The Bezos-Sanchez wedding is a spectacle the world can’t seem to look away from—the $100,000 rehearsal dress, the million-dollar performers, the inflated and artificial pomp of it all. It’s not like a royal wedding where there’s history, ceremony and a sense of majesty. It’s not a great love story. It’s just a display for display’s sake. Opulent, yes, but also calculated. When you have everything, what does it take to move the needle of your happiness? A Vogue photo shoot, a space flight, a yacht so big it nearly called for a bridge dismantling?
There are limits to all things. To life and if not to wealth, to what it can buy. But that is not for lack of trying. From 2004-2011, I wrote a blog called Luxist. It was a chronicle of all things luxury, one of the first pro blogs on the subject. I had met with Jason Calacanis, creator of Weblogs, a nascent brand of professional blogs in 2004. He said he wanted to create the online Robb Report (this was before it was online). I said, sure, and then had to learn what the Robb Report was and how to write rich. I hired watch experts, car lovers, globetrotting travelers, and bon vivants like Jared Paul Stern and the late, great Jeffrey Slonim. I took classes from the GIA, met master craftspeople, and learned the nuances that make something worth the cost. This is all to say, I know luxury, at least from the outside without whatever pleasure is gleaned in ownership. I am inoculated against its charms.
In my current life, I spend some of my time helping people dispose of their belongings, often because they are moving or have inherited possessions and are unsure of what to do with them. You cannot take it with you, and most of it will sell for pennies on the dollar. And yet, still we spend, we acquire more than we need and yet we never have enough.
Another of my Book Thing finds was a self-published book, Spoiling Affluence by James J. Klumpner, a rather interesting guy who has worked for the government as well as teaching economics and budget policy at Georgetown, Princeton, and other places. It's a book I could have only found in a free pile; it’s even signed by the author with a note. I love the cover, it’s a terrible design, but the message of how we ignore the pleasure of the ice cream dripping in our hand to contemplate what we might buy next hits home.
The book is short and powerful, a meditation on how we spend our time and money and the impact of that on our happiness. While we all have the same 24 hours in a day, we don’t have the same funds. Companies can’t sell us time, so they must sell us goods, a blizzard of choices. We become locked into the idea that consumption isn’t just necessary, but even required. It isn’t enough to have one water bottle; we must have the new one, in the limited edition color. The collect-and-hoard impulse that was once necessary for our survival has become a tool marketers can use to get us to buy more. How else can we show off our status?
Showing off too is an evolutionary dynamic gone haywire in an affluent society. Bezos and Sanchez aren’t holding a wedding in Venice to experience the pleasure of being in the city or even being in love. It is a display of both opulence and dominance that trickles down to the rest of society. It sends a message that to be rich is to spend extravagantly, even as the world recoils and the city protests against the display.
The opposite of this is the people I grew up among - the old Yankees. Old family money in New England was notoriously cheap. Clothes were worn until they were threadbare. Homes were large but not well-heated or cooled and often lacked the latest amenities. Cars were driven until they could no longer be repaired. Status was conferred based on where one was educated, the memberships they held, and the traceability of their lineage. The heir to this may be stealth wealth, the idea that status isn’t in the label but the craftsmanship of the things you own or your ability to spend in a way that isn’t flashy.
Some people study money because they like numbers, they get a thrill out of investing and watching a company soar. I rather like the human behavior aspect of it. Money can buy some happiness, but there is a leveling off. The exact number various according to what study you read but endless money doesn’t mean endless bliss. I believe the best thing I can teach is not saving or investing (although those are key too), but how to enjoy life without constantly acquiring things.
There’s a push-pull here. I’m not a latte-shamer. I believe people should enjoy their money and save as well but at some point the acquisition of goods simply doesn’t bring as much pleasure as it should. If you are spending money, it should either benefit you or bring you joy. Putting space between the urge to purchase and the purchase used to be commonplace. That has gone away, and I believe we are all poorer for it. There’s a phrase Klumpner uses that I keep coming back to, “the soft slavery of consumerism.”
But what of the benefits of ceaseless growth? Do we constantly need, as individuals and as a country, to keep having and spending more? Is rising GDP necessary for the U.S. to thrive? You could argue that the Bezos-Sanchez wedding, for all its ostentatiousness, is a job creator. After all, it took workers to sew the clothes, prepare the food, create the floral arrangements, pilot the gondolas, snap the photos, and so on. Just as Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter tour brought prosperity to each town they touched. We don’t need these things but do we need the growth or illusion of growth they bring? The U.S. is now a service economy instead of a manufacturing one, so we must constantly be selling. I can’t be the only one flat-out exhausted by that.
I keep coming back to the title of Klumpner’s book. Have we spoiled affluence? Have we taken the fun out of being rich? I look at the Bezos-Sanchez wedding and it doesn’t look like fun. It looks like fitting into clothes that restrict and heels that pinch. It looks like being constantly aware of a camera on you. It looks like medical procedures, injections, and the tedious application of fake nails, fake hair, fake tans, and thousand-dollar serums. To me, it looks like pointless work. Maybe it brings them joy, I don’t know.
There are two things I say frequently that are probably frustrating but also elucidating to the hearer. I use them on myself all the time, so I know the frustration part to be true. The first is to what end? I ask myself this when trying to figure out the motivation behind anything I’m spending on. Sometimes I have to ask it multiple times within a decision to get to the essence of it.
The other thing I ask is: is this the highest and best use of your time? This one I ask a lot when in workplace settings for getting people to delegate tasks or consider their value but it is also a good question for spending time in general. Sometimes sitting in a hammock or binge-watching a TV show is absolutely the highest and best use of your time. This question isn’t about hustle culture or squeezing every dollar out of your time; it’s about being aware that your time is as valuable as your money.
The billionaires of the world can’t spend enough. The most lavish wedding won’t put a dent in Bezos’s hoard. But for the rest of us with limited resources, it makes sense to question if we have spoiled affluence. I think of the Victorian children excited to get an orange in their stocking at Christmas. Now we beg kids to eat oranges. We both have abundance and a severe lack of it.
There’s a story I’ve heard repeated so many times about Kurt Vonnegut pointing out a billionaire to Joseph Heller at a party and saying that “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” Heller said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” Vonnegut said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” Heller replied: “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
No one feels like they have enough these days. Retirees won’t spend because they are too afraid that they might need it later. Others spend now because they don’t trust the banks, or the stock market, or the dollar. What most of us want is to feel that we have enough, that we are safe, that this modest fortress of funds we have built might provide shelter from the storm. Not the billionaires. They have all they need. It is still not enough.
I have to admit to hate-reading the coverage of the Bezos wedding. When I saw Sanchez in that ridiculously cinched-waist dress, all I could think was, what fun is that? Do they even get to enjoy the wedding? To me, the answer is no. How could you, wearing something like that. But I guess that's not the point. The point is the display.
Anyway, every word in this is brilliant, Deidre. Spot on.
A really thought-provoking post Deidre. I contemplate what "enough" means for myself quite a bit. I've realized that I don't need nearly what I thought I needed when I was younger. At this point in my life, I'm mostly trying to get rid of all the stuff I accumulated (that I was sure I needed). It's a huge relief in a lot of ways though the disposal part stresses me out.
I don't get the excess. I just don't. The Bezos wedding budget is probably bigger than the GDP for some countries. I could think of so many ways that money could be spent in ways that have more meaning and do more good. It's such a "human nature thing": this need for more and more and I'm not going to presume to have solutions. Only to say I don't see how this is sane or sustainable for our planet in the long-run.