This past summer, I worked at an elite country club in an coastal New England town, both of which shall remain nameless due to my signing of a non-disclosure agreement and my reluctance to burn all my bridges.

My job at this club was the food expeditor, or “expo” for short, at the club’s poolside cafe. Working expo, for those who don’t know, means you facilitate coordination between the kitchen and the servers. I was in charge of making sure orders were correct and going to the right place, making sure each dish got its finishing touches, and communicating special requests from the servers to the kitchen. 

The country club’s members were multi-millionaire, sometimes billionaire, primarily-white New Yorkers who would fly their private jets to the little town and do nothing but sit by the pool and eat what our cafe had to offer, which was a shockingly boring and uninspired menu of inoffensive and predictable American classics. The members seemed to love the simplicity of getting a burger and fries from a club where they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars just to walk through the door. 

The expectation, both on behalf of the members and the club’s upper management, was that every request should be met with eager acceptance and understanding. These people were paying a large sum of money to be members at this club, but their frustration often went far beyond what I thought a normal human could feel at a minor inconvenience. I watched billionaires scream at me with tears in their eyes because they couldn’t get breakfast after 10:30am or because they had yet to receive their side salad. I had to stop myself from laughing at each of these occurrences because to me, more than anything, it revealed to me that these people have never not gotten what they wanted. The fact that they were being told “No” or being asked to wait drove them to the point of frustration that most of us only experience on our very worst days. 

However, the most egregious crime that I watched the members get away with, day in and day out, was being utterly and unforgivably boring. They all had seemingly been born into their wealth, not a single great inventor or intrepid entrepreneur among them, and this lifetime of wealth had protected them from both the highs and lows of the human experience. 

I overheard a lot of their conversations, and most of what they talked about was their wealth, as well as their panicked concerns that Zohran Mamdani would increase their taxes. The billionaires would chide the millionaires for their measly millions, and would often joke about picking up the tab for them so they could save money. They would debate The Hamptons vs Nantucket, Florida vs New York, and discuss recent property and plane purchases. They didn’t care that the menu of our cafe was a grown-up version of the kids menu, because that’s exactly what they wanted. Picky eaters who grew up eating whatever they told their nanny to cook for them and had never developed an appetite for anything else. They could be using their millions to fly to Tokyo or Brazil or Paris and eat racks of lamb with saffron rice and instead, they were wasting away their days by the pool and eating chicken caesar salad wraps. Most of them didn’t even swim in the goddamn pool. 

They have more money than God and they were spending it on $30 cheeseburgers. Like many rich people, they did not know how to spend their money. The club, with its upper six-digit initiation fee and flashy allure of being part of something that only the rich can afford, provided them with an easy place to throw money and feel as though they had spent it on something worthwhile. These people will never understand the true value of a dollar, and so it was very easy to get them to spend hundreds of thousands of them. I was watching monetary-mass delusion in real time. 

In a world where many live within one hospital visit of poverty and each and every purchase is deliberated until deemed absolutely necessary, it was incredibly frustrating to cater to the childish desires of people who spent their money like it was weightless. They didn’t realize the power and importance of what they have because most of them have never lived without it. The world in which they live is so far removed from what so many of us experience on a daily basis, and I came to realize that that’s what they were paying for at the club. It was a paradise where they could sit undisturbed amongst each other, eating the same boring food they had always eaten, raising their children to be just as spoiled and rotten as they are, and the people who existed only to help them wore little nametags so they never had to remember the name of someone who wasn’t in the same tax bracket as them. 

Lives of convenience and ease rarely craft interesting individuals. To a certain extent, I almost feel bad for them, and especially for their children. They might have been able to blossom into exciting people with passion and drive ,but instead they were just going to become more rich people with more money and time then they knew what to do with it. They’re going to waste their days talking to each other, avoiding meeting interesting people or appreciating exciting food, and they will never fully understand what it means to be human. Everytime I remember that and I start to feel a little sad for them, I remember how easily these people’s money could be used to help support universal childcare, fast and free buses, free college education, fully invested parks and libraries. I remember how easily a small tax increase on these people could change the lives of millions of New Yorkers, and I remember how staunchly opposed they are to anyone using their bountiful wealth to help anyone but themselves. Maybe if we convinced them that “universal childcare” is the name of a beautiful, all-inclusive country club being built upstate, they might be a bit more inclined to chip in. It’s worth a shot. 

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