V

Loud and Rowdy! DoV & Town 🎢🎡

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[𝓟𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓬𝓮𝓼𝓪 🐸 @princesalamwane]

Men claim they don’t “see” women in gaming but what they won’t acknowledge is that many female players deliberately hide their gender to avoid the harassment and misogyny that comes the moment they reveal it.

[Orisha Franklin @bigbaydavis]

This is genuinely one of my favorite games

[Morpheus @Morpheus156]

I have a friend from DR who told me ppl legit hate this guy in that country just bcus of this video and the damage it did to their pr lmfao

[Ava @noampomsky]

very struck by this tiktok where a divorce attorney said the best heterosexual relationship dynamic is “evil witch devoted henchman”

[Flvco Cruza Fronteras @flvcovlquimistv]

Japanese🇯🇵 footballer learns that textbooks only get you so far

[🗝️ @DiaryOfKeysus]

This video is more funny when you find out she got Married 5 times & he was tired of coming to them 😭😭

[Amir. @AmirOfSHEDTWT]

I thought this was common sense guys

[El Mago @AtlantisFell]

Men finding out Kratos is ugly 😭 Like, how many fucking times do people have to say that you're obsession with stoic, hyper violent, and physically excessive roided up masculinity is what MEN want.

[Nicole🐚 @kpmybeloved]

@sourkrowt OH MOTHER

[kit 🍋 @sourkrowt]

so my best friend sent me this song that Tyra Banks made herself for a dystopian young adult book she wrote over a decade ago and i'm being so serious i think she officially made the worst song of all time

[Yves-Angeline @AdamantxYves]

Girl, this was actually scary AF. I finally get the Backrooms.

[Nisa ♀ @nisafeminista]

The biggest misogynistic male you know irl has their entire life funded by their mothers. From cooked meals, to paid car, to free housing, to paid college tuition, to free maid services. They will look down on women, yet their entire luxurious lifestyle exists because of women.

[Mooz(y) @Mooz_The_Alpha]

I love when losers realize online bots aren’t real people and they just look like losers.

Look at how he’s scaring the women then trying to laugh it off by insulting another woman.

Loser spreading hate