This weekend I went for the first time to The Brooklyn Mirage, an outdoor club in Bwillshwick (?) that resembles someone turning the multiplayer Temple from GoldenEye into an Instagram experience. We tried to pregame before the show — by the way, meme-famous DJ Baauer was terrible — but failed to get drunk enough beforehand and didn't have any other easy drugs on us. So I committed to just buy some liquor there. MIS TAKE.
First off, they make you put on an RFID bracelet and load your debit card info onto it. That's the only way to pay inside the club. An effective way to strip you of whatever meager proprioception you've built up connecting the swipe of a card with the elimination of net worth.
More importantly, though, the prices were a joke. Like I got a Jack on the rocks and the hot chick casually said that'll be fourteen and I kind of laughed. That's how much a double used to cost at expensive places when I started drinking.
Overall, the night ended up costing me around $200. This is pretty remarkable. The show was selected for its cheap ticket of $10, which means $15 because they can, which means two tickets is $30. Nice! Then we had to take cabs, the second of which was EIGHTY ONE DOLLARS due to surge pricing and distance. And then in the club, of course, drinks for two people consistently robbed me of anywhere from $30 and $50 per swipe.
The next morning, I looked back on my night and just felt sad. There is absolutely no way to get ahead in this city, in this life. I recently got a raise at work, and I was feeling good about it until I started to realize how far it was outpaced by the rise in prices of everything around me. I'm supposed to see Paul Simon with Laskin in a few weeks, and that ticket is a cool $160. It kills me that these prices will seem quaint in a few years.
There are a few things going on here. Obviously New York is a purposefully expensive place to live, and prices are driven up in response to the flood of global capital that comes here to live, work, invest, and debauch. You go in knowing that. But over the course of my decade plus here, I've only recently gotten the full sweep of the growth of that cost. It is oppressive.
The price-driving factor I most resent, even more than the corporate-minded profit maximization that characterizes every modern institution, is this idea that it's fashionable to feel pain when you pay for something. I have no idea how new or timeless this taste is, but it does seem endemic to New York, if not cosmopolitan places generally. I'm not talking about the Rolex or the fancy car. I'm talking about daily experiences. The psychology of perceived value has been heaped onto these high-society rubes to such a monumental degree, they don't even understand how masochistic they are. The phenomenon goes beyond simply attributing value to things that are priced higher. It's a fetishization of the little pinch you feel. The check comes for dinner, and it's in a converted bodega in a terrible neighborhood in Bed-Stuy, and the asshole next to you is talking to his silent date about how "I don't want to be a dick at work. I know what I'm worth," and you have to suffer through paying goddamn $150 because men of my age are still picking up the check.
The operating theory for this inflation is that the money supply's expansion over the last decade (which was either a doubling or tripling) has gone exclusively to urban elites, partly thanks to (the failure of) policy and partly the shitty mechanics of how the Fed inserts new dollars into the system, and this demographic has just been circulating the money amongst ourselves ever since. The way to test this would be to see if urban elite inflation is higher than the rest of the country's. I bet it is.
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