Trust Fund Tinas in the Time of Quarantine
Having spent the past decade attending elite private schools AND working as a nanny in Silicon Valley, it goes without saying that I have been very well acquainted with quite a few disgustingly rich, white people. A lot of them. Far more than I’d have ever cared to know had I been given the option to actually choose my associations.
And admittedly, truth be told, I have grown to love a few, despite themselves.
But what has always been so obvious to me in the course of interactions is that I didn’t come from their world. We are aliens to one another and always will be. While attending their schools and teaching their kids, I was forced to empathize with their world, but rarely was I ever asked about mine. They were not poor. They had never been poor. So why should they care about the experience of scarcity? Who cares what it’s like to overcome extreme adversity and hardship?
Empathy in the elite world only runs in one direction. Class consciousness flows strictly upwards as the poors like me were compelled to empathize with the needs and desires of the upper crust. While I certainly had plenty of needs as a poor, first-generation student who had studied very hard at pain to my mental health to earn the scholarships necessary for me to pay for college and graduate school, there was never any suitable platform made by these beneficient institutions for me to express or share my feelings or experiences. The only emotion I was given space to express was my deep gratitude to the donors who supplied my scholarship for having been given the opportunity to leave everything I had ever known behind so that I could sit next to some scumlord’s pampered princess of a daughter who yawns and tells the person next to her that this week, like last week and the week before, she just didn’t have time to do the readings.
Truly blessed.
The daughter of a single mother, I grew up in wild precarity. I lived for much of my childhood in a literal cabin in the woods where even running water wasn’t a certainty. I started working as a child, at my grandmother’s country inn—which might sound to the untrained ear bougie as fuck but back then was a family business that barely kept my large extended family alive. I scooped ice cream and waited tables for years to save up enough money to buy the cheapest used car in the student parking lot of Wesleyan University.
I was made very aware of what I was getting into the second I pulled into campus.
Most people from my background only know about the rich in an abstract way. They don’t have “inherited wealth” friends. So it was very difficult to talk about what my college experience was like with my high school friends or my family. There was no way to convey the absurd amount of class privilege I was forced to negotiate around on a daily basis while trying to maintain my sanity. I sounded crazy to them even describing it.
“Why would anyone give their kid a fucking BMW for graduating high school? Doesn’t your college cost like $40,000 a year or some shit like that? Who has that kind of money?”
At it turns out, quite a few parents of students at Wesleyan had that kind of money.
Many of my peers from college are what I call Jackpot Babies. Jackpot Babies are the children of the elite whose life begins as a guaranteed success. Whether they were aware of it or not, they were supplied by their parents with trust funds and other forms of structured inheritance so that even if they were to strike out on their wildest ambitions and fail abysmally at the attempt, they would never experience poverty. They cannot fail, at least not materially. They are supplied with a lifelong safety net by virtue of their parents’ careful wealth planning strategy.
I have learned from having known many of these parent-made millionaires that it’s actually a tax write-off for wealthy parents to supply their kids with a lifetime of security. It’s actually *cheaper* for them to inherit a fortune than for their parents to pay taxes on it so that’s just always how that keeps happening.
"It's not like I asked for a trust fund but my parents were actually just so incredibly wealthy that it was cheaper for them to set up an account that pays me $40,000 a year for the rest of my life than to pay taxes on it. See, it makes perfect sense when you stop and just think about it. Look, it's not like I asked to be provided with a steady middle-class income unearned every year for the rest of my life. That's not who I am. Who I am is a guy who wants to start a podcast."
So while I grew ever more familiar with the exotic world of the upper class, my experience was like that of an anthropologist, an alien not invited to participate but begrudgingly tolerated as an observer. But I didn’t even then have the language to express what I was experiencing in that liminal state. That’s why I had no choice but to major in Sociology. Sociology gave me the theoretical equipment necessary for me to make sense of such disparity. Had I not studied Sociology, my brain would have broken by the insanity of my situation.
But while I learned a ton about the subjective qualities of social class and the enormous class inequality that separated me from my classmates, it was still impossible for me to talk about it with them. After all, it was for me an intensely personal subject matter. I was deeply ashamed of where I came from and that feeling of shame was reinforced continually by the institution itself. I was there to experience upward mobility, right? To be the first in my family to to get to call myself “college-educated.” Let the past die, you idiot, and just enjoy the ride.
So while I was in college, I rarely ever spoke about my background. I was ashamed to share pictures of my childhood home with its cheap paneling and mismatched furniture. My family is very far from anything you might consider sophisticated. My stepfather, a tow-truck driver, wears black hoodies, jeans and workboots almost exclusively and there is never a time where there isn’t black grease staining his fingers and nails. He looks exactly like who you would imagine spent his twenties doing drugs in the parking lot of Grateful Dead concerts, which is, in fact, exactly what he did.
I love my family. I am extremely proud of my mother for what she has overcome. But at the same time, her struggles and the humiliations that I had to survive as her child have less than no value in the social capital market and I knew it. Anything I could say about my life would just sound whiny and ungrateful because had I not been given the great honor of sitting next to the blessed product of a Hollywood director’s third union? I mean, come on. What was my shitty life story of abuse, neglect and struggle compared to that kid’s epic saga?
So in college, I had grown very accustomed to just observing. After all, my life wasn’t important. Nothing I did until Wesleyan mattered. And besides, isn’t this the peak of the class ladder I’m supposed to be learning to climb?
Facebook was a revelation. It launched in 2004, my freshman year of college, when it was still known as its original domain: “www.thefacebook.com.” Then, Facebook profiles were static. There was no such thing as a scrolling feed. It was more of a phonebook than anything else.
But then Facebook introduced a social feed and things got very interesting. Suddenly, my peers, home for the holidays, were sharing photos of themselves and their parents in their childhood homes, unwrapping their expensive Christmas presents, and otherwise oblivious to the privilege that surrounds them in every image. I was morbidly fascinated. I had literally never in my life been inside such homes. I could not fathom growing up in one.
It’s embarrassing to admit that you’re jealous of what other people have. Admitting that you lack something that others have is tantamount to self-treason. After all, don’t you have enough? Aren’t you grateful for what you have? Look, you’re getting this tremendous opportunity to go to one of the finest learning institutions in the Western world—for FREE. What have you to complain about, you ungrateful pig.
But I was like, what then, 19 years old? Indulge my teenage trespasses. I was less than fully enlightened. Forgive me.
But I distinctly remember feeling just so deeply ashamed of myself at the beginning in college, virtually all the time. Facebook made me hyper-conscious of just how much distance actually existed between me and my classmates. It invited me into their homes and showed me how they lived, how their parents lived, what they did on summer vacation, how much of their life at home was organized around money, privilege and access. It was fascinating and terrible, much in the same way I imagine Keeping Up With the Kardashians is for most working-class people.
Today, college students have so many more ways to share their lives with others. I was just thinking the other day of how terrible this lockdown is for poor students and graduates of elite colleges who are connected to dozens of rich peers by way of platforms like Instagram. Because of our new need to perform living our lives constantly for the benefit of others, we are now privy to how the wealthy and privileged go about their everyday lives in the crux of pandemic and crisis.
Trust Fund Tinas of Instagram are posting about how fucked up the yeast shortage is while 6.6 million American workers are unemployed and the line for food pantry assistance goes now for miles outside the door.
I have in my own social network plenty of couples who have escaped Manhattan for one of their parents’ second homes out on the island or the Hamptons or wherever. It doesn’t matter. They’re posting up a storm. So relaxing out where privilege has always gone to hide their families from the poors.
It feels like we're living through an unimaginative reboot of the Great Depression except in this version, we all have smartphones and cheap internet so we get to watch as our inheritance-class peers learn to make bread for the first time in front of their $10,000 Viking ranges.
There are lines going for miles outside of food pantries but your social network's version of Karen Jr. got her hands on some yeast and is excited to show you twenty adorable pictures of her loaf of bread that cost her $30 to make after having the ingredients delivered by a poor.
"Ok, so me and the hubby tried to make food for ourselves for the first time in years. It was ridiculous. So fun. So crazy. So random."
"We actually got married like, what was it, like six years ago. We got this $300 stand mixer as a gift and have never, ever used it. It just sits there like a bougie trophy. But like today we plugged it in!"
“Today, me and the boyfriend had the exquisite luxury of spending six hours making gluten-free, plant-based ravioli from scratch. So delicious. What a gift that we can record our fun and share it with you, the starving poors. We're in this together. We’ll get through this. Hang on."
Let them eat homemade artisanal bread. Tell them stress-baking helps alleviate anxiety.