Why Rich People Love Pretending to Be Poor

This is Hannah Nealman. Hannah and her husband Daniel own Ballerina Farm. On this farm, the Nealmans live a picturesque farmhouse lifestyle with their children in tow. The farm looks like it was made in the 1800s and the family kind of does too. Hannah records this quaint farm life and publishes it all online to her combined 8 million followers. The video showed the Nealman's life on this adorable modest homestead. Hannah spends her days baking rustic loaves of bread from scratch or hand milking cows with her children. It's very pastoral and very romantic. The video seemed to say, hey, we live in an old run-down farm and we make the best of what we have. It's all genuinely quite charming. Except Hannah and Daniel are billionaires. Daniel's father founded JetBlue Airlines and Daniel is the heir to that empire. This fact is left out of all of their videos, I would argue, quite conspicuously. I don't think the Nealmans are pretending to be poor, but they are co-opting poverty as an aesthetic or at least some bizarre fictional version of it. Poverty in the modern world is not baking bread or milking cows and we'll talk about that later. But this video is not about putting Hannah and her family on the bus because A. Who cares? And B. The Nealmans are not the first rich people to treat poverty like a fashion statement. What they are doing is not unique at all. Rather, it is a symptom of a much more popular phenomenon that has been around for a really long time. Longer than you probably think. Today though, beamed through social media by influencers and celebrities alike, it all feels especially depraved. Why is this happening? Why is being poor the new being rich? Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France before the French Revolution. Goes without saying she was extremely, extremely wealthy. Indeed, she was known for her opulent lifestyle. During her reign, Marie Antoinette built what is called Le Hameau de la Reine or The Little Hamlet. She recruited workers to create a modest village for her, basically in her backyard. It was designed to look like an everyday peasant village, complete with farm animals like goats, cows, and sheep. Altogether, the queen built five brand new buildings. These cottages mimicked those found in the idyllic French countryside. Of course, without all the dirt, starvation, and rampant deadly disease. One of the cottages was made for the queen and her immediate attendants, while the others housed the peasants who actually worked on the farm. If stories are to be believed, Marie Antoinette often found herself bored and or frustrated by the trappings of royalty. Okay. When the world just got to be too much for her, the queen would go to her farm and dress up like a peasant. Literally. Marie Antoinette would change from her royal garb into peasant clothes, into a plain muslin dress. She and maybe some friends would milk cows, tend gardens, and play with animals. After a few days of make-believing she was poor, Marie Antoinette would return to her royal lifestyle. In fairness, this story isn't really accepted as fact by historians. It's something like an urban legend. But the fact that it has persisted tends to indicate a degree of plausibility. It feels like something that tasteless, out-of-touch rich people like Marie Antoinette would do. Because it is. We don't have to go that far back in time to find it happening. Kim Kardashian recently did a photo shoot where she dressed up like a milkmaid. This is eerily similar to the tales about Marie Antoinette in a way that is simultaneously repulsive, dystopian, and wholly unsurprising. The luxury brand Balenciaga sold dirty shoes with holes in them for $2,000. Retail giant Urban Outfitters has said their aesthetic is, quote, upscale homeless. All of this is super weird and feels kind of out of touch. The whole fake poor thing can also be seen in the entire phenomenon of van life. I'm sure there are plenty of vanlifers that are not rich. But I know and everyone else knows that a lot of vanlifers are just 20-somethings who came from money. I mean, these vans can cost north of $100,000. Vanlifers have basically just gentrified homelessness. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with living in a van. But it is a very obvious example of the rich pretending in some way to be poor. Rich vanlifers can be poor without the hard parts about actually being poor. They have safety nets. They don't have to struggle to eat. When rich people live in a van, it's cool. When poor people do it, they're seen as somehow less than. But all of this gets really boring. Who cares what rich people do? Sitting around complaining about it, rattling off chief offenders, is not a worthwhile use of time. What is really interesting, though, are the reasons why rich people love to act poor and what it says about our world. Perhaps the number one way to show off wealth has always been some form of exceptionalism. The rules of society don't apply to a person because they are wealthy and they want to broadcast that. Look at this huge house. Look at this expensive car. I have all of these things and they make me different from regular society. I am rich, therefore I am exceptional. The standards and expectations of real life do not apply to me. You can tell by the way my life is, by the things I own. So, keeping that in mind, today we live in a world inundated by, well, everything. We are expected to both produce and consume as much as possible. Our entire lives revolve around work, which is just a way to produce goods or services or, more accurately, money. The first thing we ask people is what they do for a living, which is basically just another way to ask what they produce. Your level of production is perhaps the most valued trait in modern Western society. So, what if you can go live on a farm? What if you can spend all day producing a single loaf of bread and that's it? In a world driven by productivity, producing nothing is the most exceptional, elite thing you can do. Information overload was once something we struggled with. Now, it's just something we must endure in order to survive. We have to be constantly plugged in or we can't do our jobs. We can't be connected to our families or our loved ones. Without a constant stream of news, we become ignoramuses who don't pay attention to the world around us. But if you have enough money, you have the privilege of escaping this reality. You don't need to deal with information overload. You can just bake your bread on your farm or whatever. The pop singer Ed Sheeran famously doesn't have a phone, but I guarantee you he pays someone to have a phone for him. Being completely removed from the world around us has always been a hallmark of the rich. But today's world looks very different than it once did. So, being removed from it does as well. Perhaps people are so fed up with the rat race that winning it is no longer aspirational. Instead, ducking out of it altogether is the pinnacle of success. Today, there is a growing voice of disdain for the ultra-wealthy. Anyone can hear it, whether you are part of it or not. The types of media being produced, the rise of Bernie Sanders, the general discourse in America. People don't like the rich in the way they perhaps used to. Every week, the rich are being blamed, maybe deservedly, for many of the problems in our society. But by pretending to endure a struggle, the rich hope to gain two things. Acceptance and respect. When celebrities or influencers dress up like milkmaids and play farmhouse, they are saying, hey, I'm like you, I have struggles, things are hard for me. So, the idea is that regular people will accept them. The irony here, of course, is that these people are so far removed from poverty, they have no clue how to even imitate it. The contemporary struggle does not take place in a farmhouse. By pretending to have struggles, the rich also tap into the idea of the world as a meritocracy. Rich people show themselves struggling with the implication that they deserve their wealth because they worked hard just like everybody else. The hope, perhaps, is that this will produce a respect for the so portrayed hard work that earned the rich their wealth. Last year, when asked what advice she had for women looking for success, Kim Kardashian said they just needed to get their asses up and work. This was obviously misguided advice. But it was also a message to viewers that, hey, look at me, I've worked hard. You should like me. I deserve what I have. Maybe. Maybe not. But the point remains, this is incredibly bad advice that feeds into an absolutely bogus narrative, and we will come back to that soon. So what? Who cares? Rich people can do whatever they want with their money or their influence. What difference does it make? Well, it's just ethically bankrupt to dress up as poor people for a day. It's gross on a moral level. Beyond that, it is tremendously important for people to have some genuine grasp of other people's experiences. Fictionalized, Pinterest-ready poverty is not a true reflection of real poverty. Choosing to live simply is not the same as being forced to. Performative poverty is a farcical, misleading representation of a very real struggle that millions have to endure every day. High-profile rich people have an enormous amount of cultural influence. When they romanticize poverty, it makes poverty seem like a non-issue. It makes people think that struggling perhaps isn't so bad. Perhaps it's kind of cool. At the very least, it causes the widespread acceptance of poverty. And so there is no large-scale interest in doing anything about this huge problem. This also diminishes attention on all of the issues that fall under the umbrella of poverty. When it becomes cool or even normal to be poor, no one really does anything about systemic poverty. You see, the reality is poverty isn't a necessity. Our society doesn't need to have people who literally starve to death. We have a lot of money in the Western world. There are things we could actually do. But as long as we accept poverty as part of our society, it simply isn't a problem. It's just built in. When the uber-rich romanticize poverty, they often paint a picture of a lower-class person working hard and overcoming their circumstances. This is possible, but it's not universally possible. There are many, many poor people who work hard every day and will still be poor forever. To pretend otherwise is to absolve a system that has put millions of people into poverty. This narrative puts too much responsibility on the individual and not enough culpability on the world and circumstances around that individual. Without culpability, there can be no change. We should not forget how depraved poverty is as a concept. Humans should not have to struggle so much just to exist in society. People shouldn't have to live that way. People deserve to be happy.