Sigh

For reasons I can’t quite describe, this story about people cutting back on spending (or to be more precise, what people aren’t cutting back on) infuriated me:

“I’m not giving up my Corvette or selling my diamond,” writes Susan, who is suffering with her husband through a three-year drought of underemployment. Emily won’t sacrifice travel because “it’s too important to my identity and what makes me me.” Jen, meanwhile, spends her days not working in an office but searching for freelance work at a coffee shop with Wi-Fi, drinking iced lattes because “it keeps my world normal as I know it.”

I can’t even tell you why this article annoyed me so badly. Maybe it’s the use of the word “suffering” to describe someone who is so well off that they’ve had to fight against considering the horrible proposition of selling an overpriced sports car or a rock. It’s not really a sense of entitlement that I find annoying; if they can afford to travel without going on the dole, so be it. Maybe it’s the fuzzy and pretentious notion that someone considers travel to be part of her identity, whatever the hell that means. “Oh, I’m so cosmopolitan I couldn’t bear to give up summer on the Seine.” I dunno.