Confessions of a Rich Kid

So, what were you following on Monday night, the Met Gala or the ground invasion of Rafah? 

The juxtaposition is both obvious and horrific. Watching elites across this country - from politicians to university presidents to CEOs and celebrities - operate in their insular, self-obsessed little cabals, while real people are out here fighting just to survive and uphold the dignity of human lives, has left me in a state of constant, visceral disgust.

Left: Met Gala this year. Right: Rafah. Lots of references to the Hunger Games this week. It’s an obvious comparison. But still, it is horrifying and baffling when we can recognize injustice in movies, but can’t when it comes to real human lives. Or worse, we do but we just shrug it off.

If you’ve been reading my work, you know I’m no fan of celebrity culture. I genuinely don’t know how people continue to fawn over celebrities and not be totally embarrassed about it. The world is unraveling, and I truly believe it matters where we put our attention. Celebrity beefs and $75,000/head events are not worthy of our time right now. 

But there’s another, more idiosyncratic layer to my disgust, and that has to do with my own proximity to wealth and elite social circles.  

I’ve spent most of my life as a rich kid. My dad’s a successful cardiac surgeon who has been on that storied, Boomer upward financial trajectory my whole life. And it’s because I’ve spent my life as a member of the country club mafia that I abhor wealth inequality and insist on applying a class analysis to everything. I’ve been up close and personal with wealth-culture and it makes my skin crawl.

There are obviously varying levels of rich. There’s the stratospheric wealth of the billionaire private jet and yacht class; there’s the multiple-vacation-homes multi-millionaires who fly business class and own multiple luxury vehicles; and then there’s the run-of-the-mill rich, doctors and lawyers who live in big homes and take expensive vacations and have one vacation home, but don’t have the disposable income to buy everything. Depending on how famous or respected they are for what they do, a run-of-the-mill rich person might periodically rub elbows with the folks higher up on the wealth ladder, or might move up the ladder themselves.

From a global perspective, every rich person has a lifestyle that is virtually unimaginable to the average person on this planet. For example, it’s easy for us in affluent countries like America to forget that more than 80% of people on this planet will never get on an airplane a day in their life. The things many of us take for granted as normal, like a spring break beach vacation, are anything but for the vast majority of humans on this planet.

Never gonna miss an opportunity to drag Tay Tay.

There’s a solidarity among rich people that is unparalleled. They’ve got each other’s backs. This appears to be largely true across many differences, including ideological (from liberal to far right, there’s rarely a rich person left of liberal). Honestly, us leftists could learn from this kind of solidarity, which refuses to allow ideological differences to faction the group. After all, there’s a greater cause to be supported.

And that’s the single-minded investment in maintaining and increasing the wealth and power to which most rich people seem to feel entitled. I’ve seen firsthand the way the upperclass protects itself, celebrates itself, and uses things like philanthropy to assuage feelings of guilt (if they’re there at all) and whitewash and distract from the obvious immorality of wealth inequality. 

I’ve benefited from being wealthy in so many ways it’s hard to sum them all up. I had a financially stable childhood and could focus on school. I didn’t need to work or worry about food or where I was going to live. I’ve had incredible health care all my life, and in many cases, the doctors I saw knew my dad. I’ve gotten attention, treatment, and even bedside manners that other people didn’t.

I went to good schools because I was set up to get good grades as a kid, because we could pay for it, and because of my family’s connections. Those connections meant great recommendation letters from persuasive people. My family’s wealth meant I have no student loans. I can’t believe I’m even writing that. I’ve been so deeply ashamed that I’m one of “those” kids.

I’m smart, but no smarter than a million other people who didn’t get into the rooms I got into because they didn’t have the advantages I had. That also continues to be a source of shame for me. When I was in these elite institutions, I constantly doubted whether I even deserved to be there.

Once I started working full-time, I could easily save money. And when husband and I wanted to buy a house, we had a solid down payment (husband is also an expert saver and the least materialistic person I know - literally - so he also had plenty to contribute). Husband and I make enough to pay our bills, but we also never have to worry about an illness, accident, or unexpected event leaving us scrambling financially because I have money to fall back on.

I could go on and on.

Being affluent has everything to do with my obsession with the questions of “what is enough?” and “what does it truly mean to live a good life?” It’s why I can’t confront the climate crisis without centering wealth inequality. I’ve seen and participated in the endless, hollow consumption of those who have so much they’ve forgotten how to value anything. It drives me to think about how I can make my life smaller, simpler, and slower. This is the only way I can think of to assuage the cognitive dissonance I carry as a rich person who hates the hoarding of material wealth.

It shapes so much of how I think about myself and the kind of person I want to be… and don’t want to be.

I want to say that your average rich person isn’t necessarily a bad person. I don’t want to be reductionist and make sweeping judgements about entire groups of people (lol, that’s definitely what I’m doing. And I don’t feel bad about it).

I do believe, though, that once you get past a certain point, the more money you have, the more likely you are to be a crap person. There’s anecdotal evidence to support that. Plus, our culture rewards the type of people who are competitive, cut-throat, and will do whatever necessary to rise up the ladder of influence, income, and power. They don’t even need to be competent; they just need to have the right personality. 

It’s not just in our heads. We really do have a prevalence of “morally-challenged” people in positions of tremendous power. There’s a whole body of research on “psychopathy in the workplace” (remember American Psycho?). Even when we know someone has psychopathic traits, like, say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, we still venerate them for being “disruptive” and “innovative” (barf, eye roll). That’s how committed we are to uplifting these personalities. We’ll overlook genuinely destructive and harmful behavior in people who’ve accumulated unconscionable amounts of money and power because they made a cool product or started a company that lets us buy books, toenail clippers, and power tools and have them all sent to us within 24 hours.

Listen, The Simpsons dealt in a lot of stereotypes over the years. But Mr. Burns is pretty accurate.

Which also explains why I’ve observed so many rich people with an indifference and/or inability to feel empathy for others, especially folks of different socio-economic classes. Wealthy people spend very little time, socially, around people who aren’t also wealthy. A doctor may see patients from all walks of life. Or a businessman might interact (minimally) with people who are beneficiaries of his foundation (which, again, likely exists for reputational reasons). But he’s definitely not playing golf with them. Mostly, wealthy people interact with non-wealthy people from a position of wielding power over them. Which just reinforces their feelings of superiority, entitlement, and lack of empathy. 

I’ve also witnessed this bizarre vibe from rich men, especially, insisting that they “live in the real world” because they understand business and read the Wall Street Journal. It’s this completely delusional idea that they “know best,” I guess because they pay attention to this imaginary thing called the Stock Market and have a Pavlovian response when the little line is green and going up, or red and going down? I don’t understand it, because there are no people on earth who live further from reality (by which I mean, the everyday experience of most of humanity) than rich people. I know this so intimately from my own family. Rich people are so insulated from reality they often don’t realize they don’t live in it. Poverty is abstract, its pains and stresses, merely conceptual. 

Rich people, quite literally, live most fully within all the imaginary structures of the world - our economy, politics, and academia center them. They populate industries that don’t serve human need, like advertising and PR, finance, and entertainment. They don’t live in a world that requires their physical labor, that leaves them cold or hungry or sleeping on the ground. They live in warm, comfortable, 800 thread-count-sheet worlds (I googled it. That’s a high thread count).

It would baffle me how out of touch they are, except that nearly everything about our culture reinforces their delusion and sense of superiority: fawning over celebrities, obsessing about stupid shit like the Met Gala, lusting after luxury items, and believing in the myth that we can all be millionaires if we just find the right opportunity and work hard enough. We spend so much time helping create the fantasy-land of the wealthy. 

Fortunately, that seems to be changing, especially among young folks. A lot more people these days are expressing disgust with celebrity culture, particularly in the past 7 months of watching genocide unfold. The student protests for divestment, direct actions shutting down arms factories and blocking cargo ships, the resurgence of the labor movement and its solidarity with the anti-war movement - all these things are direct, visceral threats to the reign of the wealthy. 

And you can tell when they’re really freaked out because that’s when they start to go full authoritarian; siccing their army (the police) in full riot gear on protestors sleeping in encampments, for example (scroll down the page here for a fantastic interview with a UChicago student protestor that’s going viral). 

Photo by Jeremiah Amaya on Unsplash

I hope the blossoming solidarity of the working class, students, immigrants, and even wealthy class traitors, continues to grow and flourish. Yes, the wealthy have an enormous amount of power because they have access to resources. But for too long, they’ve also gained power from the masses who venerate and seek to imitate them. We may not live in a monarchy, but we’ve made celebrities, hedge fund managers, and tech bros our kings and queens. I’ve been around some of our modern day Louis XIVs and Marie Antionettes. I can confirm what you already know; they don’t care about you. Or, if they do, their sympathy for you is trumped by their fear of losing what they have; it ends when their wealth and power are threatened. 

So, let’s keep taking their power away. Let’s keep divesting from their companies, values, and delusions; let’s reject their hollow versions of success and meager breadcrumbs of care via reputation-laundering philanthropy. 

The world may, indeed, be run by psychopaths right now. But, they are few and the good people are many, and we have much more power than we realize.