Virtue-signaling texts from your $100 million yacht no longer impress, they enrage.
For the past five decades, celebrities and other wealthy folks have sought conventional status signifiers / symbols: a couple hundred thousand acres of ranchland, a luxe bug-out bunker in New Zealand, a private islet in the Caribbean, a winery, a mega-million dollar yacht, a hip bistro in Manhattan or Santa Monica, a sprawling mansion, and so on.
The more civic-minded mega-millionaires donated enough dough to a university to get a building named after them (modesty is my middle name, etc.), funded a children's hospital or donated some of their couple hundred thousand acres of land to the Nature Conservancy or equivalent mainstream environmental group.
Now that the bogus "prosperity" of past 20 years has imploded, the nation is slip-sliding into the Greater Depression, and one consequence is that all these signifiers of obscene narcissism and ahem, privilege, will increasingly be viewed with extreme prejudice. (Look it up, along with the film Apocalypse Now.)
Put another way, all these signifiers of obscene narcissism will be, at a minimum, declasse, veering perilously close to gauche embarrassment.
Those $100 plates at the celeb's bistro and $90 bottles of wine at the celeb's winery may be chump-change to the top-5-percenter customers anxious to be seen in your establishment, but they're a whole day's pay or more to those with real jobs in the real American economy.
In the Great Depression, fantasy films about debonair, witty millionaires were viewed as escapist fare. (For example, The Thin Man who-dunnits). In the far more brittle and polarized Greater Depression we're entering, extremes of wealth and privilege will be more likely to spark outrage.
Once the tone-deaf celebs and super-wealthy awaken to this change in the zeitgeist, they will stage a land-rush into socially approved signifiers that will be designed to win the praise of social-media influencers while subtly distancing the celebs and super-wealthy from merely wealthy wannabe's. (Creating that class distinction is of course the entire point of status symbols: only the truly wealthy can afford it.
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8 comments:
Status symbols may continue to an ever-diminishing quality of bling until, at last, the lowest layers of society discover that it's both mostly worthless and totally inedible.
It won't be visible. It will be economic Freedom. The security to pick up and move if you need to where ever you need too and not suffer losses. To be free to buy the best health care and legal consult if needed and not be beholding to anyone. The good sense to not care what others have or what pretense they put on.
Those expense accounts will be shrinking, too. Where there was a $150 lunch paid for by the boss, tuna on rye at your desk during a Zoom meeting is becoming more likely.
Most Ammo is like gold now !
Money = Freedom, the only way to look at it. Proven time and time again
...and Kanye will be President.
...and Trump is president. Imagine voting in a billionaire to fix a system that helped make him a billionaire..lmao..you people are about the dumbest.
The wealthy have switched to buying farms,gold and silver.
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