Sitting in the front row in a London theatre turned Berlin nightclub, performers in touching distance as we sip from a bottle of Moet & Chandon, ‘Money Money’ (Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli) has never felt more apt.
If you happen to be rich
And you feel like a night’s entertainment
You can pay for a gay escapade.
Money makes the world go round indeed…
Wealth inequality in society is stark.
It’s nothing new, yet with everything that we do and everything that we are, we are reminded of it and struck by the fact that it’s 2025 and we are still no closer to bridging the gap. In fact, if anything, each passing day is, in fact, widening the rift that sees us drifting further and further apart from each other, all because we belong to a different social class.
Alas, despite all the protests and calls for change, when the very foundations of capitalism are dependent on the people at the top retaining control over all the resources and means of production, while the people at the bottom are forced to sell their labour to ensure their survival, we are still yet to experience the changed society that the puppet masters promised us.
How can one escape something when it is what they have been told is their only way to escape something else?…
Working every waking hour, when you are not fortunate enough to have been born into wealth, you end up spending the entirety of your life wishing that you had been, (self-pitying), and then trying to be, (to no avail).
The pursuit to have even a fraction of the wealth that they have is never-ending, and always, every time, to no avail…
But still, we try, working a dead-end job just to pay the bills that will go straight into the pocket of a smug-faced millionaire.
Your struggles might not pay your bills (who cares?) but at least they’ll pay mine.
While the working classes lay awake at night filled with worry about how they will pay their bills, the middle and upper classes have no such worries. Instead, they spend their nights (and days) deciding what lavish thing to spend their money on next.
It is this that I find the most heartbreaking about wealth inequality and it’s why, upon sitting in the theatre two weekends ago watching Cabaret with my fiancé, I couldn’t help but feel angered.
Money cannot and does not buy happiness, but it can and does buy opportunities that bring one happiness…
The trip for us was a once-in-a-lifetime type of moment, something special, a memory that we will hold onto for it is not our everyday. Yet for other people, like the man seated in the box (the most prestigious and expensive seat in the theatre) who fell asleep several times throughout, and the woman seated next to him who had the biggest, smuggest grin on her face as they sang the chorus of Money Money, ‘money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money’, this is their everyday… Date nights of theatre trips and all-inclusive holidays to our supermarket pizzas in front of the telly, the question lingering in the back of our minds is one of…
Why is it so unfair?
Why is the quality of our life based on, not even something earned like hard work, but something as coincidental as the flip of a coin?
When what you’re born into determines the rest of your life…
Social mobility does exist, but it’s undoubtedly rare when the lifestyle of the middle class is a cult within which we don’t belong. Life’s greatest tragedy…
It is life’s greatest tragedy that the blueprint of our lives has already been determined when we are but a cell in our mother’s womb.
It is a tragedy that we are all born but not all of us live because we can’t afford the privilege of it.
There are people who will go on tourist trips to Mars one day, rockets becoming to them what planes are to us, and people who will sit in the back of a driverless car, and, who knows, maybe one day there will be people paying in life to be preserved in death.
There is so much happening in the world.
We hear it on the news where segments are devoted to innovation and technological advances, and buzzwords are thrown around concerning robots and automation and a ‘digital afterlife.’ What we don’t hear on the news, however, is just how inaccessible this all is unless, of course, you’re rich…
It’s not just the sci-fi-like technological things that we miss out on, either, but also the everyday. The things that differentiate living from surviving.
There are shows being performed right now, concert halls and auditoriums, and stadiums being filled with people who have the holy grail, money, to be able to see them, meanwhile, you’re at home, looking through archives on BBC iPlayer of old Glastonbury clips because you know that you will never be able to afford tickets to the real thing. Or plane tickets. You’ll never be able to afford plane tickets, either…
Despite some people having whole photo albums filled with snaps from holiday after holiday, the closest that you will ever get to venturing outside of the UK is when you pass the displays outside the travel agents. But why? Why is our ability to explore the world, our home, conditional based on how much money we have?
Our right to travel should be a birthright.
In the same way that you wouldn’t take away someone’s keys and then make them say thank you when you give them back, because what’s rightfully ours is always ours, travelling from one place to another is not something that we must feel grateful for. It is, or at least, it should be, a given.
We shouldn’t be forced to spend our whole lives working in a job that we hate only to get to the end having neglected to do what we really wanted to do. Yet most people have no choice but to do this, for survival trumps everything. And so, with limited money to spend, if it’s a choice between putting food on the table or buying a table for you to turn your art hobby into a career, the former will win every time (a very specific example, but the reason why fewer than one in ten arts workers in the UK have working-class roots).
Imagine not having such limited resources, though… The world would be yours. The opportunities endless.
In other words, imagine being a man.
Deep pockets,
shallow heart.
Big ego,
tiny soul.
All human,
no humanity.
Oh, to be rich.
Portfolio of Hope 