Unveiling the Illusion
This is Hannah Neilman. Hannah and her husband Daniel own Ballerina Farm. On this farm, the Neilmans live a picturesque farmhouse lifestyle with their children in tow. The farm looks like it was made in the 1800s, and the family kind of does too.
Concealing Fortunes
Hannah records this quaint farm life and publishes it all online to her combined 8 million followers. The videos show the Neilmans’ life on this adorable, modest homestead. Hannah spends her days baking rustic loaves of bread from scratch or hand-milking cows with her children. It’s very pastoral and very romantic. The videos seem to say, “Hey, we live in an old rundown farm, and we make the best of what we have.” It’s all genuinely quite charming.
Except, Hannah and Daniel are billionaires. Daniel’s father founded JetBlue Airlines, and Daniel is the heir to that empire. This fact is left out of all their videos, I would argue quite conspicuously. I don’t think the Neilmans are pretending to be poor, but they are co-opting poverty as an aesthetic, or at least some bizarre fictional version of it.
Echoes of History
Poverty in the modern world is not baking bread or milking cows, and we’ll talk about that later. This video is not about putting Hannah and her family on blast because, a) who cares, and b) the Neilmans are not the first rich people to treat poverty like a fashion statement. What they are doing is not unique at all; rather, it is a symptom of a much more popular phenomenon that has been around for a really long time — longer than you probably think.
From Royalty to Modernity
Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France before the French Revolution. Goes without saying, she was extremely, extremely wealthy. Indeed, she was known for her opulent lifestyle. During her reign, Marie Antoinette built what is called La Hameau de la Reine, or the little hamlet. She recruited workers to create a modest village for her, basically in her backyard. It was designed to look like an everyday peasant village, complete with farm animals like goats, cows, and sheep.
Modern Reflections
Kim Kardashian recently did a photo shoot where she dressed up like a milkmaid. This is eerily similar to the tales about Marie Antoinette in a way that is simultaneously repulsive, dystopian, and wholly unsurprising. The luxury brand Balenciaga sold dirty shoes with holes in them for two thousand dollars. Retail giant Urban Outfitters has said their aesthetic is “upscale homeless”.
All of this is super weird and feels kind of out of touch. The whole fake poor thing can also be seen in the entire phenomenon of “van life”. I’m sure there are plenty of van lifers that are not rich, but I know, and everyone else knows, that a lot of van lifers are just 20-somethings who came from money.
Unmasking the Reality
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with living in a van, but it is a very obvious example of the rich pretending, in some way, to be poor. Rich van lifers can be poor without the hard parts about actually being poor. They have safety nets; they don’t have to struggle to eat. When rich people live in a van, it’s cool. When poor people do it, they’re seen as somehow less than.
But all of this gets really boring. Who cares what rich people do? Sitting around complaining about it, rattling off chief offenders, is not a worthwhile use of time. What is really interesting, though, are the reasons why rich people love to act poor, and what it says about our world.