As inflation surges and the South African economy shrinks, money worries are ratcheting up for most of us. But if you can, spare a thought for the millionaires of Long Island in the US as they face obliteration by a nightmarish influx of billionaires.
So desperate has become the plight of the poor millionaire residents of the Hamptons that on Thursday they were voting whether to close down an airport on their overcrowded spit of land in New York.
According to one unhappy millionaire who spoke to The Guardian, the controversial airport only serves “a select few”.
“It has become unbearable and unsustainable,” he said from the universal centre of unbearable unsustainability. “From Thursday to Monday we are subjected to an endless line of helicopters dumping on us from morning to night”.
It’s a clash that seems to have been brewing for years, as tacky new money has poured into a place previously reserved for people whose tacky new money has been elegantly laundered and gentrified by the passage of time.
In some cases, the passage of time is considerable. In the mid-1990s, Robert Gardiner, heir of the family that has owned an island in the Hamptons since 1639, dismissed “the Fords, the Du Ponts, the Rockefellers” as “nouveaux riches”.
There’s so much money now it’s nauseating. I’m a one-percenter, but I bear no resemblance to these people.
— A Hamptons resident
For most current residents, however, such names inspire respect usually reserved for royalty and, to the establishment, the influx of super-rich young tech gurus, crypto bros or common-or-garden Wall Street denizens is a sign of cultural collapse rather than simply the inevitable arrival of the next generation.
In a Vanity Fair feature last year, one resident who’d lived in the Hamptons since 1991 was adamant. “There’s so much money now it’s nauseating,” she said. “I’m a one-percenter, but I bear no resemblance to these people.”
Not all of “these people” are oligarchs, mind you. The same piece mentions a 25-year-old who had chipped in $3,000 (R45,457) with 30 others to rent a house in Montauk for a month. It’s possible they all paid different amounts, but if she was anything to go by, that month cost around $90,000 — a shade under R1.5m.
The Guardian dressed up its report as hard news, but most of the coverage of this millionaire-versus-billionaire struggle in the Hamptons has had a clear subtext, a bourgeois dog-whistle for the shabby-genteel reader to roll their eyes and laugh at the pampered, entitled crybabies.
You’ve probably seen a similar trend in that popular bit of virtue-signalling whereby people dismiss things as “first world problems” or “rich people’s problems”. And to be fair, such dismissals probably came from a good place originally, perhaps as a conscious attempt to remember that the poor have it much, much, much harder than the rich.
The thing is, though, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of humans want to have rich people’s problems. I know I do.
Given the choice of being a 99-percenter feeling smugly superior while reading The Guardian, and being a Montauk millionaire feeling hard-done-by while reading all the zeroes on the end of my bank balance, I know which I’d choose.
Faster than you can say “unbearable and unsustainable”.
