Spoiled?
Last week, Danigirl at Postcards from the Mothership did a meme that’s a checklist of things that you might own or have done. The claim is that if you answer yes to 40 or more of them, you’re "spoiled."
I’m not going to show my answers, but I came embarassingly close to being officially spoiled, which sort of surprised me. I think both the fairly high score and my surprise have a lot to do with the attitude toward spending that I inherited from my parents — travel is always worth spending money on, but god forbid you should buy clothing that isn’t on sale.
The list of items is also sort of weird, and not terribly well thought out. Why on earth should going to New York and visiting the Statue of Liberty count as separate items? And the list mixes things that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (having a second home, owning a boat, having a college education without student loans), with things that are far less expensive (we don’t have a TV or DVD player in our bedroom, but that’s a matter of preference, not cost).
I was curious to see where the list came from, so I tried following the chain of links back to the start, but ran into a dead end with a friends-only livejournal. As others have pointed out, the list is both very American-centric and apparently aimed at a young audience (is having a queen sized bed really a big deal when two or more people are sleeping in it on a regular basis?).
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Yeah, the list is weird. I go to New York and DC fairly often but I can go for the day so it’s not a huge deal. Plus you can get Egyptian cotton sheets at Target. And when is daycare being spoiled? That’s really weird. I do have a housekeeper and a couple of other extras, but there are things I do without in order to have those things (like good clothes and expensive hair cuts).
May 4th, 2006 at 12:14 am
It was very idiosyncratic. One of the “spoiled” criteria is living near water, which makes pretty much everyone in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic spoiled, and probably some other reasons, too. That plus “eating at Seattle’s Space Needle” made me think it originated in the arid West, from which a trip to New York would be worthy of two separate mentions.
Also, equating riding lessons with swimming lessons? I agree that underprivileged people lack access to either, but it’s still apples and oranges.
May 4th, 2006 at 12:15 am
Oy. I meant “regions,” not “reasons.”
May 4th, 2006 at 6:42 am
I agree that the list is weird. I find it especially hard to swimming lessons as a luxury – you get them at school here in Australia (and I was also lucky enough to get a free university education, although you can’t get that any more here). I was surprised that my score wasn’t higher, as I think of myself as very spoiled, but that’s probably because the travel, as you say, is a bit US centric (I have’t been to NY, or the Atlantic coast of the US at all, or St Louis, but I have travelled to 35 countries).
May 4th, 2006 at 8:38 am
Hey, thanks for the shout-out. You should warn a girl, though – I coulda at least passed the vacuum before the guests started arriving!
I was bugged by a couple of items on the list, most notably day care, good credit and working appliances. These aren’t luxuries, and one would assume if you have good credit you are actually rather good at *not* indulging your every whim.
I scored pretty low, but I’m still fairly confident I’m spoiled – and I’m comfortable with that!
May 4th, 2006 at 9:16 am
So interesting that you view travel as always being a worthwhile expense. In my family it’s just the opposite: unless you’re visiting family, travel is an outrageous luxury. However I was raised to believe that a car needs to be of high quality and well taken care of, and so car expense is almost universally accepted.
Is that a regional difference? (The car thing I can see coming from my family who were still on the farm 50 years ago.) Do you think your style of acceptance of travel expense is common on the east coast?
May 4th, 2006 at 10:16 am
I’ve seen this before and am convinced it was put together by a high school student. Weekend mini-vacations? For a while, that was all we could afford. What, exactly, constitutes a “childfree bathroom”? And, as an only child and the mom to an only child, I can’t help but get annoyed by the continuation of the cliche that only children are spoiled.
May 4th, 2006 at 11:07 am
The one thing I wondered about was all the things that I could easily afford but choose not to have (TV/dvd in the bedroom, 20 pairs of shoes, etc). Kind of made me feel like a snob reading through it.
May 4th, 2006 at 11:29 am
To my family if you are paying for something that you have the time to do yourself than it is a luxury. I clean my own home and refuse to pay $300+ for someone to wash my windows. I didn’t see landscaping on that list. To me that is a luxury if you don’t own a farm-size lot. A car is a necessity in most areas of the U.S.; what type of car would be more logical. Plus people cut back in other areas so they can enjoy some luxuries. Although the list intrigued my curiosity (I scored 26) it is strange to define what is spoiled or not; it depends on perspective. Also, the list was centered around the U.S. (what region I have no idea) and not internationally. If you have a list of what makes someone spoiled in a poorer nation vs. the U.S. well then our standard of living is spoiled. Purchasing a home gym can be more cost effective than a membership. The celebrity and politician items were strange- what if you are related to a celebrity, but do not dine with other celebrities. The list should be more specific.
May 4th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I wound up with a score of 28. It seems like the meme has similar imperfections to those that show up in most online quizzes of all kinds — lack of specificity. The examples that turned up in my taking the quiz were things like the assumption that a debt-free college education came about because my family was wealthy enough to pay the full cost (not actually so — I paid for it with scholarships, is that a “spoiling” influence?) and owning original art (the quiz’s assumption might be that I bought it, but it was given to me by the makers who are friends and relatives of mine).
May 4th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
In response to Jen, I’ve found that my Western and midwest relatives are willing to spend more of their incomes on U.S. travel (by car and plane), because they live so far away from major cities, nice vacation sites, and from other friends and relatives.
As an East Coast girl, I have beaches, big cities, theme parks, ski resorts, and lots of family within a few hour’s drive. I can drive a 1990 Toyota station wagon because I don’t spend long hours in my car. But I’m also more likely to fly to Europe than my rural Kansas/Iowa/Arizona relatives — because my tickets are cheaper and I live right next to a major airport.
May 4th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
Hmm. Well, I came in exactly at 40, but I certainly don’t think I’m spoiled. I have a husband who’s a tech junkie, so that covered those questions, we like to travel and have lived in the Northeast a good part of our lives (of course, the Mall of America question is certainly an oddball unless, like us, you lived in the Twin Cities), and now that I’m working again, daycare is a necessity and a housecleaner is also necessary, at least from a health code standpoint.
It would be interesting to see where something like this came from. Who writes these things?!
May 5th, 2006 at 10:26 am
Okay, some of these are odd, but I think that some of these criteria mean that you have economic privilege, or have had, which could mean to someone else that you are “spoiled.”
For example– good credit can mean that a) you have not had the kinds of economic catastrophe that can make you live off credit cards you have no way of paying off b)that if you did, you had family who could bail you out with either money or resources (shelter, etc). I can also mean that you went to college– it’s much easier to get a credit card at 19 if you are a college student, than if you are not. It can also mean that you grew up with healthier attitudes to money in your house– I remember landismom doing a series of posts on this recently.
Also for example– I can see a difference between swimming and riding lessons. Riding lessons are much more expensive, in my experience, and also are much less likely to happen in the city, whereas swimming lessons can happen at the local YMCA. Also, riding lessons assume that you all have regular access to horses– which to someone raised in rural areas, is not a big deal, but for those raised in poorer urban areas, it can seem like another planet. There are many more free public pools than free public horse farms.
For another– having a queen-size bed means you have a room large enough to hold one– many small apartments and even small houses do not. Maybe daycare at a licensed center is a luxury to someone who’s relying on an elderly grandmother. Some working appliances are definitely a luxury– there’s a reason why the houses on my block all have laundry hanging outside today– for my neighbors, a working dryer may be a luxury.
In short, I think it’s the term “spoiled” that is throwing people off, but I also have trouble with the idea that many of you don’t seem to see items on the list as indicative of economic privilege. Choosing housekeeping over expensive hair cuts is a very privileged choice to have. I’ll probably make people angry with this post, but this conversation has seemed weirder to me than the list of items– there’s a lot of defensive puzzlement that in turn is puzzling to me.
May 5th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
“Child-free bathroom” is an weird item. My bathroom is invariably free of children, but not by design. If a child needed to use my bathroom, he or she would be more than welcome.
Do people with mutliple bathrooms and children regularly restrict their offspring to a subset of those bathrooms?
May 5th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
I have to agree with Jackie. I scored 34, and there is no question that I am privileged. I hate to think I’m spoiled, but I can see how other people might see it that way. Still, as others point out, lots of things on the list are weird…
May 6th, 2006 at 10:40 am
I agree with Jackie too. The list is not well thought out and parts of it don’t make sense, but overall the things mentioned are things you wouldn’t have without privilege. I never carry a credit card debt–but the fact is, I don’t have to. I make enough money that I can buy all of the things I need and many things I want without having to carry a balance. That’s a privilege. Perhaps going to New York seems silly if you’re born there–but being born in a major metropolitan centre might confer advantages, too, in terms of educational and employment opportunities.
It still probably originated with a young kid who was feeling left out of life, but I don’t think all of the items on it are nonsense. Frankly I’d expected to be ‘spoiled’ since by any income measurements my family is doing well, but I’m not, and even if I were American I wouldn’t have a high enough score. Hell, just being American is a privilege in the world today–you are a citizen of the world’s only empire. I can’t afford travel, good clothes, expensive haircuts, or a housekeeper. Being able to make those choices sure looks nice to me. We pay the mortgage and the bills (some of which are luxuries, like high-speed internet) and after that there’s not much left over, even for savings. Still, that I can afford to buy a house with more than one bathroom and buy new clothing for myself and my family makes me, in my view, privileged; I still didn’t score as “spoiled.”
I do have a childfree bathroom, because I live in a house that’s big enough to have more than one bathroom–a privilege. If you live in a small apartment or house with one bathroom for your family, you would not have a childfree bathroom.
No meme is perfect (and that this is one is generating controversy strikes me as odd–why no discussions over Which Greek Goddess Are You? Or What Colour is Your Personality? or any of the other similarly flawed memes that propogate across the internet every week?) but I think if you compared a privileged with an underprivileged population you’d see a marked difference in scores. In fact, the friends I have who have done the meme and who I know are struggling financially scored very, very low.
May 7th, 2006 at 11:39 am
I can tell, at the very least, that it wasn’t written by anyone who lives in Michigan, where almost everyone has access to water, and “international travel” is a matter of going to Canada to drink at 19 rather than 21 😉
I feel pretty priveleged, as an only child and a person who has travelled quite a bit. I scored under 30… BUt I agree with Jackie.
If your response to any of them was “what? how is X a sign of being spoiled,” I think it’s worth taking a minute to think about what it says that you think of X as part of a basic standard of living. I know people who now say that a house with *only* 2.5 bathrooms is “practically unsaleable.” I know people who considere anything less than a *king* bed “cramped and uncomfortable.” It takes being reminded that these things are, to many people, *luxuries,” to remind us of the level of privelege many of us enjoy.
May 7th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Ok, I just wrote another full post responding to some of the big points in this discussion, but I wanted to pick up on some of the smaller issues.
Jen, I don’t think the travel is specifically a geographic thing. I think it comes from a very specific Jewish middle-class-but-aspiring background that believes that money is meant to be spent on “improvement” — primarily education, but travel can also be justified on the same grounds.
Lindsay, I’m not entirely sure what is meant by a “child-free bathroom” either. We’re at the stage where it’s a privilege to get to use the bathroom without sharing it (at the same moment) with a child, but that’s because of their horror at the idea that we might close the door with them on the other side, not because there’s a shortage of bathrooms to go around.
May 8th, 2006 at 12:49 am
So basically what you’re saying is…some kid with no economics/sociological/political-science credentials and a lot of free time created his own “are you spoiled” test and people are upset over it? Go figure. 😉
May 8th, 2006 at 8:51 am
yikes — 39!
May 8th, 2006 at 9:40 am
Late comment but – I just wanted to make another case as to how flawed that list is. I like to call myself expertly poor, or what some people might consider frugal and resourceful. I used to clean stalls in exchange for riding lessons in high school. I own several items on the spoiled list because they were either given to me, I bought them at a thrift store/yard sale, or acquired them from freecycle(.org). I also have maintained stellar credit while I put myself through college and during my years as a struggling single mother because I worked my ass off and managed my money meticulously.
While I have enjoyed certain privileges (being white and going to college, mainly), I’ve spent a lot of time on public assistance as well. I think there’s a lot to said for good old-fashioned frugality and resourcefulness when you don’t have any expendable income.