This experience also made me utterly immune to the "rich people shit is when [middle class thing]" discourse on this site. Because ive directly experienced rich people shit and its NOT when someone goes to NYU or gets Starbucks on their breaks at the job they have to work to afford their mortgage.
Rich people shit is when I had to yell at my classmates that we are not spending tens of thousands of dollars ON BALLOONS for our prom when we had a DJ to pay and their response to me was "thats only 700 dollars per person."
Rich people shit is when I went to go tutor one of my classmates little brothers who was struggling with history and it took him 10 minutes to go get his tablet from his bedroom and come back to the kitchen table because their house was that big, which was being cleaned by a live-in maid while their private chef made us snacks the entire time I was tutoring him. And then their parents paid me 500 bucks and told me "sorry I seem to have misplaced my other wallet, is this enough? Its not a lot :(("
Rich people shit is when the other teachers kids and I breezed through school with high GPAs because all of our peers had so much money that they never had to care about getting into a good university or having careers or budgeting or anything, so they never tried.
Rich people shit is when youre invited to a little get together on the weekends and get told to bring an overnight bag because their definition of a little get together is an overnight yacht trip. And then you get there and find out that your middle class definition of what's needed for an overnight trip is VERY different from a rich persons definition of the same thing: you have some pajamas, clean underwear, toothpaste, and some soap and face wash, maybe some moisturizer. They bring half their wardrobes and designer personally-commissioned serums that cost more than your house and then tell you that youre "just so quaint."
So much discourse around whos rich and whos not comes from people who have never been in a rich persons reality and so they end up shooting directly above them and calling that rich. But I tell you from personal experience that rich people are uniquely disconnected from reality and anybody who has to work for a living is by definition NOT rich. I dont care if they have a big suburban house and 2 new cars and go on vacations a lot, thats not RICH. Rich is when their kids think 700 dollars is pocket change for prom balloons and have their own personal yacht to take their friends on whenever they want, not when someone goes to fucking NYU.