Firstly, you might say that after-1,960 cultural trends have truly removed certain elements of pleasure that were attached to the lifestyles of the upper class. The domination of a frightening meritocratic spirit made a simple privilege less respectable than at the time when the wasp scions made the schools of the Ivy League. Even if you have enough money to prepare your children for life, you could always feel the need to highlight admissions to university because this is what you expect from you; The Ivy League printer rather than the social register is the place where the status really lies.
Likewise, the aesthetic trends of the last 50 years – the turning point in the ornament of architecture, the collapse of holding standards and the propagation of a relaxed effect, even among the billionaires – have eliminated an aesthetic distinction zone that the Superrich used to live and appreciate. To be able to afford certain types of beauty, building newport palaces or simply dressing elegantly for dinner was a special grace given to the old upper class, and even if the houses of the rich today are still absurdly expensive, they have lost crucial elements of visual distinction and pleasure.
The simple fact of adding zeros to your bank account does not help that. The characters of “your friends and neighbors” are probably richer than many admen (and women) of work on “Mad Men”, the previous portrait of Hamm on existential problems on the journey of Manhattan-to-Connecticut. But the casting of “crazy” lives a much more elegant world, and therefore even if personal problems are similar – adultery, divorce, difficult children, depression – the characters in the eisenhower era seem more enviable because when they suffer, there are compensations in their fresh and glamorous appearance.
Then finally, perhaps, there was once a way to ensure that wealthy people – yes, rich men – were mainly obtained – a special transgression area, a space to commit sins like adultery and get away (waiting for divine dissatisfaction, at least), which made them feel more free than the decent and respectable bourgeoisie. And this distinction has largely collapsed with the democratization of the desire for the sexual revolution.
Of course, transgression fantasies rich in rich – testify to the call of “fifty shades of gray” – and Elon Musk has his weird postmodern harem. But in most cases, infidelity among the rich today does not seem so different from infidelity among the middle class, giving the same attempts to make the most of unpleasant separations, the same childcare merchants, except with a particular pressure linked to disproportionate financial issues. If there is something that establishes a permanent mood of misery in “your friends and neighbors”, it is this feeling that money mainly makes divorce more likely without making it even more durable.