Enough with Lifestyle Porn Already
It’s killing us.
Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash
Last year Kylie Jenner threw a birthday party for her daughter that cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred grand. It featured a theme park called “StormiWorld.” To enter StormiWorld, you walked through an inflatable entrance shaped like her daughter’s head.
It gave some people nightmares.
You can see why:
I wouldn’t want a theme park for my kid’s birthday, but that’s how things go when you grow up with an insta-mom.
They fill rooms with heart-shaped balloons and bizarre-looking cakes. They buy candy shops and carriages. They go completely over the top, because their kid’s birthday doubles as a social media spectacle. It’s a chance to flaunt their wealth and produce content for their feeds, which is how they continue to earn vast sums of money.
It’s lifestyle porn.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s $60 million dollar home
Millennials spend more time on Zillow than we ever did PornHub. We watch shows about millionaires shopping for new houses. We worship celebrities because they have money. We salivate over their mansions, which take up the equivalent of a city block. We defend their right to spend their wealth however they want, even if it destroys our future.
It’s because we crave egregious excess of the mundane.
We think seeing other people’s wealth inspires us and makes us happy. We want birthdays with skyscraper cakes and weddings with swan lakes. If we can’t live that way ourselves, we’ll pay someone else to do it. Someone out there has to be posing in a new swimsuit by a giant pool, and posting selfies from a private jet with their name written on the side. We stare in awe at an endless stream of wealth orgies on our phones.
It gives us comfort.
Super rich influencer families produce reckless excess for our amusement and entertainment, at the expense of our environment — and sometimes human rights. When they get caught, they pout and ask forgiveness. If we don’t give it to them, that apparently makes us cruel.
It’s not just the waste of money. Every day in the life of an ultra rich influencer produces unimaginable amounts of waste. Their obsession with party favors easily erases all the work people like us do to reduce our own climate impact. We’re talking thousands of balloons, thousands of private jet rides, and thousands of outfits worn once and then discarded, all as a garnish for their endless deluge of selfies.
This is what the ultra rich do. They run unsustainable businesses that exploit workers. They spend their wealth on lifestyles that throw their prosperity in our collective faces, and actively ruin our futures by squandering precious resources while polluting the environment.
Aren’t you?
Lifestyle porn is destroying the future.
Cost of lumber up roughly 200 percent over last year.
Let’s be completely honest for a minute.
The majority of people under 40 will never be able to own a decent home. Housing prices are spiking once again, driven by a scattershot of problems that include soaring lumber costs. The price of lumber is going up thanks to surging infestations of pine beetles, which are killing millions of acres of forest a year in North America, creating a vast shortage with no signs of it getting any better over the next decade.
What’s driving the beetles?
When the price of the house you’ve been ogling on Zillow goes up another 20 percent later this year, you can thank the super rich for fueling the climate change that’s creating lumber shortages. When inflation eats up your spending power again and drives up the cost of groceries, you can look to the wealth hoarders, who make it necessary for governments to print more money in order to keep it circulating.
They’ll try to fool everyone with performative activism to keep us from voting for policies and leaders that could rein in their reckless living. They’ll pretend to be the good guys. They’ll tweet their admiration for Greta Thunberg before they board private jets that dump 20 times more carbon into the atmosphere than a commercial plane.
There’s no shortage of people willing to defend their habits as personal freedoms. Here’s the thing. When we do that, we’re giving them permission to stomp on our future. Their unattainable, unsustainable lifestyle porn is what’s keeping us from buying our own houses and going on our own vacations. We’re celebrating them for ruining our lives.
We’re letting them do it.
We’re letting them get away with it.
The thing about ultra rich families, they’re always traveling somewhere on a private jet, for the sole purpose of staying interesting. That’s the only reason anyone wants to “keep up” with them. Nobody would watch Kim Kardashian argue with her sisters in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn.
Our desire to live through the rich is ultimately what’s doing us in. We just can’t seem to stop wanting to be them.
Even I catch myself wishing for a part of the Kardashian lifestyle, especially when Kim walks around her kitchen, giving fans tours of her multiple walk-in pantries and refrigerators.
She basically has a grocery store in her house lol.
She’s got an industrial fridge the size of my bedroom, just for storing fruits and vegetables. She’s got a fridge for water bottles and soda cans, and another one next to the stove for condiments and creamer. I watch these videos and imagine what it’d be like just to have one really nice fridge, or a pantry that could hold more than a week of groceries.
Families like this don’t earn wealth by working hard. They make it by forcing hundreds of others to work hard for them. All you have to do is read about the way they treat their staffers, and how they constantly underpay them. The rich get walk-in fridges, but the people who enable their lifestyles get to shop at the dollar store. The writers and media specialists who create their content can barely afford to live.
She took it from everyone else.
She’ll never admit it.
Billionaires fall back on “I’m just human” defenses.
You can probably predict how the ultra rich and their families respond anytime they’re called out for their hypocrisy, including their excessive use of private jets over other forms of transportation.
“No one’s perfect,” is something they often say.
It’s ironic because perfection is exactly what they sell, even if they say otherwise. They’re in the perfection industry. Every single thing they do is designed to make their lives look fabulous, and then make you want to attain that life by buying stuff.
No, nobody’s perfect.
However, most of us don’t leave astronomical carbon footprints by flying around the world on private jets every single day. We don’t consume extraordinary amounts of energy with walk-in refrigerators, or go riding around in sports cars just because we’re bored.
We don’t tweet about how wildfires in Australia break our heart, then show off our new mink slippers. We don’t make our profits directly from ruining everyone else’s lives, and then hide from it.
Here’s what the ultra rich should do.
If the masters of lifestyle porn really cared about the environmental destruction they’re causing, they would do a lot more than just occasionally tweet about it or donate a little money.
They would all sell their private jets. They would cut their travel in half, and then cut it in half again. They would stop filling their mansions with balloons every time they want to party. They would stop filling their spare fridges with boxed water, which can’t be recycled. They would stop inflating their wardrobes with single-use outfits. They would move into smaller houses to cut down on their carbon use, and convert their mansions into sustainable housing for low income families.
Of course, they probably won’t do any of this.
So instead, let’s tax them.
