By highly-valued (by society’s conventional standards) people, I mean the types who are visibly treated much better by most of society to the point where it’s featured in caricatures:
* Very attractive women
* Very rich men
* Movie stars/famous athletes (even local/regional ones)
While I’m very broke myself, a lot of my friends are well-off and well-connected. And through mutual association, I often meet the folks I’ve mentioned in the bullet points above.
These people are used to people sucking up to them their whole lives, usually to either get something out of them directly (sex, money, prestige), or get something out of them indirectly by being seen with them.
Initially, I noticed these sucking-up tendencies in myself when around such types, especially when I watched other people react to them; so I intentionally squashed these tendencies until it became natural enough to show in my body language.
Note that I don’t mean rude or visibly uninterested (trust me, those folks are used to tons of people visibly acting hard to get and it’s a huge turn off). I mean JUST as interested as I am in them, as I would be in their friends, my friends, or a regular person most people wouldn’t think twice about.
And like I figured, those “high-value” folks are a lot more at ease around me, comfortable, and some of them have flat out said that hanging around with me is very refreshing is because “I’m different”. But all I did was force myself to act the same as I would around people without any societally-determined connotations.
An awesome side-effect I’ve noticed is that the other non-(rich/hot/famous) people in that circle also tend to be a lot nicer to me because I treat them just as well as I do the people I’m talking about in this post.
**tl;dr: Treating all people equally, in a world of extreme inequality, is apparently a very rare and attractive trait. Cultivating it will serve you well.**