First, you could argue that post-1960s cultural trends have genuinely stripped away certain elements of fun that used to attach to upper-class lifestyles. The dominance of a striving meritocratic spirit has made mere privilege less respectable than in the days when WASP scions coasted into Ivy League schools. Even if you have enough money to set your kids up for life, you still might feel the need to stress about college admissions because that’s what’s expected of you; the Ivy League imprimatur rather than the Social Register is where status really lies.
Likewise, the aesthetic trends of the past 50 years — the turn from ornament in architecture, the collapse of standards of dress and the spread of a casual affect even among billionaires — have stripped away a zone of aesthetic distinction that the superrich used to inhabit and enjoy. To be able to afford certain kinds of beauty, to build Newport palaces or just dress elegantly for dinner was a special grace granted to the old-time upper class, and even though rich people’s homes today are still absurdly expensive, they have lost crucial elements of visual distinction and delight.
Just adding zeros to your bank account doesn’t help with this. The characters on “Your Friends & Neighbors” are probably richer than many of the working admen (and -women) on “Mad Men,” Hamm’s prior portrait of existential issues on the Manhattan-to-Connecticut commute. But the “Mad Men” cast inhabits a far more stylish world, and so even though the personal problems are similar — adultery, divorce, difficult kids, depression — the Eisenhower-era characters seem more enviable because when they suffer, there are compensations in how cool and glamorous they look.
Then finally, perhaps, there was once a way in which rich people — yes, rich men, primarily — were granted a special zone of transgression, a space to commit sins like adultery and get away with it (pending divine displeasure, at least), that made them feel freer than the decent, respectable bourgeoisie. And that distinction largely collapsed with the sexual revolution’s democratization of desire.
Sure, fantasies of wealthy transgression endure — witness the appeal of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — and Elon Musk does have his bizarre postmodern harem. But in most cases, infidelity among the wealthy nowadays seems not all that different from infidelity among the middle class, yielding the same attempts to make the best of unpleasant separations, the same haggles over custody, except with a special pressure connected to the outsize financial stakes. If there’s anything that establishes a permanent mood of misery in “Your Friends & Neighbors,” it’s this sense that money mostly makes divorce more likely without making it that much more endurable.
