Economic mobility: Are you better off than your parent(s)?

[mjmooney]

But the whole 'how much you paid for stuff' thing is a marker of 'low education, new money'. Your true broadsheet-reading middle class intellectual probably drives a clapped out Volvo that never gets cleaned, and buys 'upcycled, shabby chic' furniture from charity shops, has a small TV set (or no TV at all), has camping holidays in Brittany rather than all-inclusive hotels or cruises, etc., etc.

Conspicuous consumption is perceived as being bad taste and rather common.

[MakemineVanilla]

There's loads of residual class bias like what drinks you like, what shops you shop in, what music you like, what films you like, what cars you drive, what TV shows you watch, what clothes you wear, what your parents do, what you look like, how much you earn. 

Being middle class (I.e. a working person as it was deemed a couple of posts up) is a **** one-up-man show.  Some people are worse than others, some people can't wait to tell you their wall paper cost £15 a roll or how their new fridge dispenses ice and it's a bargain at £800.  Or that their new Audi/BMW/Quashqai is better than everyone else's black Audi/BMW/Quashqai because it has a different break light to last years model.  Having kids is a competition and "look at me".  "My baby crawled at 1 month", "my baby said Xylophone when he was 10 minutes old".

Life in the middle is a big gay dick-swinging competition and I **** hate it. 

I'll win the lottery or something because creating my own company seems like too much hard work.

I don't play the lottery.

My prescription for your anxiety would be:

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton (a description and analysis of the social malady)

and

The Complete Upmanship by Stephen Potter (an antidote and instructional manual).

 

[snowychap]

ok, so maybe i over simplified saying the class system doesn't exist anymore.

You didn't oversimplify - you claimed one didn't exist and then described one.

Yes, its less well defined, with less sub-classes and layers, and people are less bothered about it.

I would say 'the classes' are certainly less well-defined [than before] but that, if you're choosing to stick 90% in to the 'middle class', there are going to be many more sub-classes there.

As for talk about classes and class systems, I think discussions concentrate too much on silly classification issues rather than power relationships (between people, between groups and so on).

[lapal_fan]

But the whole 'how much you paid for stuff' thing is a marker of 'low education, new money'. Your true broadsheet-reading middle class intellectual probably drives a clapped out Volvo that never gets cleaned, and buys 'upcycled, shabby chic' furniture from charity shops, has a small TV set (or no TV at all), has camping holidays in Brittany rather than all-inclusive hotels or cruises, etc., etc.

 

Conspicuous consumption is perceived as being bad taste and rather common.

All the gear, no idea