RICH IN GOODS, RAGGED IN SPIRIT?
Engineered emptiness
Loads of ink has been spilled about The White Lotus S3 (I myself talked to Vogue Business and The Observer about it). But one line from the finale still haunts me.
“No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have.” - Victoria
Mrs Ratliff, define better. As we know TWL (and much other entertainment in the growing eat the rich oeuvre) is about wealthy, lost people in a hollow place. People with so much, but also so little. Beautiful and damned. It’s supposed to be satire, but increasingly feels like documentary.
In 1969 Richard Nixon used his inaugural speech as president to address almost exactly this issue. The nation was emotionally fractured - reeling from Vietnam, unnerved and divided by widespread civil unrest, unsettled by shockingly violent political assassinations. But at the same time, prospering economically: US citizens had never had more access to more goods, mod-cons and little luxuries.
He put (famous) words to a strange tension:
"We find ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit."
Well, Nixon’s administration was controversial. But he wasn’t wrong about that.
This confusing gap between material wealth and emotional wellbeing has only widened in the decades since.
It began maybe in the quiet malaise of the early ‘60s suburban wives trapped in what Betty Friedan called the problem that has no name. I wrote about it, and its modern echoes, last year:
Those women thought there was something wrong with them. They had everything they’d been led to believe they wanted. Like TWL’s Ratliff family, living better and more abundant-seeming lives, perhaps, than anyone in history. But Friedan found many of them standing in their clean, bright, pastel-manicured dream lives asking themselves silently: why do I feel so empty? When will I be happy? What’s the matter with me?
Rich in goods, ragged in spirit.
55 years later, we’re richer in goods than ever. The typical American family owns 300% more items than those people in the 1960s did. And this raggedness of spirit is everywhere: in the hollow-eyed luxury shoppers queuing outside the luxury boutique, or mechanically acquiring the latest status bag in duty free at the airport. In the dead-eyed commuters scrolling mindlessly on the tube. In the emotional flatline you feel when the online order arrives and it…looked better on screen.
Psychologist Dr. Tim Kasser has demonstrated through decades of research that the more we prioritise material wealth and consumption, the poorer our psychological well-being seems to become.
And Douglas Rushkoff, in his 2024 re-issue of Program or Be Programmed, talks about something that exemplifies the ‘ragged spirit’ maybe better than anything else I’ve seen: the wave of technology being built to solve problems created by earlier waves of technology:
Social media fragments our attention and triggers anxiety, so we download meditation apps to help us focus and calm down. Frictionless food delivery makes us unhealthy and deskilled in the kitchen, so we download recipe apps and install nutrition trackers. Dating apps commodify human connection and crash our self-esteem, so we reach for therapy apps to address those issues.
That isn't innovation. It's compensation.
The ragged spirit is the business model.
We can also see it loud and clear in the beauty industry, for example. Jessica DeFino said it best:
This is how countercurrents begin
When you look at the history of major counterculture movements, they almost always begin as responses to a feeling of spiritual poverty in times of material wealth.
In the 60s young people rejected the conformity and consumerism of post-war America. In the 90s grunge and minimalism ran counter to the gauche excesses of the 1980s.
Right now? In this time of stuffocation and frictionless instant gratification…that’s running alongside this economy, this housing crisis, this trend cycle, in this wealth stratification, in this political stratification and these feelings of money dysmorphia…there is of course resistance happening. All over the place. Three less obvious examples, perhaps. All things we’ve talked about here lately.
Resistance to surveillance
Like the legendary nightclubs that ban phones, it’s becoming a privilege/luxury to spend time in a digital blind spot where we can't be tracked, recorded, watched or sold to. See places like Off the Radar in Tilburg and The Offline Club in Amsterdam (with nearly half a million members) - businesses built on providing shelter from digital capture. I call them modern speakeasies.
Resistance to newness + patina as a status symbol
As sociologist Georg Simmel said in 1900, long-established European aristocrat families were known to like their objects slightly damaged, shabby or weathered…this distances them from the new-money bourgeois who delighted in pristine shiny newness. Today, when fashion culture encourages continual wardrobe turnover, sticking with pieces long enough for them to visibly age becomes a similarly powerful statement. See also anemoia: nostalgia for times we never lived through.
The ancient-wisdom revival
We’re seeing an ongoing surge of interest in ancient spiritual practices/ancient wisdom/ancient diets as an antidote to modern existential crises - a collective search for meaning, healing, calm and connection. Yoga Journal reports that yoga participation, steadily increasing over the past 15 years, is growing faster than ever in the 2020s. And ancient psychedelics (newly decriminalised in some places) are experiencing a major renaissance - psilocybin, ayahuasca, peyote.
Those are ofc just some of the countercurrents pushing back against consumer culture's empty promises. There are many more signals that we’re questioning what it really means to feel rich.
So imo Nixon was right about our diagnosis. But it’s we, not the system that created the issue, who need to figure out how to deal with it.
My day job - like many of yours, too - is about building brands, finding ways to inspire people, stir desire. I always try to come back to this: are we helping people feel more whole, or are we leaving them more hollow?
Thanks for reading/see you next time.
Beth
This post is part of a series. Subscribe to receive the rest to your inbox.
An excellent post. I love your work.
This should be printed out and given to ppl on the corners of shopping streets. As always, keep up the good work.