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I have been around rich people and, no, they are that miserable.
Their lives are so devoid of real issues and purpose that they find conflict for no reason. I once had to deal with a family who argued over who could use which kitchen in the mansion.
There were 22 bedrooms, three kitchens, and 6 bathrooms. They still argued, and then got into a fued about it and threatened litigation(??????????)
I want to add-
In old money communities you have dynasties dedicated to the pursuit of capital.
Kids go to the best schools and are trained to aquire money from an early age. Then go to an ivy league school. Then they get jobs in finance/politics.
These kids are encouraged to compete from birth. Sports, credentials, opportunities, love from their parents etc... maintaining image in order to not appear "weak" is very important.
So, in the end you have a culture where the family is backstabbing each other, community can't be trusted, and your only value as a person is your portfolio. Every problem is solved with a purchase, or with litigation.
Thats why I'm not scared of the rich. They're specialized capital accruing lizards, but get them our of their communities and they're laughably incompetent and delusional.
I do love films therefore that show this. Take a rich lizard and stick em in adverse situations where money does not help. Or hinders. Watch em freak out.
Recently The Menu does this nicely.
Disgusting yet totally predictable bourgeois behavior. Petty and love drama. were you like their cleaning service or something?
Lol a business magnate let their failson loose and I'm the product. I'd see that family for a couple months out of the year then go back to my suburbs and public school until the next year. I was comfortable but that cheapskate made my mom go on welfare so he wouldn't have to pay the hospital bill.
Came out as queer and got dropped immediately.
I am also the love child of a bourgeois failson and a working class woman. Except my bourgeois failson father is now impoverished and basically always asking me for money even though I make less than average per year, because he broke ties with his family decades ago. I even bought him a camper so he wouldn't be homeless. Life's strange.
And his family was rich back in the 70s but mostly lost it because they just got lucky with stocks and were never really ruthless enough to stay rich.
To the extent that the trope is accurate, it provides further justification for destroying capitalism if even the people at the top are unhappy.
Yo my job has me going into the homes of the extremely wealthy all the way down to the rented class and holy shit you are wrong.
These people are so insane they think owning a massive home and having staff do all their shit is a job. They fetishize their purchases and actually cannot enjoy the products they sit on for fear of ruining it.
Sure they are hedonistic, but they typically are not happy people. They think their lives are so overwhelmingly busy that they can’t have time to smell the roses. Even the trips they go on are hassles because someone has to “watch the house”
I've seen a lot of this. Obviously not universal but miserably sterile houses full of furniture no one is allowed to sit on with yards no one is allowed to walk on are a thing. There are a lot of wealthy people who have no sense of identity beyond the things they own.
Doing yard work for giant rich people houses ranged from weird to extremely weird and upsetting.
Wealth buys comfort, not happiness. You can be comfortably unhappy, but it's much harder to be uncomfortably happy. I've known a bunch of miserable rich people, but I also know a bunch who seem happy.
It also buys access which gate keeps the entire process. Keeping the working class out of sight and the working class from obtaining the better deals.
I believe many rich people are miserable. The difference is that I hope they commit suicide
Look what happens to that wizard book girl. She's a misersble drama seeking shit person now.
I think it's a consequence of media you watch being made by people that are way richer than you buy also put in 15 hour days (TV writers), that's where the recurring work/lige balance struggle comes into so many shows as well. Also how anyone working in service is depicted cause they served tables for a summer once and that's their experience. Shows are written by professional writers and reflect their experiences which are very different than ours.
There was a good old Cracked article about exactly that (which was IIRC unfortunately written by the sex pest writer they had), about how all the weird class tropes in pop culture are because of the specific class character of a hollywood writer, how they're both exploited and privileged, out of touch from normal workers but still excluded from the real bourgeois club, and all their precarity and overwork gets focused into single important and discrete projects instead of just being a function of a constant grind of smaller actions.
Yeah, thst sums it up pretty well. They're at the bottom of the top and have to scrape hard to stay there.
I think it was "John Cheese," who was writing probably half the articles at the time and usually focused on class or addiction, and who I think later got outed as a sex pest though I don't know the details of that having only heard of it in passing. I think the article itself was called something like "Things Hollywood Gets Wrong About Working Families" or something, but it's been over a decade since I saw it so I can't remember anything clearer.
Also how anyone working in service is depicted cause they served tables for a summer once and that’s their experience.
I really feel this. Used to work at a serving job where the guests were all elite tourists and the staff was made up almost exclusively of rich European kids working for beer money over the summer while they traveled in the US. This was the same wage I was feeding a family on.
Shows are written by professional writers and reflect their experiences which are very different than ours.
and how out of touch this experience is gets amplified because they're all in a "writer's room" together and don't have any contrary experiences. Even if that writer's room is diverse in ways not having to do with class.
I think it's classic just world theory shit. The extreme unfairness of Capitalism is obvious, so how do Liberals cope with seeing some people live with access to any luxury they could dream of while others live in immiserating poverty? They do so by imagining that the wealthy are materially rich and spiritually poor, while the impoverished are materially poor but spiritually rich, thus creating a sort of balance that makes everything work out in the end. The same notions existed during Feudalism, where the jolly serf, with nothing, was contrasted with his lord, whose wealth so burdened him with its great responsibilities. I imagine that's part of why AOC had this to say after working in Niger with a USAID program:
She spent her junior year in the African nation of Niger, where she had an unusual reaction to poverty. She decided Niger’s struggling citizens had “a level of enjoyment” that “just does not exist in American life”.
It's a very condescending and paternalistic attitude which works to reinforce Capitalism through its suggestion that extremely obvious material unfairness is really not so bad. Of course, the rich can be miserable but I have a hard time imagining that Musk or Notch would be any happier if they were living in a tiny apartment instead of a huge mansion.
I think rich people are often miserable in a different way. They have all their basic needs filled in perpetuity, but I don't think they are capable of normal human relationships anymore. All their friends just want their money, their capitalist friends are just their competitors who do elaborate weird sex abuse rituals on islands. Their main social interaction is telling people what to do. i'm gonna armchair psychologize
They've ceased to have any reason to ask for favors, or to simply talk with other people. Everything in their life has become a transaction and the weight of their money permeates everything they do, it's inescapable. They've entered a situation where they have no equals, no peers, no role models, nothing. Every other person only exists as utility now.
So they're going to feel an emptiness, they're going to feel alone, they're going to feel a longing for connection, but since rich people are bloodthirsty ghouls without souls, they are going to fail to understand why they still feel empty. They have a mansion, cars, they can redirect large aspects of society. They can finance movies and art. But eventually they're gonna discover this: they can't purchase admiration. You can't pay someone to like you. But they try anyway.
Look at what rich people do. If I had a billion dollars and for some bizarre reason I didn't finance a communist party, you'd never hear from me. A billion dollars is enough to travel the world for the rest of a person's life. You can try every drug imaginable. You can have dream-like orgies in giant rainbow temples that you built. And rich people aren't doing that. What does Jeff Bezos do? Try to be an astronaut. Musk tries to be some epic science man changing the course of history. Warren Buffet wants people to know he's a folksy aw-shucks billionaire with common sense values. Bill Gates wants to go down in history as the world's greatest philanthropist. Steve Jobs had an intricately curated image and personality to appear as a dynamic technology leader. The only rich person I know who actually did something normal was Tom Anderson from Myspace. He got rich and then fucked off to climb mountains and study photography. He's probably still got a soul.
None of them had to do any of that, they did it out of dissatisfaction with what the world had to offer them, and the world offered them literally everything the world has to offer...except one thing. They no longer have a connection to humanity, if they ever had one in the first place. They erased their soul in their quest for wealth, or they never had one by virtue of their inheritance. They're never going to be able to look someone in the eye and feel friendship, or love, or camaraderie. They've broken their brains to become a predator whose superficial aspects of humanity are merely camouflage. They can only exist in a mindset where everyone else is simply doing camouflage too.
Guillotine these people, put them out of our misery and theirs.
Musk should be front and center. He's the modern culmination of every psychic injury capitalist accumulation has done to humanity. He's the congealed human shape of transaction-as-ideology.
I can only hope Allah has mercy for us, because whatever monster comes after Musk will be even worse and even more incomprehensible.
The only rich person I know who actually did something normal was Tom Anderson from Myspace. He got rich and then fucked off to climb mountains and study photography. He’s probably still got a soul.
Mr. Anderson, how we've missed you!
You can fix the material misery with riches but you still can have plenty of moral or emotional misery.
To the extent that happiness can be measured, the rich are the most happy demographic. This doesn't mean that they can't be unhappy about things or even that there are special kinds of unhappiness that are specific to bring rich but it just doesn't measure up to the amount and intensity of unsound that are felt by the poor. Actions prove this as well. If being rich makes you unhappy you can stop being rich quite easily by giving your money away, yet very few rich people do this. In the other hand plenty of people who are not rich try desperately to become rich.
Yet still we hear the trope of the unhappy rich versus the happy salt of the earth common people all the time. I think it serves two purposes.
For the rich themselves it tickles their persecution fetish and enforces their narcissism. Most of them have severely suppressed their natural empathy in order to live with themselves and as such their own emotions outshines those of everyone else and they believe that their own unhappiness is the most intense unhappiness of all. It also serves to justify their power and privilege; if just the unwashed masses knew how hard they had it they wouldn't envy them so much. So of course the rich like this trope and since it is rich people who controls mass media and cultural institutions, the trope of the unhappy rich will receive plenty of airtime.
For the broader public it serves another purpose. You have this upper class of rich buffoons who are no better than you are yourself, yet they get to live in unimaginable luxury while you struggle to make rent. And you can't do anything about it, a lifetime of neoliberalism has made sure of that. Hell, most people can't even imagine that you could have a world without a bourgeoisie lording over people. This injustice is painful so of course you become susceptible to a "sour grapes" kind of thinking as a cooling mechanism. You can't get rid of the rich, you can't get rich yourself, but at least you can find comfort in believing that they are actually miserable and that you are the lucky one.
I was re-watching Bojack Horseman and I was literally thinking this. Even though it's probably better than most, the show still humanises a rich dickhead.
Bojack was the sole heir to the Sugarman family wealth, and generational wealth helps a lot with starting a career. Especially with acting, as much of starting out as an actor is just sitting around hoping to get noticed.
Edit: although obviously the show is thousands of times better than other shows in the dickhead cartoon genre.
I think it makes sense that they're getting made. Writers write what they know, and the upper level of any given network studio is going to be pretty insular, so you get a bunch of rich kids writing about how bad it is to be a rich kid.
And even in a less cynical way, you get a bunch of rich kids who are miserable and everyone they know is miserable so they write that.
