We Might Be In A Cost Of Living Crisis But “Wealth Entertainment” Is Booming

In May, influencer (turned viral cancelled-influencer, turned normal influencer again) Caroline Calloway recounted a recent lawsuit filed against her. She’d neglected to pay $40,000 USD in rent and had shown no effort of paying it back. "At a certain point, I realised I could either live luxuriously or pay my rent,” she explained earnestly. 

I wondered why Vanity Fair was giving Calloway air time. Even her crimes — ripping off fans, being a bad friend, throwing a terrible event and not delivering on book deals she’d already received the advances for — are petty and boring compared to other blonde scammers like Anna Sorokin (you likely know her as Anna Delvey) and Elizabeth Holmes. But reading those words between passive-aggressive emails from my real estate agent about a "proposed" rent hike, I thought… "slay".

Since 2019, Caroline Calloway has been elevated from dragged ‘bad friend’ and scammer in The Cut to anti-hero, with her own cover story, face and body oil (called “Snake Oil”, because of course) and yet another book deal (Scammer was released in June this year). So, if what was cancelled in 2019 is now iconic, what's changed? 

In 2019, when Calloway was busy being hated, Australia was experiencing its 28th year of economic growth. Sure, millennials had a harder time getting first jobs during the Global Financial Crisis, but Australia was relatively protected. Most Australians aged 18-35 grew up in a period of relative economic stability — but in 2020, that changed. Australia's young people have since seen three years of hard economic times. During the 2020 lockdowns, we (and women of all age groups) were disproportionately affected by hours cuts across businesses, so if we weren’t out of work, we were muddling our way through the high school certificate online and graduating uni over Zoom. 

Now, we're out of our homes and into the woods; the primary victims of Australia's cost of living crisis, and somehow, our acceptance and interest in wealth TV and media have only grown. From viral articles delving into the minds of people like Calloway, to hours of television devoted to the emotionally bereft rich kids in Succession, our interest in the deviously and aspirationally wealthy has only grown. In fact, Succession season three experienced record viewings and, in Australia, was 34.4 times higher in demand than the average TV series. 

Logically, pretty white socialites like Calloway and Sorokin, who work hard at ripping other people off and face little to no consequences (Sorokin has launched a podcast, and is planning a pop single and a reality TV series), should infuriate us. After all, Gen Z and millennials are two generations heavily critiqued for morality policing, and yet, we love it. On TikTok, the #oldmoneyaesthetic — picture Princess Diana of Wales playing tennis or watch the intro to Succession like everyone else — outstrips #eattherich by 2 billion views. Meanwhile, the biggest trend of 2023 is "quiet luxury", which saw a 614% increase in search in 2023. It’s accompanied by inane sub-beauty trends like ‘steal wealth face’ and ‘rich girl skin’. Cheerfully classist, these trends suggest “natural”, “poreless” and polished complexions that can only be achieved with great genes, time-consuming treatments and expensive skincare, not with relatively affordable makeup and one-off tweakments.

These aren’t trickle-down values. Crunch the numbers and you’ll find it’s young people, not our parents, who are propping up the luxury goods industry. Who has the audacity to be shilling these products, or the funds to be buying $500 Shiv Roy-inspired cashmere turtlenecks? I answer my own question as I ask it. At the time of writing, I'm staring at the four items in my Net-a-Porter EOFY sale cart that are exactly $2000 in value. Will I buy them? I don't know. But I will stare at them for the next two weeks like they're the season finale of Succession, while pondering if I have rich girl skin (because despite my initial incredulity, the question is plaguing me). 

And I’m not alone. "I guess I watch shows about these people like I watch reality TV," says Jenny*, who is 33 and works full-time. She admits that she's financially stressed, in the same way that many (70%, to be precise) millennials and Gen Z are — and that she feels a knot in her stomach whenever she even thinks about her fluctuating electricity bill. 

Jenny is objectively doing everything she can to accommodate rising food, energy and housing prices, like ditching her gym membership and changing her grocery list. And yet, not only can she not get enough of shows about rich brats and con artists, and the trends that accompany them, but she also finds them relaxing. 

Alison Pennington, author of Gen F'd: How Young People Can Reclaim Their Uncertain Futures, says we're being scammed. "The cost of living crisis is a symptom of extreme corporate power over people," she tells Refinery29 Australia. "Big banks, supermarkets and private interest groups are setting prices far beyond costs and getting away with it." Pennington argues the only thing young people can do is push for wage growth and press for unions. "They speak the language of economic power," she explains. What does not speak the language of economic power is rage tweeting, and posting TikToks and funny memes that are scattered to the algorithmic winds, even though that’s the action many of us are choosing.  

Our behaviour is out of step with basic survival instincts, which perplexes Pennington, because historically speaking, food and housing insecurity has triggered mass protests. From Occupy Wall Street to the many demonstrations of the 1960s and ‘70s, and as far back as the French Revolution when the now viralised term ‘eat the rich' was coined.

According to the Finder 2023 Cost of Living Report, the categories driving the most stress are food, power and housing, which coincidentally form the basis of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs — a psychological concept so uncontroversial that it's used as much today as when it was published in 1945. It explains that food, shelter, sex and social connection provide the framework for loftier human qualities like self-actualisation, empathy and morality. With young people cut off from secure employment, displaced by rent hikes and experiencing wage growth that’s trailing behind the cost of living, it's reasonable to suggest that this baseline hierarchy has disintegrated, and along with it, our sense of safety. 

But, instead of protesting, we’re stuck in a financially deadly mix of consumption, inertia, and online sniping. Our actions feel out of step with our physical realities because they are.

According to Jane Monica Jones, a financial psychologist, it's very possible that with our basic hierarchy of needs violated, we're dissociating and choosing to retreat into readily available fantasies offered by streaming services and social media algorithms. 

“When a young adult feels misunderstood by their family of origin, that can be traumatic,” says Jones. "We're tribal creatures… and our values are instilled in us by our first tribe [our families]." Young people have found the values that were espoused to them by their parents have been lies, specifically, the promise that if we worked hard, we could play hard. Now, we're the most highly educated generation of all time, without access to a baseline foundation on which we can build identities or futures.

In this context, it’s natural to look to new values, and physical or imagined ways out. Suddenly characters like Sorokin and Calloway seem like naughty older sisters showing us how to sneak out after dark. And the seething Roy children, always wanting more, are relatable to us because, like them, we're also being denied the wealth that many of our parents had access to, simply by growing up in an earlier decade, though on a much smaller scale. We gravitate to these stories because they suggest escape and make us feel understood. 

Earlier this year, the actor who portrays social climbing outsider Cousin Greg on Succession, visited Sydney to promote its final season. Speaking with journalists, he described the Roy children as being trapped in a "cashmere prison"; with all of the comfort, none of the warmth. It was an evocative phrase, and the reassuring sentiment embedded in it was that we, the 99%, are somehow more fortunate. But, to quote Dakota Johnson on The Ellen Show, "Actually, no, that's not the truth". 

Imagine if we suffered our worst moments in the luxury afforded to these people rather than in overcrowded sharehouses, where we worry our housemates' partners can overhear us fighting with our parents, landlords, banks and bosses. Or at our jobs, where we can’t call in sick or take a “scream into the pillow day” because we’re casual workers or contractors without sick or annual leave. 

Jenny says one of the things she finds so compelling about scammers is they represent many of the values instilled in her as a child by her middle-class parents. "They're bold, they make their own fortunes, they follow through," she says, adding that "they just don't follow other values I was taught like… following the law or respecting other people." But in survival mode, neither do we. 

The other part of the equation is that it's hard to believe wealth isn't the right click of a button away. Ash King is a psychologist who researches identity and self-expression online. I ask her why she thinks, despite their expressed dissatisfaction with their financial circumstances, 72% of Gen Z believe they will be wealthy. 

It’s a phenomenon that’s been referred to as financial dysmorphia, and according to King, it’s actually reasonable because wealth now seems so incredibly proximate. "Back in the old days, the wealthy were royals or actors; we could reasonably assume we wouldn't get there," she explains. They also weren't known to us because we saw grainy photos from long-lens paparazzi shots of Gwenyth Paltrow, topless and sucking darts poolside, but we didn't know what she was like as a person. Now, she speaks to us directly on TikTok, shilling gold-plated vibrators that cost $1,249 USD. You scoff at them and at her, but look at them once, and they'll chase you across every app on your phone and every website you visit until you start to wonder if you're letting the side down by not picking one up. 

"It's a little bit like smoking," says Jones. "When you take your first drag of a cigarette, it tastes disgusting, so your brain releases dopamine to rid you of the feeling. It feels good, and eventually, you associate the dopamine with the cigarette and become addicted."  Like vape trails and cigarette smoke, when we have no cash, money has become ephemeral. More of a feeling than a reality. As Sorokin said from prison in an interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast: “I just wanted to do what I wanted… Money always represented freedom to me, not just for the sake of money.” Like Calloway, she expressed the disconnect between money as a means for life, and money as something that enabled self-image. Untethered from the physical realities of housing and food, money (or the concept of it) has shifted to the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Tied to our identity, the question, “Do I have rich girl skin?”, has a new sense of urgency. 

This, says Jones, is the crux of the issue. With concepts of wealth central to our identity and tantalisingly close, it’s hard to rail against a system that we feel we could be a part of.  "We don't want to fuck it up for ourselves if we get there," she says.