Veblen Goods

I lost track of time. If you’ve read everything before this then you know why. If you haven’t then I'm thrilled to say that I honestly, finally, can’t be bothered to explain, so tough. Figure it out. I lost three watches. I have always maintained that I have never been robbed because I really haven't. I believe you can only say you’ve been robbed if you can prove it. That’s the rule for everything else in life, so, even if I suspect I’ve been robbed - I can’t tell you for certain. There is no evidence. I lost track of time to this. The countless, persistent attempts at trying to understand how justice works in this world. Finding as many different situations and ways to answer the question, never satisfied, never certain. And then I lost three watches. They were all strangely from Tissot. The first one had mother of pearl inlay, black strap, silver detailings. The second one was also mother of pearl inlay, slightly larger dial, white strap, gold detailings. The third one was black inlay, largest dial, black strap, chrome black detailings. After I lost the last one I finally made the decision - to first of all give the rest of my watches to my mother - and then I let it all go. I had slowly been making this decision for a long time: one that no one really understood, but one that made complete sense to me. I mean, at some point I even asked myself: why? I saw the question in other people’s eyes. The only ones to say it point blank were my closest friends, the ones you love so much that at some point you stop speaking to them - maybe that’s just me - and of course my parents. My father. He’s always joking but sometimes he really isn’t. He's never failed to remind me I'm expected to uphold certain appearances. They all wanted me to stop being a martyr. I grew up as an expatriate. It means I never had to perform wealth. It was quietly assumed. And it was quietly stated. There was no need to display what was already right there in front of everyone. That was considered loud and out of place. Maybe that’s why it was easier for me to not care. Until I realized for the trillionth time that that is not how the majority of people view the world. An expensive thing is expensive because everyone agrees, it has earned its place, through craftsmanship, reputation, scarcity, acquired meaning. It’s hard not to sound uppity or judgmental to say those things are superfluous when you've grown up never having to prove your status to anyone. In fact you existed in a status pool, a section of society, where the very notion of status itself was looked down upon because everyone had it. There are idealistic principles and then there is denial. Expatriates can afford both.

We can hold both truths at once and decide for ourselves what value is and whilst many people can and do do that, when we do it, it has more authority. Because our choices matter more economically, sociologically. I hate to say it, but it is true. It works a little like this: there are things you can’t afford, and there are things you don’t care to afford. I chose education and life in the arts, humanities, and creative industries. They clash. If you are morally aware - which, I sadly am, acutely so - then you can see the dissonance all the time. And I'm not special in this regard. Many people do notice the contradictions and feel something about it. Social justice and art for art’s sake. The innate justifiability of the pursuit of exquisite beauty juxtaposed with extreme human suffering. I never said we didn’t need art. It’s just the paralysis of beauty caught up with me. Or it was always there. Designer houses and luxury apartments next to favelas and slums. It was hard to not judge both sets of people and feel like you didn't belong anywhere. When I went to my boarding school (you'll always hear about it, get used to it), which some describe as a hub for intellectual bohemians, children displaced by conflict, and the children of royals, diplomats, do-gooders, employees of the United Nations, expats, so on and so forth, they had a rule: no excessive display of wealth. Because inequality was presumed and sensitized. One of my roommates came to the school with almost nothing, having survived the earthquake in Haiti, and she had no friends, no family that she spoke about, and initially she didn’t speak anything except French and Haitian Creole so even if she did speak about it I didn't know. Was it hard to not display excessive wealth around her? Yes. She had nothing. Everything felt excessive in the beginning. And then it became natural. It was the little things. Like the clothes I wore - no brands, no visible labels. I kept the one Burberry coat I had taken with me hidden. The rest of my expensive clothes I didn’t even bring to school. And eventually I outgrew most of them. I was still just a teenager so it’s not like I had loads of expensive things, not even in my twenties and into my thirties now, because I chose or have chosen to remain a student for a very long time, a student with an explosive attitude and extremely volatile mind, so leading a life of excessive riches hasn't exactly been in the cards yet - and in any case I was, or rather am, too smart to be that materialistic (another one of those things people in privileged spaces cling to to remind themselves of their self-defined purpose) - and, of course, I come from privilege. The quiet privilege I told you about. The type where extremely wealthy people live in exclusive neighborhoods and send their children to the best schools and shop at ridiculously expensive stores, but never anything that signifies wealth, it’s just that everyone knows. Or everyone in the know knows. They don’t have to be the brands everyone recognizes as status symbols: no well known designers, everything understated and highly selective, nothing flashy - except maybe the cars. Everything effortlessly elegant. It was seen as tacky to follow fashion and definitely tacky to be ostentatious. There was class, priority, and decency. We were the educated elite, the most respected members of polite society: our status was our contribution, merit based of course, and consolidated by our achievements that demonstrated excellence in character. You didn’t have to prove you were rich. You had to do work that showed richness in every aspect of your life, and I, of course, was commended for taking it one step further - I got selected to go to a prestigious boarding school (and there it is again) before University, the one Prince Willem went to, and believe me no one could stop talking about that. I was golden. They told me that's what made me truly valuable and worthy. I was going to be a star. Or President. (I knew I was going to be an artist).

So over the years I stopped caring about quantity, I never really had, and quality became everything to me - but quality that wasn’t loud. I won’t say everyone around me was like this. They were not. I was more like this than anyone else I knew. But it worked for me. I had been moving around since I was two years old. Like children learn languages, I sort of figured this was something I just knew now. Moving around so much meant possessions became a weakness. The more you have the harder it is to move. Especially in the days when I was alone and still a student. Every time I moved I lost something. Now again, I can’t say I was robbed, because I can’t prove it. Although it’s hard to not suspect or even know with a great degree of certainty that professional movers, cleaners, other students, random people around you, could all be culprits. They were there. They could have taken your things, especially the nice things. Why not? You’re not looking. You're too preoccupied and trusting. You have to be. It wasn't like when I moved around with my parents. My parents had and have money. I wasn’t a poor student, but I wasn’t exactly a real princess, and my parents made sure I remembered that - so just like anyone else I was expected to and did do a lot of things entirely on my own from a very young age, and with limited financial means, and so basically - I lost a lot of things. I'm not blaming my parents. They made sure I was extremely well taken care of but they just wanted certain things to be stark reality. So naturally I messed up, I was careless, I made mistakes, and I lost a lot of things at a time when I couldn’t exactly afford a lot of things either. That was hard. I lost jewelry to the point where I have possessively held on to one ring for more than a decade because that’s all I can trust myself with. Earrings - gone. Bracelets - gone. Necklaces - gone. Hair accessories - gone. Clothes - disappeared. Shoes - no idea where they went. Books - some are missing. Artwork - maybe I imagined I made it because I don’t know where it is. Photographs, memorabilia - turns up somewhere on some continent in some house, and then vanishes. Just like that. It’s all somewhere and it’s all nowhere. When you move around as much as I have you have to accept that you don’t ever really own anything around you. It’s there and then tomorrow it could be somewhere else, and then it could be gone. And then you'll find it again several years later. Or you won't.

I also lost glasses. This one is somehow stranger than the watches, I’m not sure why. My eyesight isn’t actually that bad so I don’t have to wear glasses all the time, it’s just that I should, so maybe that’s why I didn’t notice they were gone? But they’re on your face. Or on my head if I had them pushed up. Did they fall? How disconnected was I to not even realize? And people check the time on their phones these days so that’s why maybe the watches were easier to miss. I don’t know. I just know I had two pairs of glasses that I loved, their lenses were designed to perfectly suit all my needs: UV, computer, yellow light, color, myopia, everything. And I lost both of them. I have other glasses - it’s just I lost these ones that I really loved. Since then I’ve had new glasses made, I am very selective so it took some time - but it was necessary. I have, however, avoided buying a watch. That’s right. I do not own a watch. I’m almost scared to buy one. I have been in several stores, looked at several designs I love, had my parents push me to buy one, but I said this time I would not succumb to the consumerist demands and societal expectations. In the age of technology I can totally justify my phone as a watch. I don't mean the Apple Watch. Like why? Just get the phone and be done with it. The time is in huge numbers plastered on the home screen, you can’t miss it. And if you don’t charge your phone then there’s a lot of things aside from telling the time you won’t be able to do so might as well have it charged. Anyway, so I stopped buying things. Expensive things. Veblen Goods are by definition things that signal status, exclusivity: things that are more sought after the more expensive they become and basically a lot of what the arts and creative industries rely on at the top for people to make a living. It speaks to myth-making, ambition, hustle, the grind and the having made it mindset - and historically it’s been hard for me to fathom why anyone would want to own a watch that costs as much as someone’s college tuition, but this is the world we live in. It's about aspiration. It's about some kind of meaning. And these industries create jobs. My moralizing, so I’ve been told, has led to self-erasure. I can’t be judgmental. And you know what, I agree. I can’t be judgmental. Creativity and livelihoods depend on some people needing those status symbols, wanting them. They serve a purpose. So I can't be a judge. But I can be poor. And as a mature, mature student who sacrificed financial prosperity for the sake of knowledge and excellence - justifying it as delayed gratification: a much needed distraction from the pandemic and a lethally uncooperative mind - I genuinely can’t afford Veblen Goods right now, and I can’t afford them even more because I’m so scared I’ll keep losing them. I can’t afford to replace everything all the time. If I had a stable location, which I still don't, then maybe I'd think differently. But even the room I'm writing this in now after thirty plus years of existence on this planet - this room is not mine forever. I will leave it one day, and everything in it will have to leave with me.

Once I landed in Thailand to find out my suitcase with some of my favorite belongings at that time had gone to Australia. They managed to get it back to me but the lock was broken and things were missing (can't say stolen) and the suitcase itself looked like it had been inside a tornado. It was a nice one too, I can’t remember the make, not something over-the-top, but it was nice. Ever since then I’ve only ever bought sturdy, super safe, double locked, expensive enough to be good but not expensive enough to be stolen luggage and I just got used to it. I see people with designer luggage and think that must be nice. You probably don't have to worry about that getting lost on some other continent. In fact boarding school justified my lifestyle choice even if my lifestyle choice didn’t match my creative pursuits or my industry of choice. Not really. Show business is, after all, show business. But at school the business was to not show. And that value mind-set is what makes me happy with my current wardrobe. It might be a little less designer than I'd like but if I lose what I have I can replace it all without losing my ability to buy food. I’m hoping to go beyond this stage in life but so far I still live out of boxes and suitcases and I don’t see that changing massively anytime soon. Though I do sometimes wish it would. My parents warned me: they said don't do what we did. It’s not that simple though. Remember what I said about language? I learned the language of constant migration when I was really young. I don’t know anything different. Eventually maybe. I do crave stability. But I accept the impermanent, ever-changing nature of things - I desire it. Most people preach this. The only constant is change. It’s comforting. Even though I suspect their changes are a little less extreme than mine. They don't crave being completely uprooted. They don't exactly crave nothing ever remaining the way it was. The problematic thing is: I do. Because that's what I have always known to expect.

Veblen Goods. I have a few. I would be devastated if I lost any of my perfume. I choose to invest most of my money in books, entertainment, art, and art supplies. The rest of it is in property so that I don’t recklessly spend it all when my mind decides to go into its cyclical journeys of highs and lows. Again, thanks to my wise parents. I have safety nets.

And yet, it's not that I don't want Veblen Goods, it's just I kind of see my life as a creative challenge. What would it be like to create meaning that goes beyond the accepted standard? Something that isn't about class, or perceived success - something that cannot be packaged and sold, something that isn't monetary. Just pure self-authorship. As much as possible. It's unrealistic, and maybe even a little forced, (some people may call it pretentious and I don't blame them), but that's what makes it exciting for me. Seeing what can be done with limited resources. It's hard, but I kind of love it.

I know what it’s like to own really beautiful things, heritage pieces, things that are valuable not just for their exclusive, symbolic value, but for what they really are. The history they carry. You have to know about these things to own them. They have to matter to you, not others. Well, they matter to those who know, but that's not the main feature. The main feature is that you wanted to own it. That feels good.

There’s this designer who said something in an old clip that has stuck with me - she was being complimented for having a really successful fashion line, and the interviewer asked her if she wants her clothes and brand to just become increasingly high-end - Veblen - and she said she didn’t think it was necessary. She said style is something that is chosen.

“Today I’m wearing something worth thousands of dollars but yesterday I was wearing a seven dollar T-Shirt and you didn’t know the difference - no one did - because it’s not about the label. It’s not about the price tag. It’s about you. Your confidence. No amount of money can buy you confidence and those who think it can - well good luck to them, and hey good for me right because I need someone to buy my overpriced stuff. I’m only joking. It’s all worth it. I really didn't mean that. We have artists working day and night to produce the highest quality products that we are so proud to share with the world - and their effort, skill, excellence - it's all reflected in the price tag. When you own something from us you know when you wear it that it was made with love for you and no one else in the world. So all I'm saying... well, my point is... that all said... I still do just really love that seven dollar T-Shirt.”