Sad Bastards of Instagram

Still in Rotation: Barry Manilow Live... A Few Days Late and a Can of Spam Short

Sad Bastards of Instagram

My 16 year old walked into the kitchen the other day and I said, “Do you know about #rkoi?”

“Oh…no,” she said, in the doomsday manner of a movie character who has just glimpsed a skyscraper-sized tsunami wave in the distance, or the lava dribbling over the top of a nearby volcano. She knows when her mother is about to launch a stemwinder, and she gripped the kitchen table to withstand the onslaught.

You may want to do the same.

#rkoi stands for Rich Kids of Instagram. If you post something on the popular photo sharing site, you can give it a hashtag and a description to make it easier for people to find related photos. So if you’re a rich kid on Instagram, you tag your shots #rkoi in case anyone needs to see proof that you are living large. There’s a helpful Tumblr that consolidates those shots into one place, not to mention an upcoming book with the same title. Somehow in my Web wanderings I’d stumbled across it, never to be the same again.

At first glance, #rkoi is where the current unprecedented and obscene concentration of wealth in the uppermost class meets the worst examples of Millennial self-absorption. Every single shot I saw tagged #rkoi could be captioned,”Lookee here, peasants! I’m rich!”

Here is what #rkois really like to document in photographs, based on my non-scientific but time-sucking study of their hashtag:

Breakfast on private jets
Their skills at shoving a Jeraboam of Dom Perignon into an already overstuffed piece of Louis Vuitton luggage
Infinity pools
Their ability to arch one eyebrow while gazing at themselves in a mirror and taking a selfie
Their weekday shopping receipts from the jeweler totaling multiple thousands of dollars, usually with a caption like, “Oops, I did it again!”
Artfully staged arrangements of watches/cars (male #rkois) or shopping bags/shoes (female #rkois.)

At first, the photos enraged me and depressed me. What is wrong with people? What has happened to humanity? What hope is there for the future when #rkoi exists?

Luckily, I finally reached a saturation point of views of arched-eyebrow rich kids brandishing Cartier shopping bags from wrists encircled by three-pound Swiss watches, and that’s when I started laughing out loud. Because I realized the #rkois are actually #sbois: the Sad Bastards of Instagram.

I mean, these are people who are being bred to be functionally useless, and they are documenting their own demise. The highlight of your day is arranging your shoes on your king size bed into a colorwheel and then plopping into the center so your maid can snap your picture? Do you realize how hard your maid is laughing at you on the inside? An #sboi may know how to spot a real Birkin bag from a fake, but my guess is they don’t know how to use a can opener or plunge a toilet. It’s not like I’m hoping for global financial collapse, but if it comes, I know how to pitch a tent and roast a weenie. These poor dummies would be wandering around mewling like newborn kittens and wondering why no one will take their Platinum card.

The more I thought about it, I was filled with pity at what it must feel like to be an #sboi, under constant pressure to acquire and show off expensive objects, to fill the giant hole where most of the rest of us have deep connections to real things. Things that would probably make #sbois shudder: our non-rich families, our janky houses, our Economy class or even road trip vacation travel to places that don’t have infinity pools.

In fact I don’t think I have even one shopping bag in my Instagram feed, nor any selfies taken with my shoe collection, organized by designer. What I do have is many examples of what an #rkoi would consider a sad bastard life, like on Mother’s Day when I tried to get a normal picture with the kids and only one would sit with me:

And another one of the surprisingly plain hat and welcome card I got from the very exclusive and upscale club to which Wendi Aarons gifted me a membership: The Barry Manilow International Fan Club.

And the delicious birthday cake my husband bought me at a local bakery. When they asked how to spell “Nancy” and he answered, “the regular way,” he’d obviously forgotten that we live in Oakland.

Look. I do envy the #rkois. Because I have always wanted to be able to arch one eyebrow – can you imagine how it would amp up my storytelling? But that’s about it. When I compare the images of my non-luxury life with that of the #sbois, I feel like the richest gal in the world.

I’m not so fancy. But you already know.