Originally Posted by
2manybikes
Thinking you know something about the person, by what bike they ride is projecting your perception on someone else. It's often wrong. There are many reasons people buy high end bikes.
What about those of us who have and enjoy high end bikes, beater bikes that look terrible, and everything in between?
Which bike is the real "me"? Answer - none. It's just a bicycle.
I don't assume anything purely from the bike a person rides.
The person on an $8000 bike might be a hedge fund manager who found a few grand behind the sofa, they might have taken out $7500 worth of debt because they desperately wanted it. The person on an $80 bike might be riding it because it's all they can afford, they might be a hedge fund manager who is just trying cycling before they drop their cash, they might be someone running errands on an old beat-up bike.
If I can overtake them they might be a professional racer having a rest day and taking in a gentle ride to enjoy the view, they might be someone who bought something far beyond their abilities.
When I overtook a Ferrari 458 on Putney High Street on my mountain bike it felt good. I know full well the Ferrari has a top speed way faster than anything I can do on my bike (and indeed way beyond anything I can do in my rather old car), but overtaking a Ferrari felt good even though it was constrained by heavy traffic. Likewise when a Porsche 911 turbo had to wait until the bottom of a big hill to overtake me because there was a 30 limit, I was doing 30, and the traffic calming measures meant he couldn't get past me, it felt good to be fast enough to stay ahead of the Porsche. Somehow staying ahead of a Daewoo Matiz, even though objectively it's the exact same achievement, subjectively doesn't feel as good.
I'm more familiar with the world of photography, where I've met people who clearly thought they were better than the people I was shooting with because they were using much more expensive gear (one guy in particular clearly felt a desperate need to impress us all with how much money he had, despite having only just met us and being unlikely to ever see us again), and other guys who shot breathtaking pictures using an entry-level camera with the cheap kit lens that came with it. Then I've seen a guy who bought a top-end digital SLR body only to then expect casual acquaintances to spoon-feed him everything he needed to know from how to compose a picture to what lenses to buy, all the time talking down to the lowly photographers who didn't have the £5000 camera he had.