Do you work?

You may think you do, but you probably don't.

“Do you work?” I looked to my right at the person who asked me this question, which sounded like a typo. He was around 28, tall with a messy head of brown hair and blue eyes, and he was wearing a perfectly fitted dark blue suit with a faintly pink shirt barely buttoned to his navel, a thin decorative scarf, a gold pinky ring, and a watch that could fund the average midwestern couple’s retirement. He was looking askance at me–peering, really–and seemed bored.

Given the context, his question was reasonable.

For a stretch in the mid-aughts I accidentally ran around New York City almost exclusively with fashion editors, Upper East Side trust fund kids, and European nobility. During this brief, surreal window into an alternate universe I received fuckoff-sized paper invitations to museum galas, found myself on the guest lists of the most exclusive clubs (Beatrice, Double 7, and Bungalow 8), and humored a lot of fraught conversations in Spring and Fall about where people were summering and wintering, which were new verbs in my plebeian vocabulary. I never had to break stride to walk through any door preceded by a line or velvet ropes, because I was walking in behind people who had names that were preceded by hereditary titles, immortalized in social registers, and printed on the mastheads of then important but now irrelevant publications. I don’t quite know how it happened, but suddenly no one in my entire social circle really did anything but attend.

These were people who don’t work (PWDW, pronounced pee-dub-dee-dub).

The bored toff and I were seated next to one another at a dinner in the subterranean wine cellar of a very buzzy, flash-in-the-pan restaurant on the Lower East Side, which at the time was chic and favored by the jetset because it was still an overlooked, underdeveloped home to other jetsetters pretending to be poor artists. Among the dozen or so people around the table were a few leggy, bright-young-thing Vogue editors who lived off of bottomless expense accounts, but most of the guests were Counts and Barons and Ladies from Europe and the UK. It was like the United Nations for landed gentry. They were of the variety of restless, angsty rich children who in their mid-twenties leave behind their medals and sashes and ride into New York City on the magnetic strips of their parents’ debit cards to befriend DJs, abuse drugs, and have a lot of sex until their family sends a prim attaché to quietly fetch them from rehab or, worse, extract them from an inappropriate relationship. Funded by heaps of ill-begotten aristocratic wealth and powered by nouveau socialite influence, the dinner was a perfectly balanced sycophantic ecosystem.

I felt sorely out of place. My inseam is barely 32 inches after yoga, my family doesn’t have a coat of arms or a castle, and back then, the only thing I attended with regularity was an office where I worked.

This brings me back to the essential question, which sounded like, d’jooWEHK?

In the only two and a half syllables that he uttered at me, I could hear in his accent where he sat in the House of Windsor’s extended family tree: a branch far enough from duty to be making small talk with me at 10pm on a Tuesday night in NYC, but close enough to be wary of who he was seated next to. I decided there was only one direction to take this conversation.

“God, no,” I said, looking slightly away from him, furrowing my brow just a bit and lacing my two-word response with a touch of disgust. I took care not to expend more energy answering the question than he had expended asking it. People whose generational wealth and privilege have spared them the drudgery of working for a living ironically speak as if they are perpetually exhausted—as if every word that emerges from their pouted mouths requires Herculean effort. (Watch Prince – sorry, King Charles speak. You’ll see what I mean.)

“I have no living family who have ever worked,” I pronounced flatly, meeting his gaze, entirely committed to wearing his birthright as a costume. He laughed, very pleased by this.

“I thought all the money in America was only a generation or two old,” he said, sneering a bit. “Barely even a patina on it.” I imagined how annoying he must have been at Eaton. I bet he’d been a flamboyant fencer and a closeted bisexual.

“The proper families in New York sorted themselves out in the late 1800s,” I said, “not long after we sent your lot bleeding back to King George.” He raised his eyebrows and laughed. How is it that even the most handsome Brits look like horses when they laugh? The young woman to his right leaned in and addressed us in a very thick Italian accent imbued with plummy British.

“What are you two laughing about?” She was arrestingly beautiful. She probably would have been a model if her family hadn’t forbidden her from working.

“This American is explaining how peerage works in his country,” he said, his sneer-laugh reduced to a fatigued chuckle and a lazy smirk. I couldn’t tell if I was now in on the joke or the joke itself.

“Do you work?” I asked her. She smiled very sweetly and slightly shook her pretty head. 

“Not yet, maybe I will not work – at a job,” she said. “I like reading and studying. I like learning about Italian art and history.” EEE-storee.

“Contessa Constantina’s family owns most of southern Italy,” announced the disdainful Brit. “Her studying art and history is just sort of reading the diaries of her ancestors.” He laughed at his joke. Constantina playfully slapped his arm and bared her perfect teeth at him. I realized right then and there that if I didn’t stop RSVPing to cursive invitations and gliding around with bored aristocrats and laughing at jokes about being bored aristocrats, I’d lose my drive, my self-respect, and certainly my savings.

I never saw the Brit or his Italian heiress again. They probably now have two kids in boarding school, split their time between Soho, Southampton, Surry and Sardinia, and both keep thinly concealed boyfriends on the Upper East Side or in Portugal. I distanced myself from PWDW and found friends who wanted to do things and build things (DTBT). I did things and built things.   

Today, I am again surrounded by people who do not work.

But it’s a different kind of idleness. It isn’t rarified or earned over generations. These PWDW are not confined to secret dining rooms and donor circles and the fashion shows of young people bankrolled by ancestral conquests depicted in oil paintings displayed on the walls of their families’ crumbling villas. They’re everywhere.

No one really works anymore.

We check our many inboxes. We toggle between our employers’ email account, Instagram DMs and iMessage. We affirm things, rearrange things, and every once in a while, emphatically disagree with things to show that we’re paying attention. Like toddlers pretending to eat peas to appease their parents, we just move things around on our plates and occasionally throw fits. White collar digital work apes social media: everything has been reduced to likes and the shrug emoji.

Many of the PWDW I know these days have had an exit, and they are no longer required to even performatively work. An exit is when you build something that someone else perceives to be valuable or threatening, and they give you an eye-watering sum of money to allow what you’ve built to be digested into a larger business, where it will eventually wither, or to be extinguished immediately out of competitive spite. Post-exit people are a funny lot. They work insanely hard for three to twelve years, usually in relative poverty, and then a single event rockets them into the socioeconomic stratosphere, where they meet other people who don’t work—often the gilded European and posh Brit types from whom I extracted myself back in 2006. Together, they attend thought leadership conferences where they exchange tips about places to summer and winter that working people have never heard of.

The only people I know who actually work are people who do things with their hands, and this does not include typing. I’m talking about the kind of work performed by surgeons and landscapers and carpenters. People whose vocations have proper names still work. Florist, butcher, fishmonger. If you are something, you work. If you work in something, you don’t actually work. If your money comes from something, you definitely don’t work.

So, I ask you -

Do you work?