Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  James, the real estate entrepreneur with assets of over $3 million, told me about a conflict he felt after seeing a colleague’s large house: “I’m just, like, looking at this place, feeling like, wow, my house is so small. And then thinking, ‘That’s a ridiculous statement you just made to yourself. What’s wrong with you?’” I asked, “Did it make you feel bad, like ‘I should have a bigger house’?” He responded, “Well, I felt that instinct, and I checked it. And I turned around and [said to myself], ‘That’s crazy. That’s a road to nowhere. That kind of mindset is a road to nowhere.’ … You have to consciously check it because [having] money does it to you, or to me.” James suggests that desire and envy can quickly get out of control, which will also diminish his sense of his own achievements.

  Alexis, as we have seen, was a stay-at-home mother with a household income of around $500,000 and assets of over $5 million. She was one of a few female respondents who talked about desiring the more stereotypical accoutrements of upper-class femininity, such as expensive shoes and handbags. She described her most recent purchase and the negotiations with her husband and with herself that made it acceptable:

  I just bought a very expensive handbag. That I feel guilty about. I’m, like, smiling because I love it so much. But, you know, I know I didn’t need it. And we first talked about it, and [her husband] was like, “Come on, you don’t need it.” And I was like, “You’re right. You’re right. This is silly, silly, silly.” And then, like, a month later—you know. For, like, Mother’s Day, he was like, “Why don’t you get it?” And I was like, “No, no, I don’t need it.” But then I was like, “Oh, wait a second!” [She laughed.] So of course I did. But yes, I do feel a little—you know, a little guilty about that.

  In this and many other examples, Alexis’s husband disciplined her desires, initially encouraging her to forego the $2,000 bag. But by deeming it a Mother’s Day gift, they placed it in the exceptional, and acceptable, category of a “treat.” Alexis also asserted again that she loved the bag and that it had “spoken to” her, establishing it as personally satisfying through uniqueness rather than as the result of a blindly consumerist impulse.

  Maya, the stay-at-home mother married to the corporate lawyer, demonstrated deeper ambivalence about what she needed to be happy. On the one hand, as noted previously, she did not want her kids to be educated in an environment where people cared too much about Chanel handbags and fancy clothes. She also told me, about one friend who spends whatever she wants, that “I pass judgment and think that’s really crazy to spend that much money.” On the other hand, she actually did want these items herself; she wished that her husband, whose annual income was about $2 million, was more free with money so she could buy them. She told me he drew “stricter lines in the sand” than her friends’ husbands. She said, “‘It’s my birthday, buy me that handbag!’ Like, what’s the big deal? Right. But it is ‘No, that bag is too expensive. I am not buying it.’ Flat out.” Notably, she frames the handbag as a potential birthday “treat.” (As we will see in chapter 5, other husbands of stay-at-home mothers likewise try to corral their wives’ spending.)

  In the face of this refusal, Maya makes an effort to tamp down her desire, reminding herself that she has the basics and should be satisfied with them:

  Sometimes I wonder why doesn’t my husband feel more comfortable with us doing a little bit of that kind of stuff [such as spending a lot on a handbag]. But I always come back to the fact that I live a very comfortable life. I do not want for anything significant. And so I’m grateful for what I have. And maybe I don’t have that Chanel bag or maybe I didn’t get to buy that Prada dress or I don’t have that house in the Hamptons, but I’ve got this [home] and I’ve got two healthy kids and I’ve got a great marriage, and I’m very grateful for that. So. You know, I mean the mind wanders, yes it wanders. But it doesn’t—it’s nothing that kind of bothers me that much.

  Maya works to convince herself to feel not only satisfied with what she has but also grateful for it, even when in fact she does not feel that it is enough. As I show in chapter 4, the feeling of gratitude is another aspect of the legitimately entitled self.

  In modifying her feelings, Maya formulates what she does have—a home, healthy children, and love—as essential and what she doesn’t have—Prada, Chanel, the Hamptons house—as insignificant. This antimaterialist formulation makes sense, of course, and I don’t think it is intentionally strategic. But the idea that she doesn’t “want for anything significant” erases the extreme difference between her “basic” existence and that of most people. This upward-oriented move helps her establish herself as “in the middle.”

  Penny, the very part-time legal consultant whose husband’s income was around $3 million per year, was one of the few respondents who did not describe struggling to define her needs. She saw herself as drawing clear limits against unnecessary spending while not sacrificing comfort. She said, “Our car is twelve years old. Could we buy a new car? We could totally buy a new car. Could we buy, even—friends of [her husband] have—like, a friggin’ Lamborghini. Like, we could actually buy a Lamborghini. Like—ugh!” But, she said, their car had only 60,000 miles on it. “So why would we buy a new car? So, I don’t think either one of us is driven by that. I think we’re pushing it away a little bit. But at the same time, when we look at the summer houses, when we want to buy, we’re not going to buy a crappy house just to make a point. So it’s a balance.” Although Penny and her husband were willing to pay $1,300 per night for two rooms on a family vacation, they refused to fly first class (though sometimes they would spend more for the “middle” category of seats). She also counterposed their spending to that of several friends who spent more, including a couple who spent $250,000 on their daughter’s wedding. By comparing her choices to theirs, she places herself in a more moderate category. The idea of “balance” also connotes middleness by referring to a middle ground between excess and self-deprivation.

  SOCIAL OTHERS AND LUXURY CREEP

  Regardless of their struggles, almost all my respondents described becoming acclimated over time to making more expensive consumer choices. Maya said that she would not spend $1,000 on a dress, but added that “the number of hundreds I would spend seems to go up all the time, right?” Nadine said, “I didn’t want to be one of those rich people that just spends money without thinking about it. But I will say that there was a period where my thinking about what was reasonable became very different than what it was, like, you know, in 1992. So, over the span of ten years, what I [had] considered a luxury or extravagant or whatever didn’t seem as extravagant.” Eliana, whose inherited wealth totaled about $9 million and who believed deeply in economic and racial justice, said she felt like a hypocrite, because “I don’t think I fully live out all my values, I guess I would say. I used to say I was gonna be a revolutionary, and then I had that first massage.”

  Beatrice identified this phenomenon as “luxury creep”:

  Well, there’s definitely been luxury creep in my life. I just feel comfortable spending more money on more things. There’s luxury creep within categories that look like necessities. So, like, I spend more and more money on clothes. … We spend a lot of money on wine. … We’ve recently had a big leap in the amount of money that we spend on bottles of wine, like fifteen or twenty-five dollars. So we would have bought wine before, and considered it, like, a life necessity, but it’s the luxury creep aspect of it that’s changed.

  Beatrice went on to associate luxury creep with her peer group, saying, “It’s a very insidious thing, you know, because it’s much less conscious than, like, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ kind of conspicuous consumption, that competitive consumption thing. It’s really about this, like—I mean for me, it’s just like this vague sense of what’s normal.”

  We often imagine that consumption is motivated by status competition.7 And a few of my respondents did indicate that they had fears about status in the conventional sense, as when James worried that
his house wasn’t big enough. Another example came from Bruno, who had decided to give up a lucrative job to pursue a lower-paying career in a field he loved and live primarily on his wife’s salary of over $500,000. He readily admitted that he had always cared about having the “right stuff,” meaning material goods such as clothing and technology. He described having had to give these up with his career change and to accept that he would not have a country house, as his peers (whom he called “my Joneses”) did.

  On the other hand, however, most people I talked with distanced themselves from the idea of status competition. Willa, for example, told me about a family member who had suggested she have guests over to “show off” her renovated home, an idea she rejected out of hand. She said, “I didn’t do this [renovation] to make people feel good or bad about—like, this is our house. I’ve provided a home for our family that totally meets our needs. I’m not making a statement about how much money we do or do not have. I don’t care about stuff like that.”

  A few women who explicitly recognized feeling competitive about consumption described these feelings as having to do with fears about not fitting in with the group.8 One stay-at-home mother talked about worrying that she would not have the right clothes for social events attached to her husband’s work. Confessing that it was because of “insecurity,” she said, “I like to feel like I look amongst the best in a room.” Another stay-at-home mother talked about worrying that her home renovation would be judged by her neighbors, saying that “consumption is my job.” She admitted that she would imagine that her home was “nice enough” only if it appeared in a magazine. These women see (and fear) their consumption choices as reflections of themselves, to be judged by others, rather than as practices of competitive one-upmanship.

  Beatrice’s idea of luxury creep further challenges this simple idea of competitive consumption, replacing it with common consumption. Rather than compete with her peers, she looks to them for signals about what she should be doing. Other interviewees referred to a similar dynamic. Asked what established her “normal,” Grace, a nonprofit consultant married to an inheritor, said, “I think I see probably a lot of the parents of [my daughter’s] friends and stuff, like, what [they] do. And probably my normal social group that I’ve hung out with since college.” Karen talked about increasing her spending partly as a function of being “surrounded by people who are all doing the same stuff.”

  Getting used to rising levels of spending and new lifestyles was not always easy. Interviewees who had grown up with significantly less than they have now tended to be especially uncomfortable with particular kinds of consumption. Talking about his live-in nanny, for example, Justin recounted, “In the beginning, I was, I guess, hesitant. It was, like, a status I never had. I never had anyone working in my house. I mean, I cleaned my toilets, growing up. So it was kind of like, hmm. Now you have, like, a servant. It’s kind of a weird thing for me.” Nathan, a money manager with an income of around $350,000 who came from a working-class background, said, “When I do something that is associated with high wealth, I get a little bit of an out-of-body experience. A little bit of looking down on myself, saying, ‘That’s weird that you’re doing that,’ like, ‘What are you doing?’”9 Karen told me, referring specifically to discomfort with self-indulgence, “I grew up without a lot of money, and I always felt kind of uncomfortable about the idea of having money and spending it on yourself.”

  Sometimes past influences clashed especially sharply with present ones in establishing what was “reasonable” to spend. Maya described, on the one hand, the restraining influence of her husband and the norms of family and old friends. As noted, she told me that spending more than $1,000 on a dress would feel “very uncomfortable.” When I asked why, she responded,

  I know, isn’t that silly? I don’t know what it is. I think—I was on my own until I was 34. And I made money, and I spent my own money. And so I had what I thought was insane [to spend] then. And it’s changed a little, but not that much actually, even though I’m now married to [her husband] and we have so much more. … And if I do talk to him about it, like, “Can you believe that handbag so-and-so bought cost three thousand dollars?” We’re both like, “That seems crazy.” My family thinks it, my mother thinks it. So part of it is from my family and, like, what we think is normal and not normal. Part of it is from when I worked and my friends from my [working] life, and so it’s kind of, you know, a combination of all of that.

  These influences from earlier in her life have shaped what she thinks is “normal and not normal.”

  But people in Maya’s immediate social circle, whom she described as her current “reference points,” are more affluent and spend more freely than she. She described how this group of wealthy people affected her sense of what was acceptable to spend, saying, “Look, I think renting the [summer] house is really extravagant. But again, in our social circle everyone owns a house. And renting, they’re like, ‘Why are you only doing it for a month? Why aren’t you doing it for two months?’ And every now and then I feel, like, things that I buy for myself, I feel extravagant about. But relative again to my friends, it’s not, and that’s what kind of makes me feel like it’s okay.” Maya was mostly upward-oriented, as I showed in chapter 1, in that she explicitly compared herself to those in her current social network, who tended to have more, and to those above them. But the diversity of her experience has shaped her sense of “reasonable” consumption.

  This increase in spending also corresponds to a particular life stage. Some earners talked about leaving behind their more spendthrift habits of clothes shopping or partying in order to focus on the future, especially once they started a family. But, at the same time, most talked about the increase in (certain kinds of) spending associated with family life. Gary said, of the transition to buying a home, moving to Brooklyn from Manhattan, and having kids, that it “absolutely shifted us into a category of consumerism, of spending, that is exponentially more than it used to be.” In some ways these are objective changes, as owning and renovating property and purchasing child care and education are more expensive than sleeping on a futon in a shared apartment, as many had done in their twenties. (Ursula said, with disbelief, of herself and her graduate school roommate, “We brought furniture in from the street!”)

  But having children also changed their ideas about how much is acceptable to spend. Olivia said, for example, “I think when we first were together, I sort of joined Scott undercover, I would say. Just because I felt really uncomfortable with unearned privilege, basically. And he did, too. And I would say that we’ve grown more and more comfortable. I think our children, having a family, has really pushed that.” Asked for specifics, she said, “I mean, we moved from this somewhat ratty apartment to a giant place. And for me, the way I could rationalize that is just, we knew we would have more than one child. We wanted to stay in the city, but we wanted to be comfortable. And we wanted it to be comfortable for our child. We never would have moved to a place like that if it were just the two of us.” As I described in the introduction, Olivia was even planning another renovation on their current apartment, despite the trauma of their earlier experience, to increase closet space, modify bathrooms, and redo the kitchen. She saw this decision as part of getting over her ambivalence once and for all, saying, “If we’re going to live there, like, let’s really live there.” Yet she also represented this effort as one made primarily to meet the children’s needs, which she saw as reasonable, asserting, “I don’t think having a closet in your room is over the top.”

  Paid consumption experts also help their clients become acclimated to certain levels of spending. Interior designers, architects, personal assistants and concierges, and other service providers often both shape clients’ taste and approve their consumption.10 One woman with a household income of over $2 million told me that she had been too intimidated to shop at Barneys until she needed a dress for a special occasion, when she had sought out a personal shopper whom she loved. She ke
pt going back to him, and he had “slowly upped” the amount she was willing to spend. Now, she said, “I’ll go to Barneys, I’ll spend five thousand. Which used to be one thousand, or two.” So the personal shopper has made her feel comfortable both in the store and with the spending. When I interviewed Regina, an interior designer who had been in the business for over thirty years, she made a similar point, commenting that “using me gives clients permission to spend money.” She compared her job, from a client’s point of view, to “going shopping with a friend who says, ‘You have to buy that dress,’” thereby both encouraging and legitimating the purchase.

  David, the interior designer, recounted of one client, “I was [suggesting] a desk that was maybe, like, five thousand dollars, or whatever. But he ended up spending thirty-five thousand on a desk. And he was a little conflicted about it. But I said to him, ‘You know, if there’s any place you’re going to spend a lot of money, it may as well be your desk. I mean, it’s like, what you do. It’s your work.’” Thus David offers a discourse of need to his client that allows him to think of ever-higher levels of spending as legitimate.11

  Noticing that he seemed to be actively legitimating this purchase, I asked, “Do you feel like you have to do that regularly? Kind of make it okay for them to spend money that they want to spend, but that they feel conflicted about?” He responded, “Some people yes, and some people no.” Referring to clients who had not been born with wealth and felt uncomfortable with it, he continued, “Sometimes it’s the more new-money [people]. The ‘shame’ people. They’re a little conflicted about that. They think it’s all just a little weird. Because, you know, they’re first-timers. It’s their first time using a designer. It’s their first big foray into, like, the big life, you know? Other clients of mine who are maybe divorced women, or this and that, are just kind of used to it. They’re just like [breezily], ‘I pay five thousand here, ten thousand here.’” As David points out, the experience of doing these expensive projects, such as renovation, helps these consumers get used to spending money. Indeed, people I interviewed who had done more than one renovation described the first one as the hardest.