The rich really are different

They have more social conflicts. Few people realize how hard a wealthy socialite works. But Cookie mag has apparently launched a new investigative series that reveals the gritty underside of life in the jet set:

Only just last month, she was forced to choose between a trunk show, the Guggenheim Young Collectors Council's annual Artist's Ball, and a dinner party at a hedge-fund manager's lavish home! Horreurs. Happily, she made the right decision and went to the trunk show. "At the event I saw rising It girl Chessy Wilson," she relates in her inaugural column, "who regaled me with a story about her handbag catching fire earlier that day when she accidentally dropped a lit match into it." Hahahahaha — barf. But it's not all clinking and chortling for this real housewife. There is a dark side. "The problem with the New York City social scene is that it sucks you in," she writes. What, like Michael Alig? Will Tatiana's addiction to nightlife end in blood and guts and jail?

Comments

Jake February 21, 2008 11:37 AM

In that respect they're like high schoolers or prisoners, as Paul Graham points
out:

An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

(...)

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

In other words, the wealthy socialite has, for the most part, been removed from the world of real struggle and work; like a character in a novel without any plot or struggle, she has to find something to do. That's not to say no wealthy socialite finds something useful in life -- Edith Wharton was, arguably, one -- but only to say that many apparently don't. So they have social instead of real conflicts.

Christina February 21, 2008 1:36 PM

I read Candace Bushnell's 4 Blondes during the height of Sex and the City's popularity. It thoroughly convinced me that NYC society is one of the most depressing and depraved environments I'd ever heard of.