Kylie Jenner, the 24-year-old KarJenner with more money than any of the rest of ‘em besides Ole’ Kimmy, is reported to be worth about $700 million. It doesn’t take an Ivy League degree to recognize that all of these “reality” shows depict the lives of 1%-level wealth (or those defrauding their way to it). Shows like Real Housewives, Keeping Up with The Kardashians and its 17 spinoffs, Below Deck, Selling Sunset and Vanderpump Rules are among some of the most popular that don’t revolve around one person dating 25 people at once in a New Mexico mansion.
Think about reality television for a second: The name itself implies it’s reflective of reality.
No matter how bad you think the wealth inequality is, I can almost guarantee you: It’s worse than that. The top 1% of richest people in America control 16x as much wealth as the bottom 50%. In America, we see opulent displays of wealth portrayed as relatively normal. “Do you think people who make a lot of money still don’t feel wealthy because our idea of what constitutes a good life that we deserve to be living in America is just warped to shit?” This is not a new or novel idea (in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it before), but I was thinking about it in a more in-depth way the other day after receiving a DM that went something like this: Pre-social media, you didn’t know that there were a slew of cool teens parading around Los Angeles in G Wagons and Gucci sweaters drawing from an inexplicable and invisible pool of funds despite having no discernible job beyond being hot and intriguing on the internet. “The Joneses” are no longer just the people who live in the McMansion next door to you and drive a newer Buick than you do- the metaphoric Joneses are now any one of the 1 billion people you can follow on Instagram.
Why? Because these apps commodify, memorialize, and aggregate the natural comparison that plagues every generation of human beings. My oversimplified theory? The apps that Mark owns drive this warped belief system that everyone’s richer than they actually are. I’d agree with the Mark Zuckerberg effect-but with a totally different definition. Some call it the Mark Zuckerberg effect, presumably implying that our generation has a few shining tech stars that make us believe unthinkable fortune is on the other side of just one good idea that starts as a means for comparing girls’ respective levels of hotness but eventually morphs into a society-altering, democracy-damaging invention. That’s adorable ‘n optimistic, but when you look at the saving behavior of many Millennials, it wouldn’t suggest that’s a realistic assumption (roughly the same number of Millennials have nothing saved for retirement). This MarketWatch article from 2018 points out (depressingly) that a staggering number of Millennials (65%) believe they’ll be “rich” in the not-too-distant future. In a lot of ways, it’s not always subjective. It’s funny how you might hear someone who makes $60,000 per year and drives a leased Mercedes describe themselves as wealthy, while someone with hundreds of millions of dollars may not. This question is fascinating to me-more accurately, the answers are fascinating. If I had to guess, it has something to do with comparison to people in a similar situation to you, as opposed to any hard-and-fast numbers: If you look around at your life, income, and net worth, and that of people similar in age and geography, do you feel like you’re better off, or worse? Whether you do or you don’t, what’s your justification for your answer? Let me ask you a question: Do you consider yourself wealthy?
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