[kazana]

For me, the whole upper-class is more myth than reality. It's mostly about perception.

In my home area, many people think of our family as "upper-class". I assume mainly because of our family businesses owning a fair deal of real estate, employing a sizable fraction of people in and around our home town, our family being big, and last but not least, our companies having been around for about 100 years and still run by family members. Some people even believe the family has "special rights" and can influence local politics, which is pretty much all bollocks.

Not a single family member I know of would consider him/herself upper-class. Some degen nephews and nieces of mine like to believe they're going to inherit rich some day, and try to live some high-flyer life style, but they're severely mistaken.
The last ones I could vaguely imagine thinking in terms of class were my late grand parents, but I think they saw the family more as a "dynasty" thing - with no attachment to the term upper-class, but more in the style of everyone being "family" and therefore a valuable member of society. Every now and then they'd state weird things like "Behave yourself in public. Remember you're a <Surname>".

Oh, and just for completeness' sake, my estimated net worth is around $0