Living a Fantasy In The City
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
-Noam Chomsky
Living in the United States is a task that is most formidable. It’s a daunting task that only few can acquire — a lifestyle of the rich and famous. The internet, the behemoth of modern communication has generalized this idea to the masses. Therefore, my generation today shoots for the lights, the camera, and the action of confusing a falsified dream with reality. They go into their everyday lives working remedial jobs that have no self-actualization, no real inherent value pertaining to them, and complain, but on the weekends they become celebrities. It’s as if this complaining has become so natural to us, that we barely acknowledge the complaining and confuse it for worship. This worship that we have is for the average and not famous, trying to flip it into something more than what it is.
Tucked in industrialized cities we confuse the glamour of spectacle in movies such as Sex and The City or Spider-man in believing that this is the ideal. We must live in a big city to live the American Dream! I mean, look at all the rich people who have come from the big city, the lights, the camera, and the action. Hollywood marketed to us through propaganda at the movie theater, that this is the ideal. Instead, reality strikes us in the living room of a studio apartment paying $1500 a month, miserable and lonely. Ticking and waiting for the weekend to come to get drunk on a Friday night to show your Instagram followers that you’re living the life, isn’t that right? It is as if movies are a fantastical dream, now co-opted with social media force-feeding a lifestyle that’s not livable. Conspicuous consumption of goods and services but not life. Scrolling through social media, we post at restaurants, drinking, and shopping — showing the keys to an apartment we do not own.
We’ve embellished in the act of showmanship rather than ownership.
We eat food that we own for 30 minutes, we drink drinks we own for 10 minutes, and we live in cramped cities that we cannot own for a lifetime. Do you not see? We are actually like the movie — fake, but the reality is miserable.
The cost of this showmanship raises prices in areas to exuberant amounts because we are desperate for city life. Places like NYC, Washington DC, and I heard Austin Texas are gathering populations that are not easily handled. This begs for political reform in these cities, such as rent control, which I don’t see a problem with. However, my problem is, why not own it? Why are we so brand loyal to cities as if they are Apple or Google? As if it’s a shirt on our back or shoes on our feet. Shouldn’t we have free range of wherever we want to live? One may say, “I want to live in the city.”, and I think that is completely fine, just don’t complain about the consequences that come with it.
This information is not hidden; you do not need to go far, just recently the average rent in NYC was reported to be $5,588 a month. This pecuniary emulation of believing that one will make it to the 1% of income earners, in cities that have population sizes of 1 million — 7 million is inconceivable. It’s as if the ego of capitalism prevents people from understanding that they are average.
When Thorstein Veblen wrote his book titled “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” he wrote it during the Industrial Revolution, close to the Gilded Age, when merchants and manufacturers had now gained the ability to have disposable income. This gave a sense of superiority to their wealth in the relevance of egoism — the ability to have showmanship of it. He states in the second chapter titled Pecuniary Emulation:
“It becomes indispensable to accumulate, to acquire property, in order to retain one’s good name. When accumulated goods have in this way once become the accepted badge of efficiency the possession of wealth presently assumes the character of an independent and definitive basis of esteem.”
The focus of the second chapter of his book was to lay down a basis for why people want to emulate rich people — most importantly, what Veblen focuses on is why poor people want to emulate rich people. If asked the question “What is there to emulate if you are already that in which you are emulating?” You can’t emulate what you already are, so who is emulating? Poor people who are not rich. He focuses on a class struggle, Veblen points out that it is the ability to flaunt your possessions that gives a sense of self-respect as he states,
“So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to the complacency which we call self-respect”
he continues later in the paragraph,
“and it is extremely gratifying to possess something more than others.”
This is what he calls a habit of pecuniary emulation.
This theory that Veblen had thought of is conscious within the thought process of city life. We are constantly in a flux of wanting the pecuniary lifestyle of partying, disposable income, and life in the city of late nights. City life is synonymous with lavishness, an opportune big break in the big city. For example, “Sex and The City” is known for its tapestry of illusion to pecuniary emulation and conspicuous consumption — nailing the dream job in the big apple and having a rich husband at the same time. Additionally, even works like “Pretty Woman.” or classics such as The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald touches on this idealization of city lifestyle emulating monetary gain.
Nevertheless, this image is such a pervasive image of the idealization of the lifestyle in cities, yet the image is completely opposite. We tend to forget about the action of supply and demand, the economics of scarcity, and that opportunity is not opportune for everybody. Being top 1-10% in a city of 1,0000,000 - 8,000,000 is a task few can achieve in this economy. But as Veblen writes it is a belief of luck — a primeval trait that is bestowed in every human.
But in any case, it is to be taken as an archaic trait (luck), inherited from a more or less remote past, more or less incompatible with the requirements of the modern industrial process. — Thorstein Veblen
Taking on the philosophy of Thorstein Veblen in the pursuit of the city life dream, we find that to say that you are from or moving to an area is in cooperation with the philosophy of pecuniary emulation. However, it is not in the sense of owning goods and services it is in brand loyalty, an idea the media has fixated on but living a fake lifestyle propagandized. The egoism of capitalism has deranged the minds of so many of my age living futile lives lonely within a populated city just to say they live there.
Rugged individualism with a high extravagance life on 2 days of the weekend seems to be the new style of the American Dream.
