On unrestrained displays of wealth - Katherine Rosman in NYT:

‘In the modern Gilded Age of New York, where Instagram is awash in unrestrained displays of wealth, Brandon and Candice Miller were royalty.
At their 10th wedding anniversary “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, they celebrated with a few dozen friends in the backyard of their 5,500-square-foot vacation home in the Hamptons.
Beautiful women in gowns watched with their handsome husbands as the couple renewed their vows near a swimming pool strewn with peonies and rose petals beneath a canopy of lights.
It was a grand public display of their perfect life and marriage. Ms. Miller told a lifestyle blogger who wrote about the party that her husband’s speech “made me cry by the end with his authentic, raw emotion and romantic words.”

It all culminated in the kind of envy-inducing images anticipated by the roughly 80,000 followers of “Mama and Tata,” Ms. Miller’s popular Instagram feed, which featured a near-constant stream of photographs and videos of her glittering life.’

(…)

‘Her husband is gone. The home they so ostentatiously lived in, saddled by several mortgages, is not truly their own. Lawsuits from creditors, business bankruptcies, botched investments and even a repossessed boat — the “Miller Time” — indicate that the wealth needed to maintain their lifestyle had evaporated, if it ever truly existed.
Mr. Miller, 43, died on July 3 at a Southampton hospital. A suicide note indicated he had killed himself while his wife and children were on vacation on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, according to a Suffolk County law enforcement official. He said Mr. Miller wrote that a business deal he had hoped would ease the family’s financial strain had collapsed.
His family was stunned. When Ms. Miller was contacted for comment, a family spokesman said she and the children were overwhelmed by grief. “Candice is devastated by the loss of her soul mate, and her two young daughters’ lives are forever impacted by the loss of their beloved daddy,” he said.’

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‘That Mr. Miller’s death occurred in the Hamptons during the height of the social season almost certainly has added to the intrigue, said Neil J. Young, a historian who is writing a book about the Hamptons. Here, the only thing as fascinating as opulent wealth is its sudden disintegration.’

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‘Mr. Miller, on the other hand, eschewed social media — he primarily used a flip phone. Friends described him as a movie buff, basketball fan and car aficionado.
But when it came to his wife’s devotion to sharing their life online, she said he was all in. “I have the most supportive husband who encourages me to do whatever I love,” she told a lifestyle blog.
Off camera, they maintained traditional separations of duties, said a person familiar with their family dynamics. Ms. Miller oversaw the daily care of the children, and Mr. Miller focused on his business, which they rarely discussed.
She had visited his office only once, and she met his business partner just three times — including, most recently, beside her husband’s grave.’

(…)

‘Mr. Miller found himself in a financial crunch. In 2021, near the bottom of the pandemic market, he sold the family’s TriBeCa home for just over $9 million, according to city records. The family set their sights on living uptown, in the type of co-op building that Mr. Miller had grown up in. But buying on the Upper East Side would have required significant cash.
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Instead, they rented a 4,382-square-foot, five-bedroom apartmenton the corner of Park Avenue and East 71st Street, according to court records — keeping up appearances for $47,000 per month. They decorated with rented furniture for which they paid $180,000 for one year, according to a lawsuit filed this spring, and $12,000 per month after the first year.
If this was downsizing, it wasn’t enough.
Mr. Miller stopped paying some of the family’s bills, including, according to a lawsuit, the maintenance and docking fees for their Van Dutch speedboat — a frequent backdrop for late-night parties shared on Instagram. Such models generally sell for more than $1 million.’

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‘In a graveside ceremony attended by family and a small circle of friends, he was laid to rest next to his father.
The dismantling of their dream life began almost immediately. A mortgage lender sued Ms. Miller for $800,000 in missed payments and interest. The Miller Time was repossessed. And the “Mama and Tata” Instagram account was pulled offline.’

Read the article here.

The ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald hovers of the island, at least part of the island.

Alas, it’s a trivialized ghost.

And keeping up appearances for $47,000 per month is not exactly downsizing. The downsizing could have gone a little further. Just a little.

The question always is: what are you willing to die for?

For nothing, is an answer that can be found in Ecclesiastes and one of the better and more awkward books in the Bible.

But dying for keeping up appearances summarizes our culture neatly.

A tragedy it still is. But the word tragedy suffers also from inflation.