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naming_the_user | on: Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one
I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

I can't pinpoint exactly "what I mean" but basically traditional values. More willing to accept the fact that men and women are going to find each other attractive, that you probably don't want your wife or husband to have a "platonic" friend of the opposite sex that they meet up with one on one, etc etc.

Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable, so we should sanitise all of the interactions and punish everyone for being human and then we might be able to make it work, sort of kind of but not really, everyone will be miserable but we pretend.

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Rendello | parent | next
I see. I went from interacting constantly online and being surrounded by people in post-secondary and higher-level academics to working alongside immigrants in a tough and (frankly) undignified job. This coincided with some other major changes in life and it definitely changed my view of what's "normal". I had to think about my previous life and where I actually derived happiness and value.

I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways, so I took the intersection of their worldviews and now ...well I'm probably wrong in every way ;) We can but try.

naming_the_user | root | parent | next
> I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways

Couldn't agree more!

qazxcvbnmlp | root | parent
Where do you derive your happiness now?

What is wrong from the view of each? (As someone who interacts both with phds and high school graduates on a daily/weekly basis I find the differences interesting).

Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.

Rendello | root | parent | next
It's hard to put into words. I think the essence of you questions is "what is your philosophy now, and how does it differ from before?" That's a question I've been struggling to conceptualize myself for a while now, so I can't describe it with any sense of coherence in a public forum.

I will say that, at the root of it all, we are who we orbit.

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potato3732842 | parent
> find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence

This isn't just a UK thing. Seems fairly universal at least across the western world.

naming_the_user | root | parent
Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.
HPsquared | root | parent
Middle class is always more insecure. A middle-class individual could move either up or down, this causes anxiety.