What Could Be Wrong With Me Party 2: Plutophobia

It's a downtown food court, not exactly a classy establishment. The world over they are similar to the point of being identical. The dining area is large and expansive. There are no real barriers to entry, and I seek these spaces out. I prefer to eat in a food court off of trays, than a restaurant with cloth napkins. 

Yet, I'm annoyed, irritated and bemoaning the state of society and the prospects of a future of humanity. I'm annoyed by people who eat and then abandon their food refuse, the chicken bones, the molested napkins, the stray rice grains and the trays, the trays that make it all so easily transferable to a bin.

My objection is not based on hygiene, not a physiological one. I will eat food I drop on the food court ground. I would eat the food served at a food court, putting it inside my body.

It's the attitude, the self same as the people on economy-class flights that immediately recline their chairs as far as they can go, and that stewards have to tell to put in the upright position for take off, until they do and then as soon as the steward is gone they recline their chairs again.

A fantasy of money, a shitty fantasy of money. In the food court I sense acutely the abyss of the nouveau riche. People who even in a food court can adopt the posture of "I've made it" if only for a moment, where its okay for somebody to clean up your shit, as though you are an infant.

And to a degree, growing up in Australia, all there is to be encountered are the nouveau riche. I could not say with confidence that I've ever come across old money. But it is the rich part I find gross.

The Skunking of Phobia (or concept creep)

In the overlap period of the 20th and 21st century, at least post-civil rights movement in the United States; phobia has referred to two, I feel, sufficiently distinct things.

Something like arachnophobia or acrophobia we are talking about a debilitating irrational fear. Like someone who is truly afraid of spiders can't get near them, even the common house spider species. Someone who dislikes spiders and doesn't feel like humanely relocating them with a glass and a piece of paper to somewhere out of the way like the garden, but slips off a shoe to pulverize them, I assert we generally wouldn't call arachnophobic.

Nor with acrophobia are we talking about someone whose heart races at the thought of a chute not opening on their first ever sky dive from a few kilometres above the earth's surface, but somebody who has a nervous breakdown on the 2m diving board they psyched themselves into giving a go at the local pool and has to be somewhat forcibly removed from the hand rails by a lifeguard because they cannot jump off nor descend the steps they climbed.

These I'll call traditional phobias, where people experience disproportionate trauma (another skunked term, but I mean fear for their life) in response to a largely unlethal stimulus like a wide open space, or holes - like in a crumpet.

Then there's the more political phobias, perhaps most notably homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia. I'm going to hazard a guess that it's very very rare for a small child to be diagnosed by a medical professional with any of these phobias. While I'll not suggest that the behaviour and people they do describe are not characterised fundamentally by fear, it is clearly a much more empowered fear that generally doesn't result in screaming, running, cowering, tears, foetal positions etc. but aggression, assertion, marginalisation, violence, annexation of property, exclusion, discrimination.

Plutophobia could plausibly be either sense of phobia, but regarding me, it is much more the latter, a prejudice and as my opening example of people who don't bin their own foodcourt filth hopefully demonstrates, for me wealth is an attitudinal disposition I dislike more so than a literal, kind of tall Poppy equation where Bert has $100,000 in net worth and Ernie has $1,000,000 in net worth so I hate Ernie 10x as much as I hate Bert.

No, it is entirely possible to be wealthy and for me to like you personally fine, I make a generalisation and I recognise the challenge in many cases; of attaining wealth and staying grounded in some kind of modal reality.

The Out Loud Maths

There's an icecream store, a crappy one, offering Chocolate, Strawberry, Vanilla and Tutti Frutti.

Now, I gotta draw up like a table, and you don't have to give me a minute because it's already written.

Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Noam Chomsky, Cassie Ventura, Sophia Boutella, Some Male Dreamboat yet to go nuts a la Pre-Marty Supreme Timothy Chalomet, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, BTK, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson all like Chocolate.

Roy, Morrison, Mussolini and Marilyn Manson like Vanilla.

Chomsky, Cassie, Male Dreamboat of the Moment, Hitler, BTK , SoS and Charles Manson like Strawberry.

Sophia Boutella likes Tutti Frutti.

Now, to explain plutophobia, we just substitute Chocolate for "Rich" the problem is that everyone likes being rich, "Vanilla" might be "Oprah Winfrey's Bookclub", Strawberry might be "Nascar" and Tutti Frutti might be "A concise history of premodern bowling games"

Imagining in this metaphor, that this ice cream shop has one of those soviet-hangover style operations filled with makework where you order your scoop flavour from one employee who gives you a ticket to take to a cashier to pay for your ice cream in return for another ticket that sends you to a holding pen where you have to hang out waiting in the company of people who picked the same flavour as you.

Because almost everyone likes chocolate, it's not that it's bad to potentially hang with Arundhati Roy, Epstein friend Noam Chomsky, Cassie Ventura or Sophia Boutella. It's just that it would be terrible to find yourself stuck in a pen with dicks like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, BTK, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson.

This for me is the mathematics of plutophobia, the problem is, for every person who seeks riches as validation of the struggle they've been through to contribute genuine value to society, they are typically outnumbered by people who just want some kind of validation of their narcissism. They just want to be rich because they like status and consumption and hedonism.

Now anywhere there's a rich scene, like elite private schools, exclusive clubs, restaurants with dress codes for their customers, vinyards, waterfronts etc. hanging around makes it merely a matter of time before dicks show up.

Somewhat in the reverse of addiction, where dopamine or endorphins or whatever spike to their peak in anctipation of the high, something Gabor Mate articulated as "it's not the having it's the getting" for me the anticipation is the bottoming out of my experience of plutophobia. My gut sinks in the Uber to pretentious district, I get angry at the destination wedding invite, I stew in transit to the resort. 

The Simple Silent Maths 101

I promise this post will explore how my aversion to wealth is debilitating and doesn't exist to justify it. That said I am compelled to do some apologetics for how I see the world:

Put simply, holding all else equal if I am not impressed by you without a million dollars, I am not impressed by you with a million dollars.

I struggle to think of a simple real world example, but imagine you met a guy for the first time in a crowded room, you shook hands and leaned in close to hear him speak his name.

"Gus."

"Nice to meet you Gus. I'm sorry but your breath makes my eyes water, it is just about the foulest thing I've ever smelled. What's the story there?"

"Oh that! Well I eat my own faecal matter."

Here you can see my struggle to think of a simple example, because in a way, the ability to eat your own shit is kind of impressive. Not attractive, but impressive.

"I mean is that like a paraphilia? Have you always done that?"

"Yes and no, these days I mostly do it for my only fans account, I can bring in 2~3k per shit I eat."

With this vulgar example, I hope I can point to a largely unconscious but widely acknowledged truth - that wealth is but a proxy for value. 

When I was in University the first time, it coincided with a mining boom in the Australian economy because it was the pre-Xi double digit GDP growth for China. It was briefly possible for someone to earn six-figure salaries operating a laundry service for a mining barracks, not even going down in the mines and extracting iron-ore. In the meantime, medical students lived in relative poverty undergoing the 6 years of schooling required to become an MD. 

I don't know, and I suspect that the data would bare out my experience, that almost no medical students dropped out of medical school in order to cash in on a mining boom. There's a general recognition that in the long run Doctors get to wear white coats, people come to them begging for help, they get good stable salaries. They may wind up working similar hours to the fly-in-fly-out miner but people are capable of comparing apples and oranges in this case. They understand that earning 6 figures as a miner is significantly different to earning 6 figures as a doctor.

What Do I Mean "Rich"?

Above I touched upon a foundation of my phobia, which is that we live in a very confusing economy. 

So for me I think I am specifically talking about "consumption" when I talk about "rich" or "wealth"

My sense, and perhaps anxiety being that most people, the modal person, might describe someone as "successful" when in fact they are simply talking about somebody who is able to consume, perhaps overconsume goods and services.

Netflix among its many true crime documentary series, had one dedicated to a catfisher that exploited this very notion of rich. A woman met him on a dating app, then he'd take them to a Michelin starred restaurant and pay for everything, take them on an international holiday to stay in luxury resorts in a chartered jet etc. They would date this guy for weeks or months seeing him as clearly solvent and flush, before he'd tell them he needed some bridging loan for an investment deal that might fall through or whatever.

As it transpired, all the proof of wealth he had demonstrated was financed by the last catfishing victim, their stolen money was used to convince the next woman that the conman had plenty of money of his own, but actually he had no income beyond the stolen savings of credulous women.

Many "rich" people, are not successful, nor do they do anything of value. These are heterodox opinions, but I appeal to open secrets, like that the stockmarket is now almost pure arbitrage and hardly functions as a capital raising institution, that many big companies are entirely dependent on corporate welfare for survival either directly sticking their hand out to the government and coughing 'ahem' or via venture capital that up until post covid interest rate rises, were able to borrow money at 0 or negative rates and bet on pretty much anything and if it hit good but if it came up snake eyes could then be transferred to a tax write-off indirectly affecting government welfare. That many highly paid executives can receive greater compensation for destroying a company and getting fired than they do for competently performing their jobs, that most wealth is inherited and that social mobility is dropping as inequality grows etc. etc.

But I don't want to be simply conflated with a commie. For me, "richness" is a state of mind, a preference for consuming expensive things, it isn't about "earning" or "creating value" or "competence" or "success" as consuming expensive things can be entirely financed through debt. 

It is to cross the median threshold of overconsumption - you know, I can overconsume calories by shopping at the duopoly of supermarkets buying near-expired meat and store brand cans/bags of soup, but richness is where you can't just go to a local beach for your holiday, you need to fly to southeast Asia where local wages are low enough that you can enjoy a full compliment of butlers and maids, even on a meagre income, and you can't just lie on the beach and listen to the waves, you need a waiter to bring you cocktails.

Australia has terms like "cashed-up bogan" that are classist, and while pointing to a real phenomena as was seen in the various mining booms of the Australian economy in the early 21st century, it is my experience that people born into the upper 20% of household wealth are often only superficially different in their crass tastes and preferences. There's no merit in hiring a private consulting firm to set up your home theatre, and DIYing a home theatre from a big box store. People do not need a home theatre, these are luxuries not necessities.

So the rich I am bigoted against, are the people who centre luxury consumption in their lives, hedonism and generally employ a halo effect thinking that people who consume luxury are smarter, more attractive, more ethical and virtuous, wiser etc. I fucking hate people with this mindset and the environments they create.

Club Groucho

“I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” ~ Groucho Marx' letter of resignation to The Friars Club.

Miki and I are the only customers in the restaurant now known as Mikayla, located on the Takamatsu waterfront near the lighthouse it's a classy joint, objectively beautiful serving European cuisine with cutlery and everything. Takamatsu is famous for Udon noodles, and like absolutely everywhere in Japan it's pretty much impossible to find bad food, you basically have to have someone's grandma homecook something they remember fondly eating the day after Hiroshima or Nagasaki were bombed.

Though somewhere in Nagoya I have a fond memory of eating a superb spaghetti marinara, generally I wouldn't recommend eating European cuisines in Japan unless you need the comfort food because you'll be there a while. But yeah, you are often better off buying a hot meal in cling wrap from a convenience store than sitting down to a plate of pasta or $60 pizza with cubes of potato on it.

I remember Miki's haircut at the time, that the seasons fashion she wore was shorts over stockings with calf high boots, I remember where we sat in the restaurant, the time of day, the colour of the menus and that there was seabream on it. The only part of the meal I remember was the dinner roll served on the side. I remember it because I picked it up with my hand and took a bite of it and Miki told me off.

I couldn't credit her with being serious, but she really got shitty with me when I did it again, at which point I believed. As it transpires, I would later learn from a podcast that it is considered proper etiquette in somewheres and somewhens that anything you put in your mouth should not come out of your mouth and I guess this extends to taking a bite out of something. I'd met US citizens/residents that were raised to cut up their food using the knife in their dominant hand, then put the knife down and switch the fork to the dominant hand to put the pre-cut pieces in their mouth. 

Miki's ire was not some extension of the Japanese culture-bound sense that it is good manners to slurp up your noodles making a loud noise to indicate the dish is tasty to the host. That you are supposed to rip a bite size piece of bread from the roll and pop it into your mouth, instead of biting off a bite size piece is actually the kind of western etiquette a culture like Australia doesn't bother to teach because it is clearly, old money bullshit in a culture where for at least a century, everyone had to master eating a meat pie without the contents dropping on their crotch.

But I was ruining Miki's experience. She'd brought me to this special joint, this classy place and I simply did not, and indeed cannot even while reminiscing appreciate the opportunity to be all classy-like.

My faux-pa pushed to the point of genuine ire allowed Miki to address me in a manner that activated my hippocampus to sear in the memory of failure. I had ruined christmas.

When I get self-righteous however, what a shitty place to take me. I regard such restaurants the same as concession stands in a stadium - price-gouging monopolists. It was quite special to walk out on a clear calm Autumn evening to the lighthouse with Miki, there's no need to eat at the kinds of restaurants that get established in these places. 

In fact I have no need to eat in fancy restaurants ever. There just seems to be a readily observable objective fact about fine dining - it is simply not worth the effort. 

I watched Fran Lebowitz intervewed recently and annoyingly people tend to ask her questions to prompt her to repeat her greatest hits of opinions, and she was talking about articles that claim to have found "the best restaurant in New York" or maybe it was "the world" and Fran claims that there's no such thing. I half expected her to say a New York hotdog from any vendor was the best restaurant in the world, but she made her point about subjectivity that whatever your favourite restaurant is, is the best restaurant in the world.

NNT points out that on Manhattan island the Wall Street bankers are not enjoying their truffle risottos anywhere near as much as the construction workers out the window are enjoying their ham and cheese sandwiches from the bodega, as the signals our brains experience tend to generate pleasure in proportion to the calories in vs the calories expended. 

Chris Rock asserted to Jerry Seinfeld in his appearance on 'Comedians in Cars getting Coffee' that a good meal is all about the company, that a two-piece feed with the right person is far better than a Michelin starred dinner with an asshole. 

In UK sitcom 'Peepshow' Jeremy takes Big Suze on a date and, in an effort to impress her consents to purchasing a 45BPS bottle of wine and in his distress is compelled to utter 'Now that is wine...I mean its not delicious like a hot-chocolate or coke but as far as wines go this is [mwah]'

Of course, the deficit in sensory experience can be adjusted into surplus by a psychological experience of consuming social status. 

This however, doesn't work if you are plutophobic like me. I get no thrill from 'special treats' from pretending to be king for a day, an hour or even fifteen minutes. But I also tend to think less of people who do, it puts me in mind of someone with a really reductive view of the world, like someone who thinks a boring number like 50 is more interesting than 49 because 50 is bigger.

The first haircut I got after returning from Mexico was an undercut, peaky blinders style. It became clear that until my hair sufficiently greased up to sit right, I would have to use some kind of grease in my hair. I couldn't find vaseline hair tonic in my local supermarket, and it was quite an effort to find a product so basic. I eventually found it in one of our pharmaceutical big-box stores for like $4 for 120ml or whatever. That was two years ago and I use it so sparingly that it only recently depleted the neck of the bottle so an air bubble is visible while the cap is on. It likely will still be mostly full when I die at roughly twice the age I am now.

My mum, bless her, noticed I'd bought this cheap petroleum derived hair grease and thought a good gift would be some luxury version of it featuring a bearded man logo stuck onto a little dark glass container. It's the thought that counts, and the thought I can acknowledge, but the gift was returned to the store. Cosmetics are a notorious domain for Veblan goods with some quirk of psychology allowing for a basic grift of extracting more money from reductive thinkers, who assume a higher price = superior quality = superior performance. 

In my last post of this series I mentioned that a symptom of my asynchronous cognitive development appears to be bringing far more context to situations than others do, who tend frequently to consider them in isolation, or some sample of a larger picture rather than the entirety of context available.

I was very grateful to receive an invitation to a friend's niece's quinceanera celebration. Largely because it was an aspect of Mexican culture I'd heard about, but felt unlikely to experience first hand. A lot of my personal makeup wound up clashing in a very personal way on that evening, so I'm sure I'll invoke this example again in further instalments, but my plutophobia was a quiet part of it.

Firstly, I do not wish to seem an ingrate, the celebration cost me nothing to attend as a 'plus one' partner of the host family's friend and I received a delicious free meal and was made to feel included and got to observe the aforementioned living culture of Mexico. 

But I was not the intended audience of many features of the celebration, indeed the stars misaligned in such a way that what I'm sure was a fabulous quinceanera was coincident with pretty much the worst party I could imagine. Unbelievably bad (for me) such that due to my lack of credulity owing to my cultural transplant, my partner and I had no contingency, she was blindsided completely by my response to it also.

In short, quinceanera's are a bit of a problematic cultural artefact - just as weddings are problematic in WEIRD nations like Australia, where the median wedding cost is 59% of an individual's median annual salary (38.5k/65k) the quinceanera can involve similar lavish social posturing with a party for a 15 year old girl costing over USD$10k in 2012. 

I have only been to the one celebration, and it was in Mexico hosted in a large field with easily 200+ guests, of which a clear minority were children. The food was a taco-bar that closed around 6 or 6.30 pm. The actual bar stayed open until 2am, there was a dance floor and a bandstand where about four full bands performed from 6 until 2 am. At one point fireworks were set off, causing a dog "Tuna" brought by some daft hippie to bolt, tarnishing for me an evening as good as Smither's introduction to the comedy stylings of Homer Simpson by announcing a "dog not unlike Lassie has been run over in the car park."

I was at that party for 13 hours. Some 3 or 4 hours longer than the friends who had kindly invited me. I actually would not learn until I saw a breakdown of Bad Bunny's 2026 Superbowl halftime show, that it is a Hispanic cultural norm to simply hang out at parties forever, and most children have a right of passage, depicted in the halftime show by a child using the football as pillow laying down on plastic outdoor furniture that Bad Bunny wakes up, to learn to endure these (from my cultural perspective) painfully long fiestas.

The length of the party is relevant to the bands hired, and the bar tab on the cocktails that ran all night long. As a teetotaller, the bar actually didn't have any non-alcoholic substances to offer me, the first and only time I ever came across this oversight. The family of the princess may have dropped collectively something like $10k USD on this celebration certainly something roughly equivalent to the Mexican median household income of USD$5k per year. 

Having that context in my mind, whatever the personal significance and triumph of a loving family celebrating a personal milestone, the event, the institution is just gross. A living symptom of gross wealth inequality that as Gary Stephens of Gary's Economics says "the future is looking like a lot of barbed wire security fences, and I don't want to see my kids on either side of that fence."

Adam Smith Smithed It From the Get-Go

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. ~ Adam Smith, Opening paragraph of The Theory of Moral Sentiments/Part I (emphasis added by me)

I assert, and would not be the first nor the greatest to do so, that the delusion of our times is the "fuck you I got mine" attitude baked into our economic institutions. Adam Smith is not, as you can see from the above paragraph, the founder of modern economics. He was a philosopher working in a much vaster and more pluralistic social sciences. 

He is obliquely anti-Neoliberal, recognizing the necessity of trade-unions as a countermeasure to the constant conspiring of the asset owning classes to deprive workers of their fair share. Smith differentiated as our modern economic talking heads do not, between capital and rentiers, most Australian's for example would not even be able to tell me what a 'rentier' is and would likely guess it refers to a tenant. 

In "Prosperity Without Growth" by Ecological Economist Tim Jackson, the character of our orthodox economy is given as fuelled primarily by the emotion of anxiety, and terms have emerged like "the precariate" to describe the emergent class of people who are fundamentally economically insecure.

This is the noise in my head that makes it hard for me to address the bigotry of my plutophobia. As Smith asserted, too many other's happiness is necessary to me to enjoy my own, at least as far as dropping money on luxury goods and services is concerned.

Perhaps related to my asynchornious cognitive development, and again I often think of the Far Side comic with the cow that is the only one aware of her fate as a steak, I felt too aware in my private school education that my and every other cohort were deliberately being stressed to become more selfish with an emphasis placed on the literal cognitive distortion of all-or-nothing thinking. Being charitable and phrasing it thusly: my school as an institution did nothing to discourage a prevalant notion that if you didn't land in the top 20% of the state, your life was basically over.

Now I'm not unreasonable, I don't for example, forego the luxuries of food security and shelter because I'm acutely aware that among many others, there's people who do not have these things in Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo and Iran right now. I'm much more local in my thinking, because economies are massive institutions that tend to divide up along nation states. I can eat fried chicken without feeling too bad about Ukrainians fighting tyranny in their eastern provinces.

In my senior year of high school I was "elected"/designated* a house captain, all the student leaders of our cohort were treated to, like, a leadership training day, it involved some guest speakers of which I can only remember the guy from toastmasters, and a trust exercise where I got distracted and wound up clotheslining Bowen, and at the end of the day we got a feedback form to suggest how it might be improved for the next year. I expressed something to the effect of "I don't see why this program couldn't be delivered to everyone." 

I disliked being in an exclusive little club, and my mum, again bless her, had gone and had the shop stitch on the yellow and black striped band onto my school blazer pocket that indicated I had achieved the pinnacle of sporting achievement in lawn bowls by winning the district finals, without my consent, and "Henderson" wound up being embroided under the school crest on the pocket, again without my consent. Yeah it's great that my mum is proud and shit, but it was also kind of like signing me up to be in "club dickhead" and surrendering my entry privileges to "club based" like I wasn't happy, but I guess it's my own fault for participating in the well known lawn bowls scammola.

For, from my bigoted perspective, if there is any social good in lobster thermidor, its greatest good is as a lure with which all the reductive and rigid thinking dickwads can be ensnared and removed to a "luxury ghetto" where I know where they are and can be confident I don't have to deal with them.

Of course, I share the preferences of Chris Rock, I am delighted with a two-piece feed and do not need lobster, so I'm happy to sacrifice lobster if it means I can also herd the bad company out from the good. 

And certainly, there are people who are thoughtful, sensitive, erudite, worldly, natural, generous and interesting that have expensive tastes. My friend Ann for example, is pretty much the only person I've met so far whose company can sufficiently distract me from my bigotry when she takes me out to a fancy place. Most company though is not worth the emotional price of admission (I know I didn't pay for lunch at the Press Club.)

For me, I experience no joy, or even relief to get a seat on a life-raft as the Titanic is going down. Listening to a recent episode of "The Unbelievable Truth" on Youtube, one of the eponymous unbelievable truths in that radio program was that an analysis of survivor testimonies showed that while US male passengers were far more individualistic and thus willing to beg, borrow or steal their way onto a life boat, testimony from English survivors remarked that once their husbands has ensured they had a seat, they strolled to the back of the ship and politely smoked cigars and exchanged banter while they waited for the ship to sink.

Having not been tested, I cannot say in the moment whether I would be more US than Englishman, I know which one I identify with. But even that falls short, I would likely as a 1st or 2nd class passenger be unable to survive without crippling survivors guilt simply knowing that the lower class passengers were deprioritized. (Or what Adam Smith said, at the beginning of economics.)

Debilitation

I am not sure I could overcome my prejudice, the visceral dislike I have of being in proximity to "the finer things" to for example, take my best girl out to a fancy restaurant where I'd ask her to be my old lady. I would feel some cognitive dissonance, that I was asking someone to spend their life with me in the specific context of an activity among those I actively dislike.

I'd also urge you not to underestimate the debilitating effect I experience, of being someone 'hard to buy gifts for' I have myself complained that my mum is someone who just likes 'nice shit' and on that hand, for me my mum is someone I struggle to buy gifts for, when I can't see the point of a fine china plate or a 'lovely' writing pen. But many people who love and care about me have had to experience the expression on my face of utter alienation and disappointment and anguish as I have unwrapped some luxury good I don't want, never wanted and never will want as for me it is an intrinsically tainted thing, and then worst of all I have to see the heartbreak on their faces as they take in mine.

I have criticised the "Platinum Rule" as being inferior to both the Silver and Golden rule which goes "treat others as they wish to be treated" on the basis of recognizing that "mindreading" is a well founded cognitive distortion which the platinum rule demands on our part. But it is not a feat of mind reading when a friend or colleague attains some shiny bauble that means so much to them and so little to me, that because of my bigotry I do not have it in me to be happy or excited for them.

To me someone saying they landed their dream internship at one of "The Big n" whatever firms, puts me in mind of Larson's Far Side dog bragging to his neighbour "Ha ha biff, after we go to the drugstore and the post office I'm going to the vet's to get tutored..."

Friends that wanted to/went on to study medicine evoked mixed feelings in me. There were win/win win/lose and lose/lose outcomes, friends who wanted to be doctors out of a genuine love of their fellow man and wanting to help them at their worst, friends who wanted to be doctors for the prestige and material rewards that would incidentally make good doctors ...and friends who wanted to be doctors for the prestige and material rewards who appeared to have given little thought as to whether they should be doctorin' anyone.

In a curiosity of framing, if I am to write "people seek validation" it will come across as conceited and condescending on my part, reframe it as "people dislike feeling invalidated" and it seems to me at least a perfectly reasonable statement that needs-must say the exact same thing.

I am constantly invalidating the self-esteem people around me draw from a luxury consumption experience, which my plutophobia generally values at less-than-nothing.

Got 'til it's Gone

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot ~ Big Yellow Taxi, Jodi Mitchell

I don't dispute Jodi Mitchell's observations, nor would I dispute that Big Yellow Taxi wasn't still 100% relevant when Counting Crows covered it in 2002, nor would I oppose someone putting out yet another cover in 2026 on a major label.

I'm going to "Yes-and" Big Yellow Taxi and just iterate it out - they also demolish the parking lot, the pink hotel, the boutique and the formally swinging hot spot. No paradises to be sure, these anachronysms from the 70s, to make way for well Emporium which replaced Lonsdale House. 

A debilitating aspect of plutophobia, is that it is very much a minority form of bigotry, and an underappreciated aspect of bigotry is the preferred side of bigotry, because the excluded side of bigotry is so viscerally ugly. But most bigots and chauvinists often value things that are objectively valuable. It is for example, very commonplace to be enamoured with Japan, and it is undisputable that Japanese culture has a lot of truly wonderful things to offer.

There are far fewer people who are enamoured with shitty, dilapidated, anachronisms. Being that my preference attempts to conserve established value, it definitionally has to be debilitating under the economic paradigm the societies I live in is based around - GDP growth, or increasing consumption of novelties, my preferences render me a kind of undramatic uninteresting enemy of the state.

I first came across this concept in an Op-ed from an Australian journalist reflecting on the working class school he attended, and talking about how his school got demolished, and he explicitly said something to the effect of "poor people's experience an erasure of their history in a way that rich people don't."

While I did end up in a private school from years 8-12, I went to two public primary schools and did year 7 in a public secondary school. My first primary school was made I think literally of 'portables' or portable classrooms, prefabricated modular classrooms that could be unloaded off the back of a truck and bolted to the ground. My second primary school also had portables though more permanent buildings, only the portable classrooms I spent most of year 7 in (some clases were in brick buildings) remain to this day, but satellite imagery on google maps shows me how much of my childhood memories have been demolished.

Here is a quirk of history though, more of my childhood classrooms have likely been demolished than my parents' and not because they are richer, but because the cheap solution of portables was likely an 80s phenomena. 

But private schools are far more likely to have 'heritage' listed buildings that cannot be touched, the wealthy are more likely to live in houses that will not be demolished for development, and instead their children are likely to displace poorer children via auctions and gentrification and demolish or renovate working class homes of prior generations as part of the gentrification process.

I'm sure almost everyone has experienced something they like not being made anymore, but as a result of my plutophobia, this is basically my whole life.

I remember attending a Syn FM end of year dinner at former Lord Mayor's John So's restaurant, I think it was Dragon Boat on Lonsdale back in the day. It was early 2000s when China was experiencing massive economic growth basically because it was finally playing catch up, like Homer getting the same chair as Lenny and Carl from the Stonecutters, these were the annoying years when China was all like "Jealous?" and I was like "Well no, we already have KFC and cars and mobile phones and the internet and international flights and sufficient calories and shopping malls and big box stores" and China was all like "You're jealous" but China's new-rich children of party hacks with pent up demand for the good life hadn't yet transformed Chinatown in the Melbourne CBD. 

Chinese restaurants were mostly Hong Kong Cantonese style, decor was always the awful yellow, red and gold and the menus always were laminated and had a minimum of 60 dishes on them. That year, Syn FM had flown out one of Eminem's friends from that other band he had that released "purple pills" and "my band" as singles, to judge a rap battle competition of Melbourne MCs and two of the finalists did a performance at the Syn FM dinner. 

The performances were freestyle and I remember the MC that clearly won rapping "I ordered 48 they gave me beef and black bean."

These classic Cantonese restaurants were good, but they are going rapidly extinct in Melbourne. Mine was Nam Loong on Russell Street an institution that had been in place for as long as I can remember, and at least 30 years. I have memories of dining their with Chan, Claire and Miki, as well as friends like Shona, Yoshi, Karl and Andrew at least. It was my spot and last year it finally had to close its doors, simply because rents were too high.

Miki aksed me "you know what?" and I likely said something monosyllabic like "what?" and she answered "it's become my favorite" of Nam Loong. I pissed her off by deliberately contravening Japanese etiquette when she tried to pass me food and I tried to accept it with my chopsticks. At first I simply forgot you only do that at Japanese funerals, but once I realised I then started pointing at Miki with my chopsticks (which is very rude) and then stuck my chopsticks in her rice (which I think might be a death threat) much more egregious breeches of ettiquitte than taking bites out of my dinner roll instead of ripping it, and ettiquette from Miki's home culture too.

But you know, once she realised I was teasing her, it was a fun joke, in a Cantonese restaurant that became her favourite and where she deliberately overordered just to take leftovers home. Nam Loong is gone and Mikayla remains, even though one I can only recall as a horrible experience and the other a repository of fond memories.

It's debilitating as shit when you aren't excited by 'new better' things, because the old is actively destroyed constantly to make way for the new. Plutophobia is a very lonely bigotry to have.

The Simple Silent Maths 201

My parents are boomers, the lived through the post-war era and experienced incredible upward social mobility. Like most boomers, everything looked really great for them up until the end of the post-war period and the beginning of Neoliberalism, at least on paper.

My parents owned multiple properties, including our family home outright. My father was an executive for the town's largest employer and while my mother was a teacher, two-income households were not mandatory yet and she had bought her own house prior to meeting my father obtained with a mortgage that was less than 4x her annual salary as a primary school teacher. 

While neither of my parents stood to inherit significant wealth from their parents, they earned enough to play keep-up-with-the-Joneses. 

The silent maths comes in through a quirk of history, almost an accident. My mother was alive at the time where the white ethnic majority of Australia referred to as 'women entering the workforce' by which they meant the advent of two-income-professional middle class households, as poor women have always had to work largely as domestic servants. The options for women though were overwhelmingly teachers college or nursing school, and while my mum became a teacher, her friend became a nurse. That nurse married a specialist surgeon, where in the post-war era before women approached anywhere near parity in medical school enrolments, nurses married doctors and achieved social mobility that way, whereas the classes have reinstated themselves now with med students now marrying each other and nurses marrying tradies.

In the meantime, my dad got a job in the same regional city as my mum's friend married a surgeon, whether this was coincidence or design I've never bothered to find out. My parents then made the fatal psychological error of winding up being the poorest people in their social group, affording them the opportunity to constantly compare themselves to the extreme rather than the average.

I remember growing up with the impression that most kids lived in houses with a pool in it. I didn't care so much not being a huge fan of pools and having never lived in climates that really warranted them for all bar a couple of summer months, I just think, and I want to stress this is my impression that like couples in open relationships succeed in ways to experience rejection even having achieved a relationship, my parents had found a way to feel poor while being quite wealthy. 

We relocated to another town, and things improved a bit, but my parents still succeeded in finding wealthier people to compare themselves to.

They won't like this at all, but the silent maths happened, I noticed the degree of independence between being rich and quality of life. This has been present in me for a long time.

One of my parent's status anxiety manifested when I first started working full time. In getting their opinion on my first ever full time employment contract before I signed it, they discovered what I was earning. Even though they raised me to understand it was gauche to ever discuss money, (which it both is and is a useful fiction to keep the working class ignorant of just how unequal and unjust compensation often is) whenever I visited my parents, that parent would download without my interest, what everyone else's kids were earning. 

They also fortunately disclosed to me, that as they remained a signatory on the bank accounts I still used from childhood that they set up for me, they'd been ringing up and checking my balances every pay period. 

This anxious behaviour came to a head where I explained that I would always take higher job satisfaction over higher compensation (which remains true) and as such, I didn't really care about what fuckface or dickwad was earning in their second year out of university. I also banned them from discussing money with me, ever, a ban that remains in place to this day. 

Likely it helped that at the time I was reading up on the Phil Jackson and Jordan years at the Chicago Bulls, and how Jordan never complained about the contracts he signed, as is frustratingly common among NBA stars, taking responsibility for what he'd agreed to. Now that's pretty easy when Jordan was paid so much by the Bulls the NBA put rules in place such that his 90s salary was only matched by Steph Curry almost two decades later in 2010s money because inflation had allowed him to be paid what Jordan got in the 90s. But it resonated with the silent maths I'd done observing my parents growing up that you wanted to have the mental health of Michael Jordan, not Scottie Pippen, great as Pippen was.

And it's not all on my parents, they weren't the only silent maths exercise I did growing up. I've known enough rich people, as in people who have substantial amounts of wealth and observed the relative independence between wealth and quality of life.

To be sure, my plutophobic bigotry is not so irrational that I have a controversial take that sort of contradicts what peer reviewed studies have shown - money is hugely important when it prevents you from abject poverty, beyond that it doesn't improve your mental health at all, possibly even starts working against it.

I know so many wealthy people who suffer that I'm not worried that they "probably think this song is about you" because the sample size is so large, that I can say objectively that it's probably not. I don't have to think of anything specific, I like most people who grew up in the vicinity of wealth, know too much dirt, that it's a fairly safe generalisation.

I'm more concerned that my plutophobia offends people (excluding my parents) who actually suffered poverty and are yet to achieve or more importantly, enjoy, a level of financial security. Furthermore, it needs saying that the Australian Economy is a heinously fucked up renteir economy, such that it's not so much a rat race but a rats-deserting-a-sinking-ship race to secure the one biggest predictor of poverty in retirement - home ownership.

The Australian housing market is capitalised at 3x the Australian share market or thereabouts, median houseprices are in the vicinity of being 9.7x the median household income, our tax code incentivises investment in the unproductive housing sector over raising capital for the productive private sector (as in our government rewards people for buying housing at objectively bad prices, and punishes people for helping publicly listed companies raise capital for investment in future growth, innovation and productivity) and it's just fucked, it's so fucked that Australia is a place where if you investigated the main driver of the modal citizens stress, anxiety, depression, frustration, anger etc. it will most likely be how much they pay for housing, and if you ask the modal Australian citizen what the single best and most important thing they have done in their lives is they will likely say 'buying my own home.'

So I don't begrudge my average fellow citizen their dreams of being so rich they might be able to afford to be extorted painful amounts of money to purchase a speculatively held superfluous housing from a 'property investor' in the dream of using that 'asset' to live in themselves. 

I do begrudge people that wish to be so rich that they can have a portfolio of houses, cosmetic procedures, international vacations, club memberships, caviar etc. aka 'obscenely rich' trying to sell me their obscene vision. 

I never had a chance to meet Biggie Smalls, and I think maybe if you grew up so poor that 'birthdays were the worst days, now we sip champagne when we thirsty' I'd be like, yeah, go for it, that's hilariously crass. 

But otherwise, pass.

Plutophobia in the Workplace

It was time for the leader to unveil his vision for the future. I can't build it up anymore without it being a disservice - it was to grow revenue by 33% over the next 5 years. AKA an uninspiring vision.

I just want to do good work, for fair compensation, I'm happy to go above and beyond in performance, but not in personal sacrifice. We made a deal. 

But I've had bosses that have grown confused and frustrated by an inability to motivate me by dangling carrots in front of my face. I've had bosses that have reduced their sales methodology and philosophy to "I always pitch growth and nobody says no to growth." Then they meet me, and I don't care about growth in sales or revenue, and lets face it, what we are ultimately talking about, is growth in consumption.

Now, Corey Doctorow coined the term "enshitification" and there's now many explainer videos and podcasts on it. The problem being that growth can be achieved through enshitifying a product, that is to say deliberately doing bad work to make a product or service worse.

The famous example is Google, owned by the same company that owns blogger.com, where having captured somewhere north of 80% of the search market, Google search could only grow in one of two ways - the first was growth of the planets population, get a billion more users, thats 800 million more google advertising eyeballs to sell. Problem is, if you start that project now, it takes 18 years to come to fruition, and Google can't exactly make people make more people to grow their market share.

Plan B, make search worse. Deliberately make it worse so people have to search twice instead of once to find what they are looking for. That's what google did, selling twice the ad-space. An engineer resigned I believe, sooner than harm the product he'd built. As an employee, I'm like that engineer, or like a public servant.

The private sector in my experience, matches plutophobia with xenophobia, fear of the other, and in the private sector, people who are happy to up marginal cost to increase marginal value are the other to those who want to minimise costs to maximise profits.

This is what is wrong with me that gives me a complicated and quite dysfunctional relationship with the job market. Would you believe me if I told you how much job seeker advice proceeds from the assumptions "you want money right? so just do whatever you need to do to get more of it."?

Wrong. So do I still need to do whatever I need to do to get some of it? And what if they offer me more than I need? Can I negotiate? 

No. Not in my experience, in fact, much as, as a non-coffee drinker I am cautioned that I am making business awkward for everyone, it is also quite awkward to let it be known you don't care that much about money.

As such, plutophobia is definitely something wrong with me, because I can jam up the whole machine with my irregularity. I learned pretty quickly I need to be conscious of my lack of fucks given about extracting the max money possible from any given employer, when I am the top performer on a team of people who give maximal fucks about extracting max money, because what I'm willing to take effectively caps their ask.

This isn't hard for me, because as I hope I've imparted, I have no objection to having lots of money, my bigotry is towards that consumption based concept of 'rich'. I do feel some guilt having money lying around that could be invested in some endeavour, I think there is on some level an ethical obligation to have only so much savings as one needs to see off any emergencies, and the rest should be invested in something productive. 

But still, I imagine it is akin to being homosexual and having to exist in a culture of insecure homophobes who need constant reassurance that they are definitely into girls and girls are the way to go sexually. It is a conscious effort to pretend to care and thus validate people who see acts of consumption as meaningful achievements. 

I'm sure I've hurt people by flicking through their wedding photo albums and only feeling bored and confused. Of people buying a new car and I make the error of saying 'enjoy' instead of asking for a ride in it.

I know I'm being rude, I just can't catch myself in the moment, and it hurts me to pretend I am other than I am. But it isn't love to put my needs above yours. I don't mean to do it, I'm just seemingly so overwhelmingly outnumbered.

Perhaps I do well with kids not through emotional intelligence and perspective taking, but simply because kids have no money.