Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  This reluctance to talk about structure extended to talking about white privilege. One African American stay-at-home mother told me that the African American men she knew who had elite business school degrees had not advanced as much as their white counterparts, which she believed was essentially due to institutional racism. But, she told me, “those are the kinds of things I don’t want to say to my—like, I would never say that to my white friends, because their husbands do work really hard.” To mention the obstacles her husband faces on the basis of race would be to challenge her white friends’ legitimate entitlement on the basis of their husbands’ hard work. For these respondents, a critique of structural imbalance feels like a personal critique.12

  AFFECTS OF INDEPENDENCE:

  ANXIETY AND PRUDENCE

  Earners were able to draw most easily on these discourses of hard work and individual self-sufficiency because they were the ones earning money. But the dark side of this provider role, especially among those who were the main or only earners in their families (usually but not always men) was a strong feeling of risk, and often anxiety, about money. James said, “My biggest fear is, I lose my job and someone gets sick. That’s my biggest fear in the entire world probably. I lose my job, we don’t have health coverage, and someone gets sick. … And all of a sudden that two million dollars [from a windfall] that’s sitting out there, that I don’t want to touch … it all gets paid to Sloan Kettering [cancer hospital] or, God forbid, you know?”

  These earners did not tend to feel strapped on a daily basis but expressed a more general sense of insecurity about the future. They were especially aware of how much they needed to survive if a job was lost or something happened to them. James said that his wife was more laid-back about money and the future, whereas “I’m much more like, I’m on the iceberg with the gun looking for sharks and hoping it doesn’t get too warm, you know what I mean?” Miriam said bluntly, “I’m very fixated on what will happen if I die, because I’m more supporting the family, right?” Several interviewees told me they worried about the cash cushion that they had in the bank. Penny said her husband “likes to sleep with a million dollars under his pillow, basically,” because he did not trust the stock market.

  Earners used various strategies of money management, coalescing around the idea of “prudence,” to stave off these possibilities. Those who received bonuses often tried to save rather than spend them. Most had created 401k and college-fund accounts for their children, which they said they would not dip into. Some had bought large amounts of life insurance. They talked also about controlling their spending, as I discuss further in chapter 3, in order to avoid debt and put away for the future. When I interviewed Justin, a private equity entrepreneur, he and his wife had “downsized” their lifestyle, renting a less expensive and smaller home than they had previously lived in, despite having two children and a live-in nanny. They had started planning for decades into the future, hoping to be able to retire early. They had made these changes even before the 2008 economic crisis, because, in Justin’s words, “My wife said, ‘If one of us ever loses a job, like, I don’t want to panic.’ And we saw people buying houses that were too big, or whatever. Spending too much money. … Just, this light bulb went off.” He told me, “I’m ready for the storm.”

  This self-protection in the face of risk is another example of the way anxiety can deflect a feeling of privilege, because it prevents people from feeling at ease financially. Even though Wendy had a “big cushion” of several million dollars and a household income of $500,000, she did not want to buy a home because she was concerned about losing her job. She was annoyed that she and her husband couldn’t stick to the budget that they had carefully devised and was determined to figure out why they kept spending more than they had allocated and saving less, even though they faced no shortage. Betsy told me, “The last thing that I want to do, and I think my husband wants to do—we don’t want to live beyond our means. We don’t have any form of debt, other than our mortgage. Credit card debt—like, we don’t do that. We spend what we have. And we like to have reserve. You know? Like, at the end of our last payment (on the renovation), we’re probably in a slightly not-comfortable situation for us.” Yet what she meant by “not-comfortable” was that if her husband lost his job (and hence his million-dollar income) they could live on their savings only for a year. The discomfort these interviewees feel is real, though the actual risk may be minimal. As I showed in chapter 1, worrying about money is another way to avoid feeling affluent.

  Interviewees explicitly connected being prudent with money to having earned it. They said that the fact of having made the money themselves made them more careful with it, again contrasting it to inherited wealth. Lucy told me that when she and her husband had made a generous cash offer on their home, the seller had accepted it but then immediately tried to raise the price. Her husband was incensed and refused to pay, saying, as she recounted, “‘Nobody gave me anything. And I worked hard for every penny I’ve got. I’m not just some guy with a trust fund running around [the neighborhood] who’s going to, you know, just throw this extra money at you.’” Julia, a stay-at-home mother, told me, of her entrepreneur husband, “It makes us more want to hold onto it because he worked so hard to make it. I know he feels this way. He’s like, ‘I worked so hard for this money, I don’t want to just spend it.’ And so I think I’ve kind of picked up on that, too. He’s worked really hard; I don’t want to just spend his money that he’s worked so hard for. Whereas I think if it was family money, [I’d be] like, ‘Oh, well, this is like a gift from the gods. We have this amazing thing that somebody gave us; let’s use it.’” Working hard and being prudent are twin processes that not only foster accumulation but also solidify its legitimacy.

  Even when risk seemed remote, many people in earner families valued this self-disciplined ethic for its own sake and oriented themselves affectively toward prudence. Talia’s husband was unlikely to lose his job, she told me. “But,” she continued, “that’s kind of the mindset that we prefer to have because, you know, like he always says … Don’t get too comfortable. You always need to work hard and keep your nose down, and don’t feel like you’re entitled to anything, because that is not a good way to be. Especially in this economy, when there are really smart people out there who are unemployed.” Again Talia acknowledges here that it is not only a question of intelligence or hard work, given that “really smart people” are unemployed. The “mindset” also governs feeling; although there isn’t much risk, Talia wants to act as if there is, and even to feel as if she’s not “entitled.” She sees this as a smart way to orient herself to the vicissitudes of the economy. Emotional self-discipline complements material self-discipline.

  Helen told me in detail about the obstacles her immigrant parents had overcome to succeed in the United States in what she called “one of those American Dream stories” (a story she had clearly told before). Later in the interview she contrasted herself and her husband with parents who let their children spend extravagantly. She said, “I feel like we have more of the values of, I think, my parents, who had to count every single penny. … And they got no gifts from their family. You know, moneywise, or anything. So they were very, very self-made. So my mindset is from there.” Having what Helen calls the “mindset” of hard-working, poor immigrants is the most important thing, thus again invoking a particular kind of deserving selfhood that is disconnected from actual material privilege.

  INHERITORS, GUILT, AND LIVING UP TO PRIVILEGE

  Not surprisingly, the inheritors I interviewed could not draw as easily on meritorious discourses of hard work, independence, and productivity, especially when they did not also have high-paying jobs.13 As a consequence, in place of an affect or mindset of prudence in the face of risk, they were more likely to describe feeling uncomfortable or guilty about their wealth.14 Ellen was a financial advisor to many people with inherited wealth and an inheritor herself. Her clients were often conflicted about not having earne
d their wealth. She told me, “We live in a culture of the American Dream. [Which] values work and values ingenuity and self-sufficiency. … You know, ‘Go build your own company and be rich, and we’re the land of opportunity.’ But [with] inherited wealth, money comes in, and [they think], ‘What did I do to get this money?’” Olivia, who, as we have seen, had grown up working-class and married an inheritor, made a similar point. She said, “I would say it’s harder to grow up affluent, in a way. Because, while I had a lot of shame about where I came from, like, that’s a badge of honor in American culture, to start from the bottom and climb your way up. … People look on you approvingly. Nobody’s going to, like, pat you on the head and say, ‘Good job,’ when you’re like, ‘I grew up as a child of inherited wealth.’”

  Beatrice, an inheritor of assets of about $3 million, echoed this characterization. She attributed her discomfort with her inherited wealth to the fact that it was “so disconnected from any sort of, like, morally supported form of earning. It’s not like I worked hard to get it or was especially clever or whatever. It’s like, my grandfather [made an investment many years ago that unexpectedly paid off]. That’s why I am where I am. … So there’s nothing about this story that has anything to do with a quality of my own that would make me feel a special kind of ownership over it. And maybe other people do. You know, people who’ve earned it themselves, not that that means that they deserve it, or actually even that they earned it, but that they got it through something that looks like labor.” Beatrice is skeptical that earning money actually makes people more deserving. But the social legitimacy of labor, and the corresponding illegitimacy of inheriting, has nonetheless affected her feelings about her own wealth.

  Sometimes this discomfort had to do with a failure of self-sufficiency specifically, signaling the shame of dependency. Caroline, who ran a small nonprofit, had grown up in a wealthy family and was now married to an architect who earned about $500,000. She told me she felt “guilty” about “siphoning off” some of her inheritance before she got married, at times when she didn’t have enough freelance work. She said, “It was just sort of shitty self-worth. … Like, why am I not capable of doing it on my own?” Vera primarily lived off the dividends from her assets of over $1 million, having lost her half-time consulting job, which had paid about $65,000. She told me, “I felt more proud of myself when I had a steady job.” She felt uncomfortable allowing her high-earning partner to pay for household labor, saying, “I feel like I need steady money in order to be able to do that. … If I were contributing steady earned income [to the household], it would put me in a morally different category.”

  Many inheritors were uncomfortable talking with others in their lives about having inherited wealth. Some used the metaphor of being “in the closet” to describe hiding their wealth and “coming out” to indicate being more open. They also described facing judgments from other people about their character and capacities based on stereotypes. Sara, who had inherited wealth of over $10 million, faced some stigma in her philanthropy-related job. She told me, “I feel like I have worked to overcome perceptions of, like, ‘She just has this job because she’s, you know, got family money.’ Or ‘She’s not going to work that hard, because she’s, you know, a little heiress,’ or whatever the preconceptions are.”

  Most inheritors described feeling that they had to work for pay even when they did not actually need to. Sara worked in part because she did not want to “be a dilettante.” She said her parents’ message to her and her siblings had been “‘You should work.’ Very much like, ‘You need to have a job.’ … It definitely got drilled into us pretty early on that we were not to be, like, dilettantes.” Her parents had said, “This money is to enable you to have a job that you like. [The money] is to enable you to plan for any, you know, medical issues. It’s a fallback, but it’s not what you should be banking on.” Now, she told me, of herself and her husband, “I mean, we’ve run the numbers. We could afford to, you know, buy a house in Jackson Hole and be ski bums. Like, we’d feel kind of crappy about ourselves if we did that, you know?”

  Eliana, an inheritor with over $5 million in assets (not including her home), told me, “A lot of guilt goes with the territory.” I asked if she had enough money not to have to work. She responded, “Oh, yeah.” She continued, “I’ve thought about it. But long enough to reject it, only. Because having a job is super-important. And I do think that’s connected to the money. That’s, like, part of my [being] normal thing. Is like, to hold a job. I’m a functioning member of society. … I think I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t have a job. I think I’d be self-conscious about that.” These responses illuminate the importance of paid work in constituting oneself as “a functioning member of society” as opposed to a dilettante. Eliana’s reference to being “normal” also establishes having a paid job as required for belonging to a community.

  Proving that they could earn money was especially important to inheritor men. Scott, as we have seen, came from an extremely wealthy family. He described himself as “high on the guilt-ometer.” He had worked two jobs after college, even though he did not need the money, because “I wanted to earn more money. I wanted to be self-sufficient.” Scott had worked on Wall Street for several years as well, which frustrated Olivia, because she didn’t understand why he kept a job with such long hours when they had small children and they didn’t need the money. When I interviewed him, he had initiated a business venture supporting nonprofits. He told me, “I got a check from that business over the summer. And I was so happy. It was less than one-tenth of what I’ve put into the business so far. But I was like, ‘Yes!’ I mean, it was still a five-digit check. And I felt like, ‘Okay, this is why I’m doing it.’ Like, ‘It actually can produce income.’” He added, “Also, somehow it’s important to me to get recognition from my family, for the stuff I’m doing. … And so, I like the idea that I’m going to pull off a coup or two, to be able to trumpet it to them. I think that kind of equation is factoring in. … I really want to prove myself.” Money he has earned is also symbolic currency, a way for Scott to show he is capable and not simply an incompetent inheritor who can only consume.

  Donovan was an inheritor of over $10 million who had also worked in finance years before I interviewed him. He told me: “I’ve shown that I can actually earn a lot of money. In fact, I’ve shown that I can earn enough money to support my lifestyle. Now I choose not to do it, I think it would be obsessive to actually do it. But I think that’s why I’m much more—I’m not conflicted about it. I think I’m pretty comfortable with this whole money thing at this point.” Additionally, Donovan and Scott had both gone into independent entrepreneurial ventures linked to their political commitments, a choice Gary was also considering. I never heard women talk about earning a lot of money in the same way that men did, as proving themselves, although women did care about having a strong work ethic and contributing to their households.

  In making and talking about these choices, these interviewees drew boundaries against nonworking inheritors (“dilettantes,” in Sara’s words). Willa, who worked in advertising and had both inherited and earned wealth, positioned herself “in the middle,” as we have seen. When I asked if she deserved her lifestyle, she said:

  I’ve worked hard for it. I mean, I was lucky enough to grow up with this lifestyle, so part of me is entitled enough to think that I deserve it. Just because I don’t know anything different. You know, if you ask people who grew up in the projects, they think that that’s where they’re going to live for the rest of their life, just because they’ve always lived there. I’ve always lived in something that looks similar to this. But at the same time, you see, as opposed to my—I have a deadbeat brother who thinks he should live this way. But he doesn’t work. Or can’t hold a job. And at the moment, he’s not holding any job at all. And he doesn’t do much to help society, or anything like that. And so, I’m like, “Well, then, why would you have this?” But my husband and I work hard.

 
; Willa begins by alluding to her hard work. Then she pivots to a sense that she should have her lifestyle because she doesn’t know anything different, almost suggesting that it is her destiny. As she invokes her “deadbeat brother,” however, she makes it clear that the feeling of being “entitled” because of always having had the money is not enough to make her worthy of it. Work (or something to “help society”) is also necessary.

  Caroline emphasized her “work ethic mentality” and said she had always “worked hard,” unlike people in her family who were layabouts. She said, “I mean, money ruins people. God, I’ve just seen it again and again and again. … One of my best friends in the world, daddy’s princess, you know, never had to work. Quit every time a job got tough. Hates herself. She hates herself. She just feels like she’s got no purpose in the world, and she spends all her time doing self-help stuff. Just wallowing in her ‘What’s wrong with me?’” The earning self, these stories indicate, is a healthy self as well as a deserving self.

  Sometimes inheritors stretched the definition of work to cover other kinds of labor, linking themselves, by however tenuous a thread, to the legitimating discourse of work. As we have seen, Nicole preferred to think of herself as not privileged despite her several million dollars in inherited wealth. She told me she sometimes felt guilty because she did not feel stressed about money like some of her friends, but she immediately deflected by adding, “It’s not like I’m rolling in it.” I asked her if she had any self-consciousness about her large apartment when people she knew with less came over, because others I’d spoken with had mentioned this feeling. She responded, “I don’t feel embarrassed. Because I did paint all the walls. I mean, now they’ve been repainted by professionals.” She laughed. “I didn’t do the best job in the world. But, I worked—you know, I put a lot of elbow grease into this. This was not, like, handed to me on a platter. I feel like we worked for it. Through, like, physical labor.” Nicole interprets her having painted the walls and done other physical labor relevant to her renovation as the “hard work” necessary to legitimate her possession of the apartment.