Written by Bryan Lutz, Editor at Dollarcollapse.com:
Social Media is exposing and amplifying the affects of the wealth gap.
Here’s where it comes from:
via @Charles Hugh Smith at Oftwominds.com
It’s not the kind of cosplay you’d expect either.
We’re living through a fascinating cultural paradox that’s capturing the absurdity of modern status signalling.
On one side, we have wealthy individuals desperately performing poverty, while on the other, young men with limited means are obsessing over looking “only money.”
This video exposes the absurdity…
The “Old Money” and “Quiet Luxury” aesthetics have exploded across TikTok, with everyday people cosplaying having private jets and Monaco vacations.
As this video from the Horses YouTube channel points out, actual wealthy, “old money” people are increasingly embracing stealth wealth, deliberately dressing down while displaying their “simplistic, hard-working, purist lifestyle.”
The irony is palpable: these trends have created a generation that believes nice clothes that say “quiet luxury” equal wealth, when in reality they’re just performing an expensive fantasy.
Meanwhile, there are some content creators embodying this contradiction.
Take the “Dollar Tree Dinners” phenomenon—creators filming budget meal tutorials in clearly expensive, $50,000 kitchen teaching viewers how to stretch a rotisserie chicken into four meals using dollar store ingredients.
Probably out of no fault of her own, her channel and recommendations have become poverty cosplay for the algorithm.
This has happened before in societies where there’s a high wealth gap.
For example, it’s said that Mary Antoinette used to dress down spending a few days “on the farm” to eschew the life of luxury.
And Seneca used to occasionally shipwreck himself to remove the affect that wealth played on his character.
Maybe these were good practices, maybe not, but the real tragedy isn’t the performance itself. It’s the distortion of actual financial wellness.
While young people chase expensive signifiers of wealth, they’re missing the boring fundamentals that actually build it: saving, investing, and living below your means—ironically, exactly what those “poor-performing” rich people are doing.