kimberlysteele | The Trouble with Unearned Wealth, Part I (Reply)

A look that's not too far off from aging Hollywood... some are already most of the way there.

Our civilization is defined by its unearned wealth. Petroleum is the wealth of stored solar energy formed from the compacted, rotted remains of trillions of living organisms that lived millions of years ago. How absurd that one species burned nearly all of the huge reserves of fossil muck in fewer than three hundred years. It takes a special kind of stupid to that, and a special kind of entitlement.

I say this and I will be driving my car over 30 miles today. Though my car is a 2006 economy car that most women of my socio-economic background would have replaced at least three times over by now, it is still a Faustian bargain I chose when the facts on the ground are I hate driving and I never wanted to own a car. I have always been a fan of walking long distances, but even I cannot fathom walking seventeen miles to get to work and seventeen miles back once I am finished. Like many, I am stuck in an arrangement of bad faith where I spend resources I did not earn that would not be possible to spend if this was 1623 and not 2023.

Unearned wealth is immensely seductive. My reluctant travels in my car take me past several luxurious neighborhoods that I used to want to live in as a younger woman. Along one road I drive, the entire stretch on both sides is McMansions for several miles. New roofs, freshly bricked driveways, and neat little gardens mulched and edged in brick loom behind shrubbery that costs more than my monthly mortgage to purchase and maintain. Windows are not allowed to be dirty or to have rotted sashes. Cars are hidden away in five car garages that look like average size houses. Some McMansions have the appearance of small villages from a distance because of their weird, eclectic rooflines.

Nobody who lives in a McMansion or any of the millions of homes designed to imitate them in miniature believes in unearned wealth having a price. The atheism of our age is driven primarily by people who subconsciously fear paying the piper. I believe the Joel Osteens and Dalai Lamas of the world who ride the top of unearned wealth only believe they answer to God if God is still handing them a massive share of unearned goodies. In their hearts, I believe Joel Osteen and the Dalai Lama are agnostic atheists despite their bleating to the contrary. I judge them not by their words but by their deeds.

Nobody knows the price of unearned wealth because from the looks of things, the consequences are designed to play out over large, glacial eras of time and are so grandly scaled, our puny human minds could never understand them. Perhaps that is why the downfall of Hollywood celebrities in our current era is so fascinating to me. Many of them seem to be running face-first into almost instant karma over the span of one human lifetime. A celebrity’s stock and trade is their looks; that is to say, their wealth is largely dependent on how pretty they can make themselves. Back in the halcyon days of Greta Garbo, becoming the belle of the ball meant you had to be born good looking. Nowadays, there are an array of plastic surgeries that can transform a plain Jane into a fetching Gretchen. Madonna was able to use plastic surgery to her advantage for a time, as were many others, going from an average-looking 6 as a young woman to an 8 as a forty year old woman. Many years later, Megan Fox inflated her lips and with them her career. Untold numbers of Hollywood men got hair plugs and extended their careers along with the appearance of youth. Nowadays, the lowliest of influencers is expected to inflate her breasts, reduce her nose, fill her brow, and puff up her lips via easily-attainable cosmetic procedures. What they are not allowed to do is to look old, and therein lies the rub. At some point, unless we die young, we are all going to look different than we did as young people, and looking like a quasi-young version of what’s currently on trend is decidedly not the same as looking genuinely young.

Trying to outrun the visible signs of the reaper’s encroachment is ending for many in disfigurement. An increasing number of older celebrities, including males, are disfigured because of the number of cosmetic procedures they put themselves through in order to chase the dragon of a “better” appearance. Simon Cowell, Meg Ryan, Priscilla Presley, Lara Flynn Boyle, Demi Moore, and the late Michael Jackson are all harrowing examples of what happens when cosmetic procedures go too far. With the explosion of cosmetic procedures, we now see them exacting their costs at an early age. Celebrities are now getting face lifts and buccal fat removal that renders them deformed and weird looking their 30s: Lea Michele, Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian and Anya Taylor-Joy are on a scary race towards Jocelyn Wildenstein territory.

The Coronatarianism epidemic that saw literally billions getting an experimental set of injections disguised as vaccines in order to stay in the good graces of the favored class was our civilization’s way of worshipping its true God: unearned wealth. The shots themselves served as an unholy communion with the pharmaceutical grift that now comprises at least 70 percent of the real economy. I believe the costs of that particular grift are far scarier than becoming the facsimile of a cat or the Saw franchise monster in the face, and that’s why I was ready to die rather than take that communion.

With a subject this dark, I realize I have much more to write, so this ends Part I. I have no positive spin except to say that if you have earned wealth, be proud of it, and if you think you’ve got some unearned wealth, do your level best to find it where it hides, potentially give it away, and work to sublimate it in order to ameliorate its terrible karma.