My wife and I make okay money in a middle class area, but, due to a combination of good luck, and contrived to circumstances, we recently got to watch a college football game in the stadium’s super executive corporate sponsor level suite. It was awesome. Open bar, amazing catered food, and people networking all around me who are clearly in the c-suite of their respective companies. I had a list of crazy things I was going to say if someone asked me what I did, but it never came up.
Likewise, I grew up on a council estate in the north of England. Worked my way up to a good education and eventually created a $250k consulting business in London.
My experience of six figure earners in London was that many were also “new”, their parents had been working class, which I suppose points to some social mobility and meritocracy left in Britain.
For others it was totally normal. Not that they were from money, but in the more mundane sense that they’d grown up in London, they and all their friends had gotten tutor support by parents who both worked and for whom looking at the job opportunities on offer in London, a six figure salary was a realistic prospect after working some years. This is probably the category I aspire for my kids to be in
Then there are the kids from money. Not unpleasant people, Britain doesn’t quite have that competitiveness in the same way. Bragging about income is still crass. But they did seem genuinely clueless of the grief they’d been spared because bank of mum+dad bunged them a loan of 500k when they bought their first place, which they then paid back fairly effortlessly.
The most unpleasant people I ever dealt with were rich people from other countries. Maybe because in Britain money doesn’t buy you class or respect.