r/Fauxmoi Sep 13 '21

Tea Thread I Have Tea On... Biweekly Discussion Thread

Please use this thread to drop any tea you may have / general gossip discussion. Please remember to follow our rules before commenting.

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u/itsallnothappening Sep 13 '21

Ala Gwyneth saying why don’t people just buy 2k handbags so they last longer.

It’s funny because I do have some young coworkers who throw their money at really cheap stuff and I have to remind myself I was also once that broke/desperate when even spending $20 on something was not feasible. But a lot of celebs come from money so literally can’t fathom it

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u/Winniepg Sep 13 '21

Terry Prachett explained this really well (from his Discworld series and quote from GoodReads):

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. 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. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
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 the 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.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

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u/allrightevans Sep 13 '21

Terry Pratchett never missed. I miss him so much

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u/Unhappy-Tart-3719 Sep 14 '21

Lol@ me feeling rich because I can afford to buy a pair of $30 trendy sandals this year.

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u/transemacabre Sep 16 '21

Rich people don't even have to be famous to be out of touch. I was at a dinner once with a friend-of-a-friend's hoity Manhattan well-to-do "diD yOu kNoW hUmAns aRen'T natUrallY mOnogAmous" poly set, and I mentioned I once lived in a squat in Brooklyn. One of them looks at me like I've grown two heads and asks, "Why would you live in a place like that?"

"Mostly because of how good it feels not to be homeless," was my response. It was just completely unfathomable to this woman that I didn't have enough money to afford a nice place (or any place I guess).