‘The White Lotus,’ Daphne, and the Luxury of Delusion

Money may not bring happiness, but it can buy the next-best thing.

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When I was in grad school, I worked part-time for a wealthy family. I tutored in their Manhattan home, a beautiful place on the Upper East Side. They also owned a weekend home at the tip of Long Island. They often invited me to fancy events. They gave me free passes to practically every museum in the city. I was welcome to their refrigerator during the 15 hours a week that I worked there. And I was grateful, not only for their kindness, but because I was completely poor. My monthly food budget was something like $100 at the time, and I survived by eating pasta every day at home and discreetly eating a ton of free food at theirs. When their housekeeper visited each week, I wondered if she did the same.

The housekeeper would bring her elementary-school-aged daughter to her shifts, and I would play with the daughter while having conversations with her mom. I can’t remember what we talked about, only that it was never about the family that we worked for. I don’t know if we were afraid of hidden cameras, or worried that someone would overhear, or if we just felt more appreciative than resentful of their wealth, but our conversations ignored that we were two poor people of color working as The Help for rich white people.

But we did have a look. We shared the look whenever we noticed something that seemed especially rich and white, raising our eyebrows with a smirk and a shrug. Money strewn about on the floor? Gesture, smirk, and shrug. A $15 price sticker on a four-ounce container of pistachios? Gesture, smirk, and shrug. The look asked, “Who lives like this?” and “Do they have any idea how wild that is?” It said, “Rich people live on another planet.” Who spends $15 on four ounces of pistachios?

I spent much of my life as a poor Black kid surrounded by rich white people, and I often wonder about their sense of reality. The allure of lifestyle porn in TV and movies is that it offers insight into how rich people live and think, and allows me the fantasy of knowing what it’s like—but feeling confident that I still have my working-class grip on how the world works for most people. You may not be surprised that I love The White Lotus.

The primary theme of HBO’s hit drama, which collected 10 Emmys earlier this year, is that rich people are deeply unhappy despite their privilege, and that they will search for solutions to their misery in paradisiacal vacation resorts. My favorite motif of the show, though, is that most people who are accustomed to wealth lack even a shred of self-awareness, and those who do see through the existential misery still choose the delusion. The realization that people can still be unhappy in paradise is too much for the characters to bear, and as a result, the wealthy people escape to another reality.

In Season 1, one of the characters we follow is Rachel, who slowly recognizes the warped reality of the rich. She is an anchor for the audience, hating the bizarro world of the vapid and rich—but eventually choosing to join it. In the second season, which just ended, Daphne represents a natural progression of someone who recognizes the delusions of the rich but goes beyond accepting it to fully embracing what it has to offer.

HBO

Daphne and her husband, Cameron, are seemingly among the happiest of the rich people. But Daphne in particular has a clear understanding of why she’s so happy: Everyone, no matter how many advantages they have, feels like a victim, so she chooses to do whatever she needs to balance the scales. Daphne practices a type of hedonistic justice, where her privileges—being wealthy, young, beautiful, white—buy her way out of existential crises. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy delusion … and that’s close enough.

Daphne and Cameron’s friend couple, Harper and Ethan, are new to being rich, with Ethan having sold his company in a multimillion-dollar windfall. While much of Harper and Ethan’s plot centers on their relationship—their jealousy and their dying sex life—my favorite part of their character arcs was seeing how they would navigate being “new money.” They think that they’re different from those rich people, and Harper repeatedly describes Ethan as being “the same,” unchanged by becoming rich. The irony of repeating that compliment on the beach of a five-star White Lotus resort is lost on them, signifying the change already taking place. Like Rachel in Season 1, Ethan eventually faces a symbolic decision: He’s aware enough to see the miseries of the rich, and must choose whether to embrace Daphne’s hedonistic justice.

Rich people in The White Lotus live at the expense of others, but the real prize of their wealth is the luxury of delusion. Working-class and poor people can only hope to benefit by taking advantage of rich people’s dreams about how happiness really works. And when given the choice between facing problems without money or embracing the delusions that wealth affords, people will almost always choose to be rich.

And if you can’t be rich, you can gesture, smirk, and shrug.

I like to think that if I was suddenly wealthy, I would keep my grip on reality. But maybe that’s delusional, too, if only because I do in some way dream of being rich. The housekeeper and I shrugged, smirked, and wondered, Who lives like this? But we always ate the pistachios. And we loved them.

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Thanks to everyone who responded to my last Humans Being, about culture influencers and Twitter. My favorite emails were all the ones mourning Humans Being, which I announced will end this month. They made me laugh, and feel very loved:

“No more Humans Being? No, I won’t allow it. Carry on. Sorry.”

“I don’t want it to end. It can’t end. And yes, it is all about me.”

One of them just said, “No!”

17 days ’til Humans Being ends.