I am reminded of a YouTuber I caught wind of because of my fascination with people who decided to move overseas. His name is Jon Olsson Delér. He appears to be Swedish. The first video I saw was him touring the apartment he and his then girlfriend, Janni Delér. (They are now married.) But this wasn’t any ordinary one-room apartment, this was the apartment they had in Monaco of all places. And he’s had seven “house tours” of places they were staying at one point or another around the world: one in Marbella, Spain, another in Bali. One on their Yacht, the Princess. The latest video was back in Marbella, Spain, touring their latest home, “Casa Castle.”
Their other v-blogging videos are equally as ostentatious. There’s the one entitled A $22,000,000 SWIMMING POOL!! and another one called THE LIFE OF A BILLIONAIRE where Jon spends most of the time with two billionaires whom you never heard of before nor are given their names or how did they get to be that wealthy. He seems to travel to-and-fro between Spain, Monaco, and wherever else they want to film.
Janni’s videos are equally of her charmed life, like the video entitled, BACHELORETTE PARTY — kidnapped in Greece! or her attempt at a cooking show demonstrating three vegan breakfast recipes in her Casa Castle Kitchen. She is a blogger, fashion designer, and a model.
Both of them have a small coterie helping them behind the scenes. It’s glamour, glitz, and they have that sense of “they’ve made it.” There was nothing I saw in those videos that I wouldn’t have been surprised if these were two rich wealthy thirty-something Americans who were smart enough to save their money and use it towards whatever business entrepreneurship they wanted to achieve.
I would argue that your suggestion that Americans have uniquely developed this sort of “if you’re ain’t first, you’re ain’t tryin’” mentality isn’t true, it is more of a general sense of what tends to happen when people become wealthy. Professional athletes, like Jon (he is best known for being an Alpine freestyle skier) might tell you that wealth or chasing after wealth will simply magnify whatever your character was before then. To me, the difference between Jon, Ravi, Walker, and Steve is that all of them know all about achieving whatever it is that they want, whether it’s wealth, honor, power, pleasure, or pick your poison. Perhaps Steve might know what to do when you have any of those things or even better he knows what to do when he doesn’t have any of those things. It’s more than some sense of knowing your place or lowering your sights, or even this sense of humility that Steve might display (but it could also be a false sense of humility too).
There’s a lot of things that have happened to America that could be seen as uniquely American. Striving for wealth, position, honor, etc. isn’t one of them.
