First, you possibly can argue that post-Sixties cultural developments have genuinely stripped away sure components of enjoyable that used to connect to upper-class existence. The dominance of a striving meritocratic spirit has made mere privilege much less respectable than within the days when WASP scions coasted into Ivy League colleges. Even when you have sufficient cash to set your youngsters up for all times, you continue to may really feel the necessity to stress about faculty admissions as a result of that’s what’s anticipated of you; the Ivy League imprimatur relatively than the Social Register is the place standing actually lies.
Likewise, the aesthetic developments of the previous 50 years — the flip from decoration in structure, the collapse of requirements of gown and the unfold of an off-the-cuff have an effect on even amongst billionaires — have stripped away a zone of aesthetic distinction that the superrich used to inhabit and revel in. To have the ability to afford sure sorts of magnificence, to construct Newport palaces or simply gown elegantly for dinner was a particular grace granted to the old-time higher class, and despite the fact that wealthy folks’s properties at present are nonetheless absurdly costly, they’ve misplaced essential components of visible distinction and delight.
Simply including zeros to your checking account doesn’t assist with this. The characters on “Your Buddies & Neighbors” are most likely richer than most of the working admen (and -women) on “Mad Males,” Hamm’s prior portrait of existential points on the Manhattan-to-Connecticut commute. However the “Mad Males” forged inhabits a much more trendy world, and so despite the fact that the non-public issues are related — adultery, divorce, troublesome youngsters, despair — the Eisenhower-era characters appear extra enviable as a result of once they endure, there are compensations in how cool and glamorous they give the impression of being.
Then lastly, maybe, there was as soon as a means during which wealthy folks — sure, wealthy males, primarily — had been granted a particular zone of transgression, an area to commit sins like adultery and get away with it (pending divine displeasure, not less than), that made them really feel freer than the respectable, respectable bourgeoisie. And that distinction largely collapsed with the sexual revolution’s democratization of want.
Certain, fantasies of rich transgression endure — witness the attraction of “Fifty Shades of Gray” — and Elon Musk does have his weird postmodern harem. However normally, infidelity among the many rich these days appears not all that totally different from infidelity among the many center class, yielding the identical makes an attempt to make the very best of disagreeable separations, the identical haggles over custody, besides with a particular strain related to the outsize monetary stakes. If there’s something that establishes a everlasting temper of distress in “Your Buddies & Neighbors,” it’s this sense that cash largely makes divorce extra probably with out making it that rather more endurable.
