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56 Ignorant Things Middle-Class People Say That They Need To Stop Immediately
When someone uses a season as a verb, you know you are in the company of ignorance. "We are summering in Tuscany," delivered with complete composure, as if this is a normal thing that normal people say in normal conversations, while somewhere nearby, a person is quietly calculating whether they can afford to put the heating on this winter. Not winter as a verb. Winter as a cold, expensive, extremely real noun.
The middle class has developed its own language, reference points, and bizarre blind spots that are equal parts fascinating and infuriating, depending on where you are standing. The wellness advice, the property ladder opinions, the baffling confidence with which deeply out-of-touch things are said to people who cannot afford to relate to a single word of them. These are the worst of the worst.
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#2
Rinso The Red 2 hours ago
"I got a car for graduation! What did you get Rinso?" "I got kicked out"
#3
Kelly Scott 2 hours ago
I can't count the number of people I've seen that complain about all the perks the poor get: free medical, free food, free housing. They have no understanding of what it takes to qualify for these things and what you have to do to keep them. I always ask, "If these things are so wonderful and important to you, why haven't you quit your job and applied for them then?" People finally shut up then.
The middle class did not always exist. Before the Industrial Revolution turned the economic world upside down in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, society operated on a brutally simple two-tier system: you were either born into land and title, or you were not, and that was largely the end of the conversation.
The rise of factories, trade, and professional work created something entirely new: a class of people who built their position through skill and commerce rather than inheritance. They were not aristocrats. They were not peasants. They were something the world had not quite seen before, and they have been finding their own way ever since.
#4
LizzieBoredom 4 hours ago
I'll eat your leftovers, your rightovers, heck even your middleovers. I'm not picky.
#5
The global middle class is considerably larger than most people picture when they imagine it. Somewhere between 4 and 4.5 billion people currently fall into this category worldwide, meaning that for the first time in human history, more than half the planet lives in a middle-class household.
The defining threshold is roughly $11 to $110 in spending power per day, adjusted for local costs. This is a bracket wide enough to contain both the person agonizing over an avocado at a farmers market and the person who has never set foot in a farmers market in their life, and yet here they both are.
#7
Wil Whalen 1 hour ago
Public transportation isn't readily available in all cites. Our transportation system s***s where I live.
#8
Michael Largey 1 hour ago
Saying someone being poor is bad with money is like saying someone falling off a cliff is bad with gravity.
#9
Michael Largey 1 hour ago
Many people devote a large chunk of every paycheck to real estate. It's called "rent".
Getting into the middle class and staying in the middle class are two different conversations, and getting out of it entirely is a third one that nobody talks about enough. The route in typically runs through education, specialized skills, and consistent employment, all achievable with the right circumstances and a significant amount of work.
The route upward from there is a fundamentally different challenge. Building genuine upper-class wealth requires moving away from earning a wage and toward owning assets that generate income independently. The middle class works for its money. The upper class has largely arranged for its money to work for itself.
#10
Wil Whalen 1 hour ago
There is nothing entitled about that. Again, someone was smart and saved money and had to use it to cover something expensive. This is your problem, not theirs.
Baby boomers were the golden generation of the middle class in a way that has not been replicated since. When boomers were in their 20s, nearly 70% of them fell into middle-income territory. This represents a level of generational economic stability that successive cohorts have simply not been able to match.
The middle class has been quietly shrinking ever since, meaning millennials and Gen Z are navigating a significantly more compressed version of the economic landscape that their parents and grandparents built their assumptions on. This does go some way toward explaining why the advice to simply "get on the property ladder" lands the way it does.
#13
Spittnimage 2 hours ago (edited)
There are a few places in my town that helps people with rent, utilities, and food. Both are probably d'ead and gone now thankfully, but you could go to the township trustee's office to get help with rent or utilities and the two women that worked there acted like the money was theirs. They'd put you through an interrogation before they'd give you a voucher for what you needed help with. They were not nice women, acted like they hated their job but stayed because they liked the power they had over the people coming in for help.
#14
#15
detective miller's hat 3 hours ago
I mean..... it depends on what has been sitting in said tupperware and how long. Once I totally forgot about a container of beef stroganoff and it ended up pushed juuust far back enough in the fridge that I couldn't see it, so out of sight out of mind. There was no way I was releasing the abomination in that container into the world by opening it.
In the United States, the middle class has an official income bracket, and it is broader than most people expect. A three-person household earning anywhere between roughly $55,800 and $167,500 annually falls within the middle-class definition used by the Pew Research Center and the U.S. Census Bureau.
That is a range wide enough to contain deeply different lived experiences. You will have the family carefully managing every monthly expense at the lower end, and the household taking two international holidays a year at the upper end. They are technically the same class. They are not, in any meaningful daily sense, living the same life.
#16
Partypants 2 hours ago
I remember in high school my friend asking where my family was going for vacation. I said nowhere? And she let out a big sigh , and was like ugh we're going to Belize..again.
In the United Kingdom, class identity is expressed as much through shopping habits and leisure choices as it is through income, and a large-scale YouGov survey mapped this out with uncomfortable precision. Buying groceries at Waitrose or Marks and Spencer rather than a budget supermarket emerged as a significant class marker.
So did taking skiing holidays abroad, a leisure activity that carries a very specific set of financial and cultural assumptions baked directly into its existence. The British class system has always communicated itself through extremely specific consumer choices, and the supermarket you walk into says more about your perceived social position than most people are entirely comfortable admitting.
#20
Kelly Scott 2 hours ago
I worked in a bank and saw firsthand how hard it is to take things off auto-pay, short of closing your checking account. I swore I would never have anything on auto-pay, no matter how much it saved me.
#21
Spittnimage 2 hours ago
I hated those "tell us where you went on your summer vacation" the teacher asked when school started.
Ask Americans how they define middle-class status, and the answers are grounded, practical, and very revealing. A Washington Post survey found that the top markers were not holidays or postcodes or supermarket preferences; they were a stable job, the ability to put money aside for the future, and access to health insurance.
No mention of summering anywhere. No skiing. Just security, savings, and not being one medical bill away from a financial crisis. The contrast between what the American middle class considers its defining characteristics and the oblivious confidence with which some of its members speak about financial struggle is, frankly, the whole article.
#23
Spittnimage 1 hour ago
Depends on your job. My ex isn't middle class and he had a 401K. If you job pays enough you can afford to put money into it. He lost the money when his third wife divorced him and he was ordered to hand it over to her. Me (second wife) and his first wife deserved it more than third wife did. He sat on his a$$ and got drunk or was out running around while we did everything; with his third wife she sat on her a$$ and made him do everything my son said.
The ignorant comments on this list were almost never delivered with bad intentions, and that is the most important thing to hold onto as you read them. The middle-class blind spot is not cruelty; it is insulation. It is the very specific unawareness that comes from being comfortable enough, for long enough, that discomfort starts to feel like a choice rather than a circumstance.
The summer-as-a-verb crowd is not the villain. They are just people who have forgotten, or perhaps never fully learned, that the view looks completely different from the other side of the income bracket. The first step is noticing. This list is a good place to start.
Do you have any other middle-classisms that drive you up the wall? Share them in the comments!
#28
Kelly Scott 2 hours ago
Also, poor people can usually eat the same thing day after day because that's what they do. I have a friend who can't stand to even eat leftovers because they're something she ate the day before. But I remember getting a can of Crisco, some salt, and a 5-lb bag of potatoes and having fried potatoes for every meal until the potatoes were gone. If I told someone that, they'd ask me how I could stand to eat like that. The other thing in eating is that poor people don't make "balanced" meals a priority. They can't always afford to have three or four different things to eat at the table. One item is what they'll eat and that's the meal. I still find myself doing that today. I'll eat plain hamburger with ketchup and that will be my supper. Nothing else. No veggies, no dessert. I had to keep a food diary once and the doctor wouldn't believe what I would put down for meals. He thought I was lying about what I ate every day.
#31
#32
Partypants 2 hours ago
As a kid me and my brother had this friend who lived in a beautiful house and clearly parents were doing pretty well. We'd show up in our hand me downs and this one magical day our fruends mom asked us to clean off her patio, basically just sweeping. Afterwards she made us rootbeer floats and I dont think I ever had something so incredible !
#35
Kelly Scott 1 hour ago
"We don't like Walmart because of how they treat their employees, so we shop at Whole Foods instead." How nice you can afford to do that.
#38
Kelly Scott 2 hours ago
Or something I read in Newsweek long ago: "Most people don't go to the dentist because they're afraid of pain." I'll take the pain, buddy, what I can't do is pay the bill.
#39
John L 3 hours ago
Back in my time it was "enamel hypocalcification". Don't see it much these days, but when I was a kid, it was fairly common. It looks like parts of each tooth are whiter than other parts, typically on the lower edges of teeth. It occurs from not getting enough calcium when you are growing up.
#40
Kelly Scott 1 hour ago
If I got asked to lunch and said it was because I had no money, people would tell me, "Oh, it's only $5. Surely you can afford that!" People don't understand, when you say you have no money, you have NO money. Not yes, I have a couple bucks in change in the car, or yes, I can pull it out of my a*s. I mean I have NO money, as in ZERO, ZILCH, ZIP. It's the 1st, I've paid my rent, my bills, and gotten gas and groceries and for the next four weeks, I have NO money left over for ANYTHING!
#41
#44
Spittnimage 1 hour ago
I felt rich when I bought my used iPhone with face ID. Saved up my pennies to buy it.
#45
Partypants 2 hours ago
I took two city busses on my own as a kid to get to school , I remember showing up soaking wet and freezing after waiting in the rain. I always envied my friends who came with their parents in a warm car.
#47
FreeDragon 3 hours ago
Pretty normal in European countries. And of course visiting a foreign country is easier here too.
#48
Lukas (fuck/transphobes) 3 hours ago
I do my best to support indie games. I've bought Stardew Valley three or four different times on different devices (it helps that it's not more than 15 dollars). But for big corporations? I can't afford a 60-70-80 dollar game. I'm not paying nearly 1K for every Sims 4 DLC they've locked basic gameplay mechanics they put in their 40 dollar expansions.
#51
#53
Michael Largey 1 hour ago
There was a time when a family could live decently and own a home on one working class job. Then came Reaganomics.
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John L 3 hours ago
While a lot of these don't seem like "middle class" things, you have to bear in mind what generation you are. If you are gen X and boomer, these are "middle class" things. They were around and making money when the environment wasn't near as harsh as it is these days.
Kelly Scott 1 hour ago
However poor the middle-class gets, there is always a group that is poorer.
Load More Replies... Wil Whalen 1 hour ago
A lot of these are just people s******g on others for being responsible with their money.
John L 3 hours ago
While a lot of these don't seem like "middle class" things, you have to bear in mind what generation you are. If you are gen X and boomer, these are "middle class" things. They were around and making money when the environment wasn't near as harsh as it is these days.
Kelly Scott 1 hour ago
However poor the middle-class gets, there is always a group that is poorer.
Load More Replies... Wil Whalen 1 hour ago
A lot of these are just people s******g on others for being responsible with their money.
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