How the f💰💸k is everybody living like this?

The state of spending today.

I’ve wanted to write this for so long, but there’s so much to say and it never feels complete. I’ve tip toed around it— talking about founder debt, how we are living through a second Gilded Age, “quiet luxury”— but never hit it right on the nose. As I’m learning with writing, more regularly and more seriously, you sort of have to release the hope of ever fully capturing the thing. You will never fully get it all down on paper. Someone will always send you some interesting podcast or deep dive article about it after they read what you hit publish on. Said podcast or article will crack the nut in a way you wish you had in what you wrote. I’m deciding that that’s the beauty of Substack rather than a defect— I get to write you again or post a note and say “so-and-so had a great point to add!” instead of having my thoughts etched on a scroll for all of time. Feeling bad for all the philosophers of yore. I wonder if Socrates was ever like in the shower and suddenly remembered something he didn’t put down on paper in his latest and greatest and was like “fuck! I can’t believe I left that out.” (From what I know about Socrates… prob not!)

Back to the headline, and let’s make this more of a conversation/jumping off point than a defined and finished thesis:

How the hell is everybody living like this?

I look around and I see myriads of people that I have to assume are living well above their means— the rise of “luxury” as a trend (as if real luxury could ever actually just be a trend!), the consumerification of every single social media platform (TikTok’s transition to full on store with TikTok Shop looking like it was always the endgame), every single thought or suggestion from influencers big and small pushing product or affiliate links, the absolutely obscene costs of living in America’s biggest city… I’ve been looking at all and wondering to myself— particularly when I made a founder salary, which is to say none at all— how are you all doing this? How are you all living like this? Is everyone just saddled with crushing personal debt?¹

All I see, all around me, all the time, is money. Money lit on fire!

I looooove shopping. Always have! I don’t think there is anything morally terrible about loving shopping or fashion, even from a sustainability standpoint. Thrifting is shopping too, and New York has no shortage of vintage shops & markets. I make a living and have always made a living working at or with brands that want to sell you stuff. I’m okay with that. I genuinely believe there is nothing wrong with buying yourself a new bracelet or body lotion or dutch oven to bake bread in.

On the flipside: I feel kind of disgusting about what the algorithm has done to our taste, how we spend money, and how valuable we’ve made things seem as a society that people have hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal debt (not your mortgage! not your car payment! but stuff..) that they will never be able to pay off. I’ve mentioned my founder debt before, and while I am in a good place now (thanks fully to the support of my friends/partner/family who all helped set me up to pay things off effectively), I know what it is like to be absolutely fucking crushed under the shoe of debt & interest. Nothing is worse. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad it happened to me and I struggled as hard and as much as I did with debt, despite having had a really healthy relationship with it and with money before I became a founder: this is how most people in America are living and will be living, pinned beneath the heel of debt they may never wriggle out of.² Having a taste of that first hand, as I’m sure some of you do too, changes the way you see things. I understand intimately how when you have no money and lots of debt, it is almost easier to spend money on things that you think will feel good in the short term, just to get by— clothes that will make you feel like the put-together career-person that you are, decor that’s going to make your workspace better so you can make more money, clothes for the life you’re going to have when you’re successful. Or just the expensive pedicure because you’re so fucking exhausted and burnt out from drowning. ³

How are people affording fashion?

Elle Sundberg

wrote this well in How are people affording fashion?. I am inundated with links to buy items that cost more than anything I’ve ever spent on a single item— except, perhaps a plane ticket or a car— at an alarmingly constant rate. Is everyone really buying those $900 High Sport pants? (God bless

Totally Recommend

for actually doing some real journalism on whether or not those insanely expensive pants are good or if the Old Navy version would do just as well. She also, importantly pointed out that the influencers who are so effectively “pushing” these $900 pants all make 15% commission on them. If you can sell 40 people those pants, that’s over $5K in your pocket, easy— but are regular people realizing that the creators they follow are profiting off of not just their recommendations, but off of followers spending above their means?)

The “F*** You, Pay Me” Internet

The slow, steady ease with which influencers have usurped magazines and fashion editorial in the last decade have left us with a pretty useless Vogue, and instead, plenty of rich thin women (of the exact same stock that would have been able to work for Vogue back in the day, with paltry pay) telling us via Instagram, TikTok, and increasingly, Substack, what fashion is and looks like. (You could certainly argue that social media has also liberated us from just “one” look, body type or type of fashion, but I’d push back— thin white women still dominate this space.)

Social media has more than shifted the way people spend money so as to better display it to their followers. Over the top closets are one thing, and I do feel the designerification has been getting particularly bad lately— The Row tote, Khaite jeans, the High Sport pants, The Row jellies— do regular people need these things? They are all, of course, things you could still find well-made and more reasonably priced versions of, without the brand name⁴, so is this a textbook case of lifestyle creep? It’s easy to say that I don’t think regular people need to spend $1,200 on stretchy pants. But what about travel? What about experiences? Who is to say who should or should not spend a grand a night to stay at Il Pelicano?

Not me. But social media drove this shift too: how the hell has suddenly everybody been to Italy?