Or maybe I am thinking too dark. But otherwise one wouldn’t need to be so vague about it.
[1] it could be sluts or prostitutes. I mean both terms neutrally, also I wrote it that way for brevity (reality is more nuanced). People decide what they want to do. I am against coercion though, obviously.
Two examples from my life - a friend is a headhunter for tech companies. My last job was been him hitting me up before the job was advertised - I had met the hiring manager and booked an interview before they saw my CV or anyone else even applied to the job.
There’s a major sporting event in my city every year and the tickets sell out within minutes every year, the good ones gone to season ticket holders years in advance. A colleague is a season ticket holder and not interested in that particular game so the last few years I’ve gotten his ticket for less than face value for the cheap seats.
I’m fashionable and have a nice place but nothing says “software engineer that earns more than most doctors”
People that wake up next to me think I earn about 1/3rd to 1/5th of what I earn, I don’t correct them
But at the same time I do want just a little bit of the hypergamy. Unfortunately, broadcasting to that sentiment seems incompatible with staying low key and attracting more collaborative people, but it could be fun which is my goal. I’ve seen how doctors are treated in the attraction game, its strange and downright scary to see some people code switch around them to be seen as eligible mates, I could have that. I’ve been analyzing it and it has very little to do with perceived utility, and almost solely to do with perceived earning potential combined with the idea of other people wanting them.
When I’ve spent extended time in small towns I inherit that treatment. In small towns across the US, you have people aspiring to hook up with entry level military conscripts because “they make so much money”. When you earn an entire order of magnitude more than that, it’s almost impossible to blend in and people can tell, so you get the code switching hypergamy sentiment.
This is the closest parallel to what people are talking about in this thread, because I’m rarely networking. Recruiters reach out to me over email and linkedin and thats it. Do work, get paid, sign off.
Thankful for the group of guys at our neighborhood bar where we play gays vs straights pool and rib about this stuff. Lol, just wanted to share that anecdote tbh
But even then, it's not disinteresting instantly, I'm around a lot of people with similar libidos and interest in sustained variety, who have achieved that, and brought similar people together. So I could really only say thank you for your personal account, it's a very individual journey not reflective of everyone else's experience with abundance.
I haven't really done much with material things, I live in and buy what's comfortable for me. But I know there is a large crowd that finds shiny material things attractive and its always an option when I want to optimize for that.
Also an ex-patriate is typically in the professional class. So those "English" teachers who teach in Japan, etc., may think of themselves as ex-pats or try to frequent "ex-pat" hangouts but they aren't necessarily because of two things: one, they have not been working at their home office and then transferred and typically they do not hold prelesional degrees -though they may hold "certificates" or whatever. They are in effect temporary workers on a limited stay visa, often needing annual renewal by hopping to a third country to have it renewed themselves. For ex-pats all this or arranged by their employers.
Here, your theory goes out of the window.
PS I do not disagree that some use cases could include temporariness (wikipedia mentions academic discourse and something about some british civil workers a few decades ago) but this is by far neither the unique nor the most common way it is used nowadays, nor how historically it has often been used long before.
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/expat...