Signs of wealth: Not being precious with your items

I watched a clip of a woman on Instagram named @sommyah I was sent by a friend.. and she was talking about these $1000 sunglasses she purchased (she got two pairs of them). After talking about them, she would fling them off to the side (on her bed, presumably), and the comments on the video blew up with refrains of “OMG if I just paid $1000 for each pair, I’d have set them down and treated them a lot better than flinging them off to the side.”

It got me to thinking that such a comment sort of shows the difference between the “rich” and the “poor” and the way they view things.

Note: I don’t actually know if she is rich or not, I’m assuming so very briefly based on the fact that she does not have children, owns a lot of designer items and seems to work a high end job; but then again – who knows? No one walks around with their net worth on their heads and maybe I’d be surprised. So for all intents and purposes let’s pretend the image is as advertised, and by poor I don’t mean economically necessarily, but “not rich like THAT”; which in my mind includes normal income folks.

The thing is…for rich people, $1000 for some sunglasses isn’t a lot of money, relatively speaking. For her, maybe $1000 is your $100.

(Also please note that I am not going to get into the debate of IF she should have taken more care of them as a general principle of caring for your things for sustainability and so on…)

I liken it to when I was a kid and saving up to have a $20 bill in my hand (the same way I see Little Bun saving up his money and being beyond ecstatic he has one), these days, $20 isn’t that much, even taking into account inflation. $20 barely pays for a single meal these days, but on the past, it was worth a lot, but particularly to a child.

As I got older, my $20 benchmark has since changed to $100, and I’m a little ashamed to say that even THAT has now changed to a higher number as being ‘significant’, although that is all relatively speaking to what I’m buying of course.. as $500 for daycare isn’t as expensive as $500 for a meal, let’s say.

So whenever I see people making judgements on how someone could possibly carry a MacBook Pro laptop worth anywhere from $2000 – $6000 these days depending on the configuration in one hand while holding a $30,000+ (upwards to $100K) Hermès Birkin bag with her finger, I always think – maybe for them, it isn’t a lot of money, or a big deal.

Aside from the fact that people should obviously take care of their items as a general rule as not to waste money or things in having to replace said item…maybe $6000 is a drop in the bucket for them.

I am also reminded of another story a long time ago of someone I followed on Instagram who said her father mentioned a family who only came to one of their homes for a month every year. Before they showed up, they’d get her father to trade in the last year model’s car, buy 2 new ones, etc.

When she mentioned it was such a waste to get rid of a car just because it was last year’s model and only driven for a month, her father calmly said – To us, it seems like a lot of money. But for them, it’s like spending $1. They deal in many more zeroes than we do, and if you could trade in and replace your cars for new ones every year for $1, wouldn’t you do it?

(I mean this is hypothetical because I don’t think I would, just on principle of wanting to drive and use things until they DIE… but I see the point.)

Everything is relative, and obviously I have no idea if people on IG are actually well off, relative to their income, job, etc… but I always see these videos and imagine what $1000 actually means to them, to see it from their eyes.

If it would cost for us, $20 to replace something, we may not quibble as much, and maybe that’s why rich people aren’t as precious about their items as we might be.

It also brings to mind people who save and scrimp to buy that one amazing designer belt which they wear with everything and love, taking care not to scratch it, and maybe only wearing it on special occasions because it represents a lot to them, from a financial standpoint of having to have saved for it, to what it means to be able to wear an item like that.

In contrast, I’d expect rich people to just wear their things as their things.

Yes it’s a $1000 pair of sandals but they’re not saving them for special occasions. They’ll go to the grocery store with them, and not refer to them as the “Brand Name loafers”. To them, they are just shoes or loafers. If they wear out, they’ll just buy another pair. They treat them just like… any other pair of shoes.

They aren’t going to be precious with them and only wear them to do certain things – they may very well wear them to walk the dog because they are just so comfortable and they are not worried about ‘ruining’ them.

In contrast to the way my mother grew up, she owned 2 pairs of socks per year. She said she would wear them only for school days, take them off, wash them and dry them carefully and hope to not get holes or ruin them before the school year was done. Her two pairs of socks were the most precious items she owned in her closet and the most important to her life.

Though I must note that the real irony is some very expensive items are much easier to keep, maintain and repair over the years, making the cost per wear much cheaper than having to replace shoddily made sandals bi-annually.

This has been talked about as being the true “poor tax”, where if you buy one pair of amazing boots of high quality, they will last longer and be better to repair than a pair of cheap ones… but the caveat is that poor people are unable to afford those high quality boots even if they are cheaper in the long-run; they’re cut off from benefits from such smart economy at the pass.

I believe Terry Pratt said it best in his Same Vines ‘Boots’ Theory from his 1993 Discworld novel entitled “Men at Arms“:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars.

But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. …

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

So when I see people using very expensive things carelessly….. as they would normally live their life, I am not as bothered or as judgemental because I realize whatever I think or feel, is being seen through my lens of how much I have or own and what is my feeling toward the item, which is not at all what their experience is as the one who owns it.

Or even if they set their expensive bags on the ground, or hold it open without closing the clasp carefully each time – it is just how they want to use the item, regardless of its cost. If it really bothered them, they would stop buying expensive sunglasses they keep losing, or they would buy a cheaper purse instead if they felt bad.