Do you have friends from different socioeconomic backgrounds?

No. Most people I come across scoially are through education, job and family/friends; and all these places have a preselected population in a broadly similar socioeconomic class. Some friends started from a lower socioeconomic position and moved up, but are now in a comparable position to me.

do you wish you did

Yes. I wish society as a who wasn’t so stratified. I wish everyone had opportunities and the experiences of people from different social classes wasn’t so alien and unrelatable (which would be the case if there were equity in society). I’ve known people from different socioeconomic groups and their company and experience has enriched my life…but an ongoing friendship hasn’t been maintained somehow.

how do you think it would influence your perspective?

I’d like to think I keep a pretty broad perspective even now. I do see and support very different people’s personal lives in my work. I would really wish to have everyone on equal fitting as mentioned above.

I have a friend that grew up very poor and with a difficult family, where drug abuse was a constant issue. It went to a point where they were just living under one roof, but stopped communicating. He luckily moved out, managed to go to university and got out of that downwords spiral. His brother didn’t. He’s now a drug dealer with no vision for a different career.

I think it’s very important for me to have that perspective. It’s in a way humbling to see how much of a difference it makes to have a working family. In general I think this changes my view on society as a whole. You allways hear that some people have problems, but I allways thought that those people “just” have a hard childhood and are just normal people when they grow up and move out. But that shit leaves marks. I allways have to think about his brother who didn’t get out of that circle. He will continue to have a very hard life.

Hard to say. In my culture even the wealthy don’t particularly show off their wealth so it’s hard to judge unless we talk finances which we don’t. My grandmom’s brother died a while back with 300k in the bank. He lived in an old farmhouse and drove a 20 year old car.

I’ve lived in trailer parks and worked for multi-millionaires/firms worth billions, so yes. With some exceptions, rich people are insanely insecure and often just fucking boring.

Yes, because I have experienced varying levels of prosperity myself, and because my dad’s family had money and my mom’s parents literally lived in a trailer.

Not sure that it influences my perspective, except that I have an urge to “be nice on the way up, so you don’t crash so hard on the way down”, and I feel comfortable in most places whether run down or opulent, and consider that an asset.

Yes.

Yes and for an interesting reason. I am a member of a minority group. Doesn’t matter which, and I have never seen it as a defining part of my identity, but it has one obvious advantage: my friends have come from a wider variety of class backgrounds than they otherwise might have.

Personally I’m skeptical about multiculturalism, I think it can be dangerous in democracy if taken too far. But the fact that humans inevitably sort themselves into groups does have some upsides. De Tocqueville mentioned the political one: groups are a bulwark to protect the individual from the state. But there’s another: a group which is based on ethnicity, or sexuality, or some other immutable personal condition, or religion, or a political ideology, or even a hobby, is at least not one which is based on money and social class.

I don’t even know my friends’ socioeconomic backgrounds

Yes. I was born privileged but made friends through work and social situations (I partied a lot, took drugs, went to raves) from other backgrounds. Work, too. I didn’t complete college and worked in retail, restaurants, etc, while teaching myself a lot about computing. I later worked at one of the leading tech companies in software development (as a QA tester). I now work for the government (in IT). People in my life have varied backgrounds; I think all come from relatively good homes (as in no parents who were destitute drug addicts or otherwise), but everyone is emotionally developed even if they / we took extra time to mature (I couldn’t love myself until 2019).

I come from bizarre family, with an upper class father and a mother who grew up in extreme poverty, experienced wealth and now lives in poverty again after divorce.

Although most of my friends are lower middle class, two of my closest friends are homeless asylum seekers and two are doctors, one of which is a neurosurgeon. Some others are unemployed or upper middle class. One of my closest friends is so wealthy I can’t even fathom it.

I don’t have dozens of friends, as my writing could imply. We’re talking 15 persons tops. So there’s indeed a little diversity in there.

And frankly? It’s exhausting and often infuriating. Switching is complicated. But hey, I won’t complain. At least I have close ones. I know some people want for friendship (e.g. my gf).

I have only two people one could, without any doubt, call friends. One comes from a family wealthy enough they could instantly pay off someone’s mortgage if they wanted to. The other comes from a family that straddles the poverty line but which is respected enough they could probably change if they wanted to. And I come from a community so small and so isolated economy as a thing just doesn’t exist (but I do happen to be rich in rai stones, not that this helps me).

We don’t tend to think about wealth unless it comes up or if the first friend’s father is doing something special, in fact they’re usually pre-occupied with one of the very few things they have in common.

My family is upper middle class, although my mom did struggle financially for a few years. I went to school in a poorer neighborhood, so I do have some friends with less money, I have some friends with parents who make about as much as mine, but I dont have any friends with really rich families, although I was sort of friends with one who went to vocational school with me.

It does help to understand just how much it sucks to have no money, so yes.

I was born in the lower bourgeoisie. Not rent rich but very comfortable like vacations in foreign places every year and alpine skying. My family also was very catholic and conservative and so was I.

During my highschool years I distanced myself from religion (partly thanks to an awesome priest at my school). I also befriended some folks who were more open than I was but still palatable to my shitty views.

Then throughout college I made some leftwing friends who helped me discover a whole new world of concepts and personal freedom.

And through these friends I realized I was trans, polyamorous, and mostly a massive removed.

So pretty much everything of who I am and my current life which hinged on meeting the right folks from other backgrounds.