Obviously I hate everything about the rich and obviously they wouldn’t be rich unless they were unimaginative, but still.

I live very close to some very wealthy people. My neighbors are millionaire landlords, retirees, and labor aristocrats. Some nearby houses are owned by billionaires or people who are close to billionaires or might as well be billionaires. I walk past these places almost all the time. (The owners are seemingly never home.) And something that gets me about them is that despite all their money and power, they’re still stuck in the same shithole as the rest of us. They still have to drive to these places, even if they’re billionaires and they have drivers. They still get stuck in traffic. They can’t ride their helicopters to their houses, and the nearest airport is forty minutes away on a road that sucks ass. Can’t take a bicycle: you’ll die. Can’t take public transportation: there isn’t any. Can’t do shit. They still have to deal with people driving past their houses, sometimes very close. They still have to deal with shitty cell service all the time. Since landlords stole all the housing here, there’s a critical shortage of workers. If some appliance breaks in your house, it can take days or weeks to get someone to fix it, if anyone shows up at all.

And hey, this place is beautiful, that’s why billionaires and millionaires are here, but it used to be better. The first summer of the pandemic, no tourists were here. (We’re usually swamped with tourists.) I couldn’t believe how much wildlife I saw. I saw a seal swimming around at the beach. I saw a fucking kingfisher. I never see this shit here. And just imagine what this place was like before European settlers ruined it. Supposedly migrating whales filled the horizon. You could see them from land. Migrating birds blocked out the sun for days. It was so cold in the winter, you could walk across the frozen sea to the outer islands. 99% of this shit is gone now. Instead, the billionaires and millionaires are doing the same shit as the rest of us. Yes, they can go sailing or whatever, but they still spend a lot of time staring at their fucking phones, at fucking instagram slop or who the fuck even knows. Like, these guys won, this is the world they made, and they’re all on shitloads of anxiety medication. (I’m not going to tell you how I know, but I know.) And I’m not making fun of people on anxiety medication. I’m just trying to say that even the people at the very top, the richest people who have ever existed, are deeply unhappy. Billionaires know there’s eight billion of us and only a few thousand of them, plus their running dogs in the police and military and corporate media, plus the few hundred million people (the global 10%) who identify with them.

I’ve worked for people like this before. At one house I worked at a looooooong time ago, the guy had, like, dozens of people working around him all the time, landscaping, gardening, serving him, whatever. Who the fuck wants to live like that? I get nervous around waiters and waitresses. I can’t stand using money to make people who are less fortunate than me do things. (I have never worked as a waiter but I’ve seen plenty of videos of waiters and waitresses literally screaming and crying about their jobs so it seems like not the most satisfying profession.) I guess if you’re a rich piece of shit, you view servants as objects, as not something human, but it really bothers me. And like…under capitalism, everything we use is impregnated with the ghosts of the people who made it. Most of the people reading these words are in the imperial core. Even if you just buy a bag of chips, the ghosts of the workers who made those chips are in the bag. We just can’t see them.

And the fundamental lack of imagination of the rich is one reason it’s like this. I think about collective power. Collective wealth. Guaranteeing necessities for all means that you don’t have to worry about peasants with pitchforks burning down your house. You could have bullet trains, buses, bicycles, better infrastructure, communal living, community events. You could be part of a community. You could do fun things with all kinds of different people who would genuinely like you. You wouldn’t be paying them. And they wouldn’t be trying to swindle you. If we all lived in Soviet apartment blocks, we could concentrate all the population and amenities in one place in this area. Everything else could be for wildlife and nature and whatever. You would see all kinds of crazy shit whenever you went on a hike. You could have memories, instead of wasting your life scrolling your phone.

But no. We can’t do any of this. It’s impossible. Because the line must go up. The numbers that don’t even mean anything to you anymore need to increase. That’s all that matters.