Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] What happens when the party ends?
[00:00:07] My cousin writes about parties. I write about what happens when you go home alone.
[00:00:12] Daisy Prince publishes the Digital Party, a weekly digital magazine that's really about cultural trends and undercurrents of what's happening in this crazy decade, which she calls the new twenties. A New York based writer and editor with over 20 years of experience, her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Town and Country, and Born out of the Pandemic. As an antidote to doom scrolling, the Digital Party showcases how affluent communities are building connection in an increasingly digital world. Yes, there are party pictures. People love the eye candy. But the real focus is on the cultural shifts happening right now.
[00:00:50] Call it melancholy, call it slight depression, call it realism. I focus on what happens when the party ends and you're alone with yourself.
[00:00:58] While the Digital Party Tadler and other publications explore how the wealthy create community and culture, I focus on the hidden costs, the pressure, the isolation, the paradox of people who claim to value privacy, yet show up religiously at events designed for public consumption. They'll attend every charity event with a camera crew present, post carefully curated shots on Instagram, and bristle when anyone asks a real question about their lives.
[00:01:24] Is that privacy? I call that personal marketing or curated control.
[00:01:29] A recent Wall Street Journal article, the Ultra Rich Are Spending a Fortune to Live in Extreme Privacy revealed how the ultra wealthy are spending fortunes to live in what they call extreme privacy. But reading between the lines, it's not actually privacy they're buying, it's curation.
[00:01:46] They're not avoiding people, they're avoiding regular people. Private clubs with $15,000 initiation fees, members only. Restaurants with C shaped booths designed so guests can't see each other.
[00:01:59] Entire wellness Centers rented for $150,000 where a family doesn't have to share the space.
[00:02:04] As one Miami wealth manager put it, they have enough money to live exactly how they want to live. One developer interviewed for the article said his clients want to socialize in circles that are meticulously selected.
[00:02:17] Another wealthy woman explained why she prefers these curated spaces.
[00:02:22] The conversations for some reason, they just feel safer and they feel deeper. You hang out with people that are like minded. Here's what struck me about that quote. She can only have deeper conversations with people who are exactly like her. That's not depth, that's an echo chamber. The comments on that Wall Street Journal article were telling. Readers praised Warren Buffett for shopping at McDonald's and talking to regular people. One wrote, being part of a community, talking and engaging with all members of society in America is deeply rewarding. To alienate yourself is to deprive yourself of the essence of America. The wealthy have a constitutional right to associate with whomever they choose. But when you only talk to people in your tax bracket, or when you engineer your entire life to avoid encountering anyone different, that's not privacy. That's isolation dressed up as luxury.
[00:03:13] My experience has taught me to read social media backwards.
[00:03:16] The more perfect and polished someone's Instagram looks, the more dysfunctional their life often is. Behind the scenes, celebrities have been confessing to this for years. Years after a perfect gala photo gets posted, the same person does an interview.
[00:03:32] I looked beautiful on the outside, but inside I was dying, or my marriage was falling apart that night, or I was using heavily. The wealthy don't want privacy from admiration. They want privacy from scrutiny. They want to be seen on their terms in flattering at carefully curated moments.
[00:03:50] What they're really saying is, please photograph me at the Met gala or hugging orphans, just don't ask me any hard questions.
[00:03:57] This connects to something called hyper agency, a wealthy person's compulsion to control everything, including how they're perceived.
[00:04:05] The concept of hyper agency was developed by sociologist Paul Shurovich. He described it as the ability of the extremely wealthy to shape the very conditions and rules of society rather than just operating within them.
[00:04:18] Similarly, psychiatrist and author Paul Hochmeier has built upon this term and calls it the capacity to control your world to avoid any discomfort.
[00:04:28] That level of control comes at a cost. It prevents you from doing the hard work of healing psychological wounds. When you're constantly managing your image out of fear of being seen for your real self. You can't be honest about your struggles. And when you can't be honest, you can't get help.
[00:04:44] I've watched someone close to me project Glamour on social media while privately unraveling. By the time anyone realized how bad things were, it was too late.
[00:04:54] That's the real pressure of privilege, the isolation that comes from needing to look perfect all the time. Why does any of this matter? Because none of us knows what comes next. A recession? A depression? A repeat of the 1929 crash. If Daisy is right and we're in the roaring new twenties, we already know what historically comes after the roar when the music stops. You don't want your only asset to be good party pictures. You want to be in the best possible shape psychologically, physically and financially to handle a market crash.
[00:05:25] My friend Ryan Levesque, who writes the Digital Contrarian, describes this moment as a collision of cycles, technological upheaval, economic tightening, long wave shifts in the global economy and our own internal life cycles all crusting at once.
[00:05:40] When those waves line up, things don't just change gradually, they snap. Business models break. Roles and identities get stripped away. The illusion of control gets tested. Our great great grandfather Frederick H. Prince weathered the 1929 crash not by being extravagant, but by being disciplined. While others invested crazily during the Roaring Twenties, he bought industrial shares with care. Anticipating instability, he avoided leverage, owned what he controlled outright, and stayed disciplined when others lost their heads. His Fortune, estimated at 250 million, remained largely intact because he invested in enterprises that created real value stockyards, railroads, land. When the crash came, he lost friends to suicide while he had the liquidity to buy depreciated assets. The lesson Restraint and long term thinking outlast the party.
[00:06:33] We can dance into oblivion or we can prepare ourselves.
[00:06:37] My cousin writes about how people build connection and culture that work matters. There's a genuine wellness aspect to gathering in person.
[00:06:44] In lifestyle medicine, connection is one of the core pillars of health. And we've been told we are in an epidemic of loneliness. In an era when we're increasingly trapped by our phones. Parties aren't just frivolous, they're a form of social health.
[00:06:58] As Daisy puts it, serendipity is not something you can create from a screen. And serendipity is one of the great magical things in life. She's right. Parties make chance encounters possible. When humans are in a room together, the sparks that lead to jobs and relationships can happen.
[00:07:14] I'd prefer my child goes to a party, has a few drinks and takes a cab home instead of spending the whole evening gaming or scrolling.
[00:07:21] Yet you can be at every party and still feel completely alone.
[00:07:25] You can be blocked from the possibility of serendipity because if you're managing your image the whole time you're there, you're not actually present for the magic you're performing.
[00:07:35] Here's my confession. I used to need alcohol at those parties. I was shy and a few drinks made the conversations flow easier. But looking back, I wonder how much of that ease was just numbing myself enough to tolerate the superficiality. When everyone's guarding their image, small talk is all that's safe.
[00:07:54] The alcohol didn't create connection, it just made the lack of it bearable.
[00:07:58] So what happens when you don't want to be truly seen?
[00:08:01] What do you do when the beautiful photos of you or your friends mask profound loneliness? What do you do when those images become a prison?
[00:08:10] The Privacy wealthy people claim to guard often isolates them from the very help they need. They're not protecting their peace, they're protecting their image. And that protection can become deadly.
[00:08:22] So yes, Daisy writes about the cultural moments and community building of old money life. And I'm grateful someone does. There's a real value in documenting how people come together, how serendipity happens, how connection forms.
[00:08:35] But I write about the cost of keeping up appearances because you can attend every party and still be profoundly isolated. The party photos aren't the whole story. Sometimes they're the opposite of the story.
[00:08:46] So here's my paradoxical advice. Subscribe to the digital party, go to the events, show up for the serendipity, but leave the performance at home. My work on wealthy minimalism is about letting go of control, including the exhausting control over how you're perceived.
[00:09:04] Real serendipity requires presence. Real connection requires vulnerability.
[00:09:09] The wealthy person's paradox is having maximum freedom but minimum connection.
[00:09:15] Daisy writes about how to create the connection. I write about what prevents it. Get off your phone, show up in person, but when you do actually be there. Let go of the performance. Let serendipity do its thing. You'll be in better shape emotionally when this economic cycle ends. And that could make all the difference.
[00:09:34] If you want more of this and to be notified when my book Wealthy Minimalism is published, sign up for my newsletter early to Rise O E H R L I To Rise if this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. But here's the real thing. I want you to know if you're carrying something you can't talk about, if you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs.
[00:10:07] I work one on one with people like you navigating exactly that. You can reach me@diana oehrli.com thanks for listening.
