I Watch The Lifestyles Of Wealthy People Online And I highly Encourage It.

I just finished reading an essay by a brilliant but, in this case, deeply misguided creative arguing that we should all be “eating the rich” because rich people are supposedly what is wrong with the world. The piece was dense with theory, references to Bourdieu, Marx, false consciousness, symbolic violence, aesthetic laundering and a generous sprinkling of intellectual performance. It was also built on a foundation I fundamentally reject. You can read it here.

The entire premise of the essay is that nepo babies and wealthy influencers are a danger to the internet and that engaging with their content is an act of political betrayal. She said that admiring wealth is the same thing as consenting to your own oppression and that aspiration itself is a capitalist trick. That part in particular had my jaw hanging because when did it become a bad thing to aspire to more than you have?

Let’s be clear on one thing; I do not particularly care for influencers. I do not even follow most of the people that are usually cited in these conversations. I am not invested in defending anyone’s trust fund baby or their lifestyle. What I am deeply invested in, however, is defending the idea that poor people deserve hope, imagination, and a sense of possibility.

For many poor people, especially in a country like Nigeria, the internet is the first and sometimes only place where they ever get exposed to the vastness of life. It is their gateway to the world. Not books. Not elite universities. Not global travel. The internet. When you grow up surrounded by lack, scarcity becomes your normal. You learn very quickly to dream dreams that only match your environment. You learn not to want too much because look at your reality! The internet disrupts that. The internet shows you magnificent houses you did not know existed. Careers you did not know were real. Ways of living you were never introduced to. This kind of exposure matters to many people.

I love to watch rich people on the internet. I enjoy it and I encourage everyone to do it. I want poor people to see rich people. I want them to see big houses. I want them to see expensive lifestyles. I want them to see what is possible.

It is not symbolic violence to see a better life and desire it. It is not brainwashing to look at wealth and think, I want that for myself. It is not false consciousness to believe that your life can be materially different from that of your parents.

Wealth, in fact, is frequency. And yes, you can manifest it.

Permit me to introduce you to the law of correspondence, if you have not already heard of it. It states that everything below is the way that it is above, and everything without is the same way that it is within. In simpler terms, your external reality is a reflection of your internal world.

How you see money is how money will meet you. How you relate to power is how power will relate to you. If, on a subconscious level, you believe wealth only comes from theft, exploitation, and moral rot, then becoming wealthy will feel like something evil. And human beings do not move enthusiastically toward identities they find disgusting. You will unconsciously resist the very thing you claim to want. But if you see wealth as energy and as a resource that amplifies whoever is holding it, then you will stop flinching at abundance.

People love to mock manifestation because they reduce it to aesthetics and affirmations. But manifestation, at its core, is alignment. It is behaving in accordance with the version of yourself that already believes a different life is possible and making decisions from that place. Your inner world sets the ceiling for your outer world.

Whenever I hear or see people encouraging the poor to fixate on how “rigged” everything is, I hear an invitation to make peace with smallness under the disguise of political awareness and it makes my blood boil. I can tell you for free that what you’re doing is spiritual sabotage not wokeness.

Is there some truth to the issues she raised? Absolutely. Two things can be true at the same time. Systems can be flawed. Inequality can be real. And individual agency can still matter.

There is more than enough evidence in the world of people who were born with absolutely nothing and still became extraordinarily wealthy despite capitalism’s cruel grip on our world. Reality is more complex than the neat binary of oppressor and victim.

That essay collapses everything into a structure whilst leaving no room for will. Or imagination. No room for personal responsibility. It tells poor people, in essence, “The game is rigged and you will probably never win, but at least you can be morally superior about it.”

Encouraging people to hate the rich does nothing for poor people. It does not feed them. It does not house them. It does not give them skills. It does not expand their options. It only gives them a socially acceptable place to dump their anger. Class consciousness that ends at resentment is lazy. Consciousness that does not also include self-examination, ambition, and a hunger for upward movement is incomplete.

Who is teaching you people this madness?