Refinery29, Kylie Jenner, and the Denial Underlying Millennial Financial Resentment

The financial privileges described in three recent articles amount to an instinctive denial of what American wealth really is and what it really means. Photograph by Jamel Toppin. Courtesy Forbes.

By Jia Tolentino

Lately, the air has been crackling with financial resentment. Tweets and articles about money — about, say, how Kylie Jenner is a self-made billionaire, or how two rich college graduates chose their expensive apartment in Kips Bay, or how one young woman lives in New York on an intern’s salary and a generous parental allowance — have extended themselves, like steel rods, into our atmosphere of extreme inequality. As planned, the lightning of outraged public attention has forked and flashed through the air.

The agita directed at these recent articles, published by Forbes, the Times, and Refinery29, respectively, is much less about the articles themselves and much more about the era and the nation we live in. We are mad at billionaires because our richest one employs warehouse workers who sometimes have to pee in bottles to avoid being punished for taking bathroom breaks. We are mad at the way American wealth is locked up and transmitted within families because we live in the world’s richest major country, and yet a third of our population struggles to get by. But our current political system is stacked so firmly in favor of those who wish to keep things this way that we have found ourselves, as usual, litigating these issues in discourse rather than in policy.