How altruistic of you.
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It is still necessary. If your job is taking care of rich, entitled crybabies, particularly when said crybabies are corporate executives, discretion is required. Otherwise, the rich entitled crybabies will find someone else who will keep their assholery secret.
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I like to think the frog story is entirely due to a misunderstanding, where the people came to the hotel room and thought, “Why the fuck is there a live frog in the room?” but were too polite to mention it. I mean, I know that’s not what happened, but I like to think it was, for my sanity’s sake.
I suspect it’s a force that has to be constantly (and consciously) fought by every rich person to avoid becoming an asshole, though.
Also studies show that the increased social status of being richer than other people makes people happy. Which explains why the super-wealthy, who couldn’t materially benefit in any possible way from more wealth, still seek it.
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Exactly. That’s why old money and smart money in America often presents as comfortably and plausibly upper-middle class to people who have no business or no need to know that they’re feelthy reech. They still may act like entitled arseholes amongst their own circles and retainers, but taking that approach develops good habits of the mind in terms of not always coming off as suspicious and bristly or asking “do you know who I am?”
An income of USD$75k per year gets you pretty far up Maslow’s Pyramid for a start. $1-million in the bank and a paid-off mortgage gets you to the point where you can start worrying less about money and more about time. Once you start exceeding $15-million in net worth things start getting ridiculous, especially if you’re still working a job you don’t like to collect more money.
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That may be true but I’ll bet that’s incredibly difficult to study with any level of precision, especially when it comes to extreme levels of wealth.
For example, a recent influential study on the subject of money and happiness from Wharton required 33,000 participants to engage with a “Track Your Happiness” app a few times a day. The people who volunteer for such a study and actually participate consistently are probably a self-selecting group that may or may not be reflective of society at large. And I didn’t see a number for how many billionaires were included in that group of 33,000 folks.
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My entire fiscal ambition is to get to the place of “Fuck You.”
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I don’t think anything would give me greater pleasure than to ensure the hair-washing San Pellegrino water was laced with huge amounts of LSD and various other things used by that person were laced with LSD for weeks and months to come.
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Possibly. One of the big problems is that at some point, they get used to the fact that no one ever says “no” to them. That’s a huge problem.
One time at a company where I worked, the CEO came to our office in CA and at the last minute, decided that before he came out to speak he needed to have a particular song played. I can’t remember which. This was pre itunes cloud/Apple Music/Spotify, etc… So the IT VP blasted an email to all of IT to see if someone happened to have it on their ipod or whatever. Nope. Then he said, let’s grab it off of limewire or something similar. Which required that we UNBLOCK all file sharing protocols on our firewall.
I was like “why don’t you just tell this hump that we DON’T FUCKING HAVE IT”. Oh, no. Can’t do that.
I hate that kind of shit.
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I have to wonder how selection bias plays into things, i.e. the people with a lot of money accumulate unnecessary wealth because they are the ones that get off on the social status of it…
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i’d be curious to hear your take on it, and I also think that it has a lot more to say than just that, rich white people get away with the shit that we already know they do. And I think some of them do get their comeuppance.
The characters covered a wide range in my view, from young people still figuring out just how to navigate their privilege alongside their awareness of how it’s built on the backs of others, to another who’s trying to decide whether she should accept the role that her new marriage to a rich, sexist asshole seems destined to consign her to, versus her pursuing her own ambitions, to several interesting characters who work for these pampered people, and can see right through their pretensions, weaknesses and other demerits. It’s also about how people justify their privileges to themselves. Many of the characters and much of the acting are great!
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Maybe I’ll get around to watching it, since people whose tastes I agree with seem to enjoy it (you, for example)… but there is so much content out there, that it might be a while!
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If these folks are like the caterers I know, as long as they got paid, someone got to eat the food. So that’s some good news.
And ultimately like, as long as this idiot pays the folks for it, it’s a waste of a day for them but they got paid, which is a pretty sweet deal. Like if you were a yacht crew wouldn’t you rather not spend the day shuffling some billionaire dweeb around but make the same money?
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Feel free to spoiler tag your answer: Whom?
In the first season, there was none that I could see.
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All of the wealthy vacationers, in the sense that we see them (and people like them) with their pants down, so to speak. The bride too; she’s not gonna be happy, and may end up numbing herself most of the time. The couple with kids too, in their undoubtedly unhappy future; we learn enough about them to see that coming. Probably others too, if i think about it more. I don’t think comeuppance has to be blunt or immediately painful to be there, nor to be a satisfying end to a bad character for me as a viewer. And it’s not something I always even want from a story with bad people in it; seeing how, or why, they’re bad, and sometimes that they’re also complex humans, who don’t always act worse than I or others might in their shoes, can satisfy me too. As can pulling back the stage set of a fantasy lifestyle that a lot of Americans have, to reveal the abused lives that support it. Reminds me of Jamaica Kincaid’s book A Small Place that way, about the trashy role of “tourist” on her home island of Antigua. Both have probably inspired some self-reflection in at least a few people, and even soured some of them on the very idea of such a vacation.
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That knowledge of mere general malaise isn’t enough for me, personally; I look to my preferred fictions to give me some glimmer of the karmic reckoning and humane justice that I know better than to expect from my reality.
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I find Succession better for that kind of satisfaction. Those ultra-rich arseholes get slammed down every episode, with more sure to come and the general malaise present as well.
Both shows do depict the sense of entitlement discussed in the FPP equally well.
Another show which is wildly popular, which I have never bothered to watch.
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You might like that one better. As @Mindysan33 said above, though, there’s so much quality stuff out there it’s hard to choose. I’m going for a change of pace with Ted Lasso next, which is apparently a show about lovely non-billionaire humans with positive attitudes being nice to each-other.
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It’s a lil’ easier when one is a self professed ‘snob’ who has very little bandwidth for retreads of the same old tropes.
As I like to say, Vince Gilligan kinda ruined me for most television…
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Bet there’s some shows and movies we both still like though.
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