the thing is also that rich people cannot understand how many of those small moments of appreciation for life poor people have to miss out on. the difference between a poor person and a rich person who work the exact same hours is that the rich person has free time. even with the same hours!
i spent a lot of time at my best friendâs place during my senior year of high school. his mom is an exec at a company literally all of you have heard of. she worked hard! and for long hours, longer than many of her coworkers and some of her subordinates (she was overworked, technically, because the company had made her absorb the job of a second person.)
still, on the off occasion that we got to talking in the realm of workersâ rights, there was still some barely-perceptible catch in her view of work that i felt ultimately disallowed her from viewing working lifestyles as something influenced by the systematic and not merely the personal. and when i think about it, this might be why:
when my best friendâs mom came home from work, in the late evening or at night, she would take off her heels at the door before padding across the persian rug and collapsing onto what is probably my favorite couch, a huge sectional with seats as wide as mattresses. the walls intersecting behind it were glass, so as she caught her breath she could see a number of things: always the shimmering lights of manhattan; if it were still evening, and fall, the autumn leaves of the entire length of central park; if it were summer, a whole dome of sunset and, on rare occasions, fireworks that burst right in front of the balcony, at eye-level from a spot on the 25th floor.
on days when she came home late, she never had to cook. my friendâs father, a househusband, may have cooked something already, or we might have ordered sushi, or gone to one of the hundreds of restaurants within walking distance. if she didnt want much there was always cheese in the fridge, or wine in the cupboard, or espresso, or something novel: maybe i had brought them cake, maybe someone else had.
there was a lot of difficulty in raising her kids, but none of it came from their educational environments, which is more than most can say. both of her sons were in top public schools. the one i went to with her older son let us dual-enroll at columbia. if i had known her sons earlier, they would both have been enrolled at new yorkâs lycee francais. her younger son was disabled, thatâs difficult no matter who you are. his speech now is slow, but clear. i imagine speech therapy costs money. i imagine itâs more stressful to have a child who canât speak when you know you canât afford to raise them into a teenager who can. but now, when she sits on the couch and asks her sons about their days, they complain about the too-fast pace of columbia calculus or the annoyance of not being able to pronounce a particular diphthong in french. real complaints. complaints that could be worse.
there are other things too, like how the apartment (save for the boysâ room) was always clean even when i visited impromptu . (once, i came completely unannounced to surprise the younger one with a slice of birthday cake, but there was only a cleaning ladyâ iâm guessing the apartment complex sent cleaners every two weeks or so.) celebration was easy, fun was easyâwhen she heard iâd received my first college acceptance, she immediately took us all out for dinner, and then back in for a nightcap. i had chartreuse for the first time. when something good happens there is champagne, there is caviar. they do not have to worry about safety, on the 25th floor of a complex with a front desk who calls to announce visitors and packages. beyond these there are surely a hundred other privileges that i cannot imagine because iâve grown up with the same ones.
and all of this happens outside of work, which is why i reiterate: respite makes all the difference. and if you are rich i believe it is difficult to see that even while you work the same (or longer!) hours or âas hard asâ the working poor, the passive respite that comes from your wealthâ the persian rug and the fluffy couch and the city lights and the sunset and the well-learned children and clean kitchen and leftover camembertâ is giving you so much more life than the surroundings of any poorer person when they get home. the plain relaxation of the worker only seems egregious when you do not realize that their time at home is not ever relaxation, and yours is.
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