You show up poor, and you leave rich.

A refreshingly independent, cautious meditation of a Yale graduate about her years at the university and what is happening at elite universities in general as a consequence of their tendency towards social elitism. From The Real Problem At Yale Is Not Free Speech by Natalia Dashan. A discourse on proximate and root causes.

In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to convey the truth.

And this is how I ended up offering a sandwich to a man with hundreds of millions in a foreign bank account.

But are the bizarre effects of distorted wealth signaling all that bad? Society is complicated, and there is miscommunication in every interaction. Being vague about your social class, and assuming other people are also being vague, can be useful—just as white lies, and sometimes actual lies, can be useful.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with haphazard and sometimes warped class signaling. But if you put on a façade for long enough, you end up forgetting that it is a façade. The rich and powerful actually start believing that they are neither of those things. They actually start believing that there is not much difference in status and resources between themselves and the upper-middle class, the middle class—and eventually, between themselves and the actual poor. They forget that they have certain privileges and duties that others do not. They forget that the inside joke was just a joke all along.