Advice from the old lady:
This is a great thread
@cola. Very wise advice. People need to understand the nuances that go into the complexities of social strata. It has a language that you can read if you pay attention.
People in the same strata recognize one another. By mannerisms, style, speech patterns, presentation...it is non verbal to a tremendous degree. Really well calibrated people read these cues and have the versatility to morph a little and adjust seamlessly into the environment but people with that level of subconscious awareness (who make the adjustment effortlessly) are rare.
It’s the paradigm like
@guru1000 said. I’ll give an example. I just reconnected on social media with a man I’ve known since 18 as a college freshman. We became buddies and eventually dated for a bit several years after we met. He was athletic (college football defensive back), funny, sexy & masculine & from a great family that was well off. We always just clicked. We lost touch for 25 years.
Our life trajectories are so different. He coaches high school football deep in the ghetto in a major city and runs a center to help educate drop outs. He changes lives in an impoverished community. He is still a physical specimen, still funny and warm & masculine and all that. But I’m in a completely different social arena than him. He’s already told me he would spend the rest of his life with me. And not for material reasons.
But he smokes some weed here and there, lives in a rented 1 bedroom apartment and lives a modest life. But he helps the young people he teaches and coaches and he inspires them to do better for themselves.
I live a different life entirely. Much as I am fond of my friend I’m not sure I’d be happy with his lifestyle. I’m much more successful and ambitious and like a higher end lifestyle...although I deeply respect him because it’s more a calling than a career.
So even though the fondness and connection is there I’m not sure we’d be a good fit. I’m going to think he’s too bourgeois and he’s going to think I’m too fussy and high maintenance (even though men in my strata find me quite easy going.)
Paradigms indeed.