Closely connected to materialism is ostentation, the making visible of wealth, as Maya’s example suggests. These consumers drew especially strong boundaries against this kind of display. Penny told me, “One of the reasons we’re not in the suburbs, I feel like there’s a lot of show of wealth. … I just, kind of, reject a lot of that.” One of the wealthiest women I talked with lived in a house in the suburbs worth over $12 million. She was appalled by the excesses of her neighbors, who lived in what she called a “McMansion.” She told me of her first visit there, lowering her voice, “The gates opened up to this huuuge house. And the play set—like, we don’t have a play set. But, like, a play set in the backyard was, I’m not going to kid you, bigger than this whole room. It was something you would see out of—I don’t know. It was like bigger than a school’s play yard.” She differentiated her own preference by saying, “So there’s some things, like, flashy for the sake of flash, or big for the sake of big. Something small in a special, personal way would feel more impressive to me, or nicer to me. Or more interesting—maybe the right word is interesting—to me, than something that’s just scale for the sake of size.”
Alice is the stay-at-home wife of a corporate lawyer with whom she owns outright at least $8 million worth of real estate, including their home and a country house. She said, “When I think about [our] homes—I mean, when you add it all up, it’s a lot of value and real estate. But the people who go and buy, like, twenty-million-dollar homes in the Hamptons or whatever. I just have a hard time with that. Or these humongous houses. I don’t know that that would ever be something that I could see as part of our lifestyle.” For Alice the problem is not “a lot of value and real estate” but rather “these humongous houses,” which are both unnecessary and showy.
Drawing boundaries against ostentation and against spending for its own sake is a way for my subjects to distinguish themselves from the “bad rich” who spend illegitimately. They appeal to distinction, demonstrating high cultural capital—the knowledge that smaller is more “interesting,” that generic expensive vacations are unsophisticated, and that “flash” is gauche.4 But to distance themselves from wealthy people with less refined taste is also to situate themselves in the middle. For example, Miriam, the investment banker, lived in a $2.3 million home in Brooklyn, which she and her husband had spent $600,000 to renovate. She said, “I mean, obviously I think we have a large apartment by a lot of New York standards, but, you know, it’s not got pillars and a curved driveway.” “Pillars and a curved driveway” are rarely seen in New York City; they are an iconic image of wealth in the social imaginary, just as the trailer park described in chapter 1 is an iconic image of poverty. Invoking these comparisons, whether to imaginary rich people or to their actual McMansion-dwelling neighbors, my respondents situated themselves in the symbolically-middle, legitimate space of reasonableness.
In making these comparisons, my interviewees subordinated having to showing. That is, having is acceptable as long as it is not shown (or shown off) in particular ways. Yet they faced the possibility of seeming to “show off” in relation to people with less, including coworkers, family, friends, other parents, and household workers. That is, although my respondents did not find their own choices ostentatious, people with less might certainly see them as such. And the signs of wealth that marked their consumption, even when it wasn’t “flashy,” could create distance between them and their friends, peers, and family. They therefore tried to minimize the visibility of the choices they had made—hiding or downplaying them—especially when it came to their homes. As we saw in the introduction, Scott and Olivia were conflicted about inviting others to their expensive apartment (Scott said, “We don’t want that ‘Wow’”). Eliana, an inheritor with a large brownstone, told me she was sometimes uncomfortable when her son brought his friends over, especially one friend “who lives in the projects.”
Miranda lives in a five-story brownstone with her inheritor husband and two young children. They had installed an elevator in their home as part of a gut renovation. She explained that they had put it in partly so older family members could visit them (a “basic” need) and so they could locate the guest room where they wanted it instead of on a lower floor. She also mentioned that the elevator was “not that expensive” because they were renovating anyway. Sensing that she might feel embarrassed about it, I asked, “Are people like, ‘Oh my God, you have an elevator’?” She responded, “Yeah, it seems a little—yeah. That’s why I have that little line, ‘You know what? If you’re doing that much work, an elevator isn’t that expensive.’” The denial that it is expensive serves to minimize any sense that the respondent and her husband are extravagant (though of course “expensive” is a relative term). She also said, with a laugh, “I don’t usually tell people I have an elevator.” Asked why not, she said, “The house is really big on its own, and it’s a full brownstone, and I realize that it’s an enormous luxury to have in New York. So I don’t need to be like (snotty tone), ‘And, the elevator.’” Notable here is not only the justification itself but her awareness of this self-protecting rhetoric, similar to Richard’s admitting that he told a “story” about his child in order to justify his renovation. Downward-oriented people were especially conflicted about this kind of display. As I argued in chapter 1, the discomfort caused by difference, which makes inequality visible, can become a motive for people to seek more homogenous environments and social circles.
Beatrice invoked another kind of social interlocutor—domestic workers—when she spoke of hiding purchases from her children’s nanny: “Oh, you know, I mean it’s just uncomfortable for me for her to know what I spend on things. … If I buy something, if I buy, like, clothes in the store, I take the tag off. I mean, we’re not talking about—I take the tag off of my Levi’s jeans. I mean, it’s not like it’s a mink coat or something. I take the label off our six-dollar bread. … I think again, for me, it’s a choices thing—the choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.” David, the interior designer, confirmed that this practice was common. During renovations, he said, “Things come in with big price tags on them. They all have to be removed, or Sharpied over, so the housekeepers and [staff] don’t see them.” He attributed this practice to shame about what he called “the obscene level of wealth” of a very small number of people. Such attempts at invisibility are curious because of course domestic workers in these households know that their employers are wealthy, even if they do not know exactly how much their bread costs. So the removal of this evidence would seem to be a way to obscure the conflict from themselves rather than to hide any meaningful information from their employees.
Beatrice told me she would not take the tags off the bread if a friend were coming over, even one who did not have much money. Instead, she said, “It’s about the extremity of the inequality, and the fact that I know that she [the nanny] struggles.” Despite her conflict about the nanny, Beatrice was not conflicted about inequality with her housekeeper, Elena, because Elena worked for another, wealthier, employer. She said, “It depends on who I’m thinking about it in relation to. I think that that’s actually really key to my feelings about the money. Elena works for one of the richest women anywhere. And so I feel somehow, whatever we have is puny compared to what Mrs. [X] has. So I don’t worry nearly as much about what Elena thinks.” Again, Beatrice follows a logic of middleness, comparing herself both to the housekeeper and to Mrs. [X]. And even as she describes feeling bad about it, Beatrice signals that her consumption is reasonable (“not a mink coat or something”).
DEFINING LEGITIMATE NEEDS
Nearly all those I interviewed wanted to be “normal,” nonostentatious consumers. But many, especially the wealthiest, described grappling with questions of what exactly reasonable consumption consisted of. For example, Sara, mentioned in chapter 2 as not wanting to be a “dilettante,” had inherited wealth of over $10 million. She and her husband, who worked in finance, were struggling to determine a level of lif
estyle spending they felt comfortable with. She said:
And so the question of, like, what is our limit? I mean, we’ve now run the long-term projections. Okay, if we spend X percent for a year, like, what does that leave us in ten, twenty, thirty years? And is remaining where we are today [financially] okay with us? Especially considering that our kids already have trust funds. So, yeah. That’s the question for us. Like, what is [the limit]—because that limit is somewhat arbitrary. I mean, it’s not arbitrary, but it’s deciding, you know, when I retire, do I want to have fifteen million or twenty-three million dollars, depending on how much I let myself spend now. It’s like, you know, what am I going to do with fifteen million versus twenty-three million dollars when I’m 65?
Beyond these big-picture questions of how much to spend or to save, respondents worried about everyday spending choices. Scott and Olivia, as we saw earlier, struggled over “what it is okay to spend and not spend,” in Olivia’s words. Olivia described a conflict she felt when buying a new minivan about whether to get the model that included an interior vacuum cleaner (she called it “every mother’s dream”). This model cost $10,000 more, even though she did not want any of the other features that came with it (“It comes with a giant DVD thing. We’ve never had a DVD in the car. We’re philosophically opposed to watching TV in the car”). She said,
And so, you know, like, part of me was like, “I really want that vacuum, and we’re not, we’re not going to miss ten thou—” I mean, it’s terrible to say. But it’s the truth. We’re not going to miss ten thousand dollars. And we’re going to have this car for another ten years. Like, we don’t buy a car every three years or five years or whatever. So the vacuum would really make me happy. Ten thousand dollars, amortized over a bunch of years. But then in the end, I was like, no. You know. All right. We’re going to live without the vacuum.
In the end, Olivia said, it did not feel right to either of them to spend $10,000 on a vacuum—even though, as she points out, they can easily spare the money. Notably, Olivia feels that “it’s terrible to say” that they won’t miss $10,000, which she seems to have admitted by mistake—a sign of the transgressiveness of this kind of explicit acknowledgement.
Nicholas, who hated the idea of a hotel where “they massage your toes,” told me he did not face material limits. Yet he created small hardships for himself to save money, such as not staying in a hotel on the beach on a beach vacation. His style differed from that of his wife, who was more comfortable spending money. Nicholas neatly summed up the difference between them when he said, “All of her questions [about spending] are like, “Can we afford it?” And I’m always like, “It’s not a question of can we afford it. The question is, do we need it?” He continued, “I’m fearful of the slippery slope towards needing more, feeling like you need more and more in order to be satisfied. It just seems preposterous to me.” He described furnishing their home after the renovation: “Do you just buy a chair for eight hundred dollars or two thousand dollars or three thousand dollars? Do I get an extra thousand dollars’ worth of comfort and beauty from this more expensive chair?”
We often imagine that people have fairly clear desires, constrained only by their ability to pay. But the accounts of these consumers show that their desires do not always exist independent of these limits.
These questions of need and want were clearly also moral ones, which linked spending, again, to “values.” Lucy told me she and her husband had agreed that each of them could have “one veto” once their renovation was finished—that is, to choose one thing to change or get rid of just because they didn’t like it. They had come up with this policy after living for ten years with a sofa they hated. To get rid of it, they felt, would have been “wasteful,” but the decision was “based on principle,” she said, “it wasn’t financially driven.” The “waste” was a moral issue rather than an economic one. Lucy tied this to her feeling that buying things for the house that weren’t only functional was self-indulgent; she asked rhetorically, “Do I really need another sofa because this one doesn’t please me?” Their agreement to give themselves a veto was essentially a free pass to not feel guilty if they ended up wanting to alter something without a “legitimate” reason—but the fact that they only got one apiece meant they would not allow themselves to make constant changes. She said, “I feel really hypocritical when I talk about [these issues], because I—here I have this stuff, and this house, and all these other things. It feels very hypocritical. But at the same time, I’m trying to be kind of mindful about it. I will buy nice things, but I don’t want to just turn them over for the sake [of novelty]. … Hopefully, I’m buying these things, I’m buying them with care, because I hope to live with them for a long time. And maybe pass them on in some way.”
In talking about these moral dilemmas, some people alluded more explicitly to the context of inequality in which they were making choices and to the fact that most people do not have these options. Nadine, for example, first framed her spending as reasonable relative to her assets, saying, “Starting five years ago, it was like, wow. You know, we have all this friggin’ money. We sold [some assets]. We were getting fourteen thousand a month from [family sources]. And I have, like, just all this money in investments. Like, I don’t know, a million dollars. And I’m like, “Well, I guess I can buy this leather coat for five hundred dollars. I mean, I really love the coat.” I asked, “What’s the part of you that’s saying, ‘Okay, that’s true, but I still shouldn’t do it?’” She responded, “Well, I don’t actually believe that [some] people should have that much money and other people shouldn’t.” Nadine is trapped between evaluating her desire in relation to her vast resources, which makes it seem reasonable, and linking it to the limited resources of others, in which case it seems excessive. It is not clear that not buying the coat would be a better moral choice, particularly, but she still feels hesitant about it.
As Nadine’s comment indicates, these consumption choices can be thought of in different ways depending on the alternatives to which they are compared. Many people I spoke with used these kinds of comparisons to situate their own spending decisions. Ellen, a progressive financial advisor who is also wealthy,5 spoke of “coming to terms with the dichotomy of being an activist interested in improving the world and having a comfortable life.” She continued, “And, can I, short of, you know, taking a vow of poverty, sleep at night, and say, ‘I am improving my corner of the world.’” Notably, Ellen compares her lifestyle to a minimal standard of existence associated with religious asceticism (a vow of poverty), which has a contemporary valence of unreasonable sacrifice as well as extreme self-deprivation. Even as she’s explicitly acknowledging this dilemma of how to live while also wanting to “improve the world,” this comparison locates her consumption in a middle ground between absolute self-denial and excess.
Even people with fewer resources (relatively speaking) struggled with these limits and talked about them in moral ways. For example, as we have seen, Keith and Karen were among the less wealthy in my sample. They felt anxious about money, especially because of recent expenses for their kids, such as for tutoring, and for their ongoing renovation. Keith said: “This is the classic debate. It’s been a horrible day, it’s 10:00, the kids are finally down, we’re fried. All I want is an eight-dollar burrito. Am I bad person for ordering and getting an eight-dollar burrito delivered? It’s like, we make three hundred fucking thousand dollars a year. I can’t get an eight-dollar burrito? You know? I’m not going to Momofuku or something.” Nicole told me, “There are things I feel guilty about. I feel like I take too many cabs, for sure. And when I’m in a cab, I’m like, ‘Oh, [my husband’s] going to see that I took a cab.’ But he doesn’t give me grief for it. I just feel guilty. Because I know it’s stupid, and I should get in the subway instead of taking a cab. Or I feel lazy. But that is the luxury of my life, is taking a cab.” Both these speakers feel morally conflicted about small purchases such as a burrito and a cab ride. Yet while they rec
ognize these conflicts, they make comparisons that cast them in a good light: the burrito is explicitly compared to the expensive dinner at trendy Momofuku, and the taxi ride (like the second washer-dryer) is implicitly compared to some other kind of “luxury” that presumably would be more truly luxurious.
On the rare occasions that they talked about coveting expensive items, my interviewees tended immediately to dismiss these longings as “ridiculous.” For example, Willa explained why she is always on the lookout for a new property to purchase and renovate: “It would be to get a townhouse with a bigger living room. To be able to have bigger parties. I mean, and this is such a stupid thing. Because the reality is, like, I should listen to myself. Because why am I buying a house—or an apartment, whatever it might be—for the three times a year that we have a huge party? Like, we, in this house, cannot have a huge party. Is that the worst thing? No. Like, do the children have bedrooms and a bathroom? Yes. Like, we’re fine. We’re fine.” Willa believes her desire for more space is unreasonable; she tries to talk herself out of it, alluding to the basic needs of the children, but she can’t quite “listen to” herself.6 Nicole had already combined two apartments in her renovation, but she told me, “I’ve got this pipe dream of taking over [a third adjacent apartment] someday. Which would be ridiculous. I mean, that would just be too much space.” Asked why she wanted it, she talked about the possibility of her children’s having their own area away from where grownups would be socializing. Although this is a “legitimate” use of the space, her comment—the characterization of her “pipe dream” as “ridiculous”—still manifests a deep ambivalence between what she wants and what she thinks she should want.
Uneasy Street Page 13