People Who Grew Up Wealthy Reveal The Moment They Realized They Were Extremely Privileged
It's not always something you realize when you grow up in a bubble of wealth.
Carla Medeiros | Pexels With wealth comes privilege, but if you were born into money, you don't always realize how good you have it. Things are just status quo in your happy little bubble until something or someone points out that what you assumed was normal was anything but. In a Reddit post, people who grew up wealthy shared the moment they realized they were extremely privileged. Needless to say, it was eye-opening.
Interestingly, many only realized their affluence in their adolescence, and some even later into young adulthood. It makes sense. If you grew up around other wealthy people, your own wealth seems normal. It's something you take for granted, because it's easy as a kid to assume everyone lives like you do.
People who grew up wealthy reveal the moment they realized they were extremely privileged:
Comparing vacations and travel
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Travel is a privilege, even if it's just a camping trip with your parents, but people who grew up wealthy often take for granted the difference in their family vacations until they are exposed to peers who grew up with a whole lot less money. One Reddit user put it best: "My parents loved to travel. By the time I was 16 I had been to every continent aside from Antartica. I didn’t realize that this was privileged behavior until I went to uni and most of the guys I met had never left the country."
To put it into perspective, the average international economy class ticket price from the U.S. is about $1,217, and you’d have to multiply that by five for the number of continents they visited. That alone would total around $6,000 just in flights before age 16, not counting food, hotels, and more.
Another commenter shared a different perspective, writing, "I had a conversation with a friend like a decade ago about this. He had made some comment about skiing in the alps growing up and I commented how fortunate he was to grow up doing that and they just stopped dead mid sentence and realized that it was something about themselves they had taken for granted and not really examined."
No college debt
As one privileged person on Reddit explained, "Realizing how having my college tuition covered by parents put me so much farther ahead than everyone else in the long term." Another wrote, "I was able to buy my first house right out of college because my parents covered my tuition, rent, food, etc. and gifted me the family car."
College costs are no joke. The average cost of college in the United States is $38,270 per year, according to the Education Data Initiative. If it's a private university and you live on campus, the average is $58,628. To really put this into perspective, when you factor in loan interest and potential loss of income because you need to pay that loan back, the outlet estimated a bachelor's degree could cost $500,000.
With over 42 million borrowers having federal student loan debt, it goes to show that not every family can afford to pay for college. It also makes sense that those who grow up wealthy would get a serious dose of reality the minute they enroll in college and realize their peers are paying for their education without any outside help.
The size of their family home
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It’s not news that wealthy people often have large houses, but sometimes those who grew up in them don’t realize that it’s a privilege, not a common experience. “I took my friend to my parents’ cabin and he said, ‘Wow, this is nicer than my house,’” one person wrote.
And there might be some truth in that. The median size of a single-family home in 2024 was 2,146 square feet, and to put that number into perspective, Forbes Global Properties wrote that most real estate specialists consider a home a mansion if it is at or above 8,000 square feet, about four times bigger than a regular home. If someone is wealthy enough to pay for that, their cabin is indeed likely to be nicer than the average household.
What was truly interesting about this Reddit post, however, was that most of the people who realized their privilege. The nice thing about the Reddit thread on this topic was that most people realized their financial privilege and were, in turn, humbled and more thankful for it. It opened their eyes and made them more understanding and empathetic. It's not bad to grow up in wealth and privilege. It's only bad if you think you're better than anyone because of it.
Matt Machado is a writer studying journalism at the University of Central Florida. He covers relationships, psychology, celebrities, pop culture, and human interest topics.
