I just want people to not have to be so afraid

Every now and then I come across something that reminds me how deeply out of touch I am. This week it was this trend piece about West Village TikTok girls. Ultimately it is the same story that gets written once every few years: young people are terrible and they change neighborhoods for the worse. In other news the pope is Catholic.

The article made me think about this Brian Philips essay about the constant feeling of financial safety and comfort being out of your reach, a feeling that so many millenials have been grappling with for most of their lives. It is hard to feel anything but rage when I look at people who have everything they could ever want while I am trying to save money for a better rice cooker. I don't know if they're happier than I am but it certainly seems like it would solve a lot of my problems if I had more money.

I will have lived in New York for a decade this October. In that entire time living in the West Village has not once even been conceivable for me. As the article notes, rent for the average one bedroom there is $6,000. The highest rent for an entire apartment I have ever lived in was $4500 and that was a place I shared with 3-4 roommates at any given time. It is a world that is incomprehensible to me.

A while ago I dated a girl from the city who was friends with a lot of rich people. I got to go to a lot of fancy parties in Manhattan and meet people from what I guess you would call high society. Everyone there seemed to know each other either from whatever expensive private high school they went to, or Soho House, or whatever Skull and Bones-style secret rich person cult they all got their adrenochrome injections at. I usually felt like a zoo animal at these gatherings. Explaining that I'm from West Virgina - yes, it's a state, not Western Virginia - and that I went to a shitty public high school made me a fascinating curio. The fact that I had to actually work a stupid office job instead of living in a loft my parents owned while running an Instagram business or doing puppetry or whatever didn't help. I felt more like an exotic pet than a peer. Obviously that relationship didn't work out.

That group of rich kids would absolutely despise the West Village girlies in the NYMag piece they're really just pigs wearing different lipstick. The affectations or trappings may be different but whether your parents are paying your rent on a studio in Bushwick so you can focus on performance art or on a 1-bed in Manhattan so you can focus on building your TikTok fitspo audience your parents are still paying your fucking rent. The fundamental throughline is a lifestyle that is unachievable for most people and the accompanying freedom from the constant low-level fear of being alive in a world where if you lose your job you lose everything.

I've met enough rich people cosplaying as starving artists that I don't want to paint myself as a man of the people. My dad's a lawyer and for West Virginia my family is rich. When he dies I will probably inherit enough money to like, buy a house or maybe be able to retire in my sixties. My family isn't rich enough to cover a $6,000 apartment indefinitely but they've covered my rent when I've been out of work and paid for my college tuition and plenty of other stuff besides. I'm only able to live as much of a middle-class life I do because of them, and if I did lose my job I'd have a place to go or some help if I needed it. All of this is more than a lot of people have! But the gap between that and whatever the truly wealthy and unconcerned have feels infinitely wide. I don't really think it's a great use of my time to self-flagellate about how fortunate I am while billionaires are allowed to exist.

There is so much in this world that people take for granted that feels forever out of my reach. The same is true for much of what I have when compared to people who haven't been given the advantages that I was. We are all gazing across a series of chasms at each other and as far as I can tell the primary telos of the people in charge is to demolish as many of the bridges available to us as they can. It is impossible for me to imagine what it's like to be in the shoes of a rich man who wants to pull the ladder up behind him. How can you look at the world as it is and think that things should be harder? All I really have ever wanted is to live in a world where everyone is free of the fear that if one thing goes wrong they could lose everything. There is enough in this world to make that a reality but every day that dream seems further and further out of reach.