OMG Digital Magazine OMG Issue 276 14th September 2017 | Page 6

OMG Digital Magazine | 276 | Thursday 14 September 2017 • PAGE 6
The Toxic
Dream You
May Not
Realize You've
FALLEN FOR
SoulFood
Lauren Greenfield—photographer, documentarian and author of the
new book Generation Wealth—talks about the pitfall so many of us
just can't seem to avoid.
By Susan Welsh
Lauren Greenfield has spent 25 years exploring what
one of her subjects calls the "toxic dream": the pursuit
of wealth, everlasting youth and, sometimes, fame.
She's recorded images and stories of all sorts of people
around the world, from a 60-year-old California parale-
gal who spent her way into homelessness, to celebrities
and wannabe celebrities (like Kacey Jordan, the prosti-
tute whose business enjoyed a boost after she spent a
drug-fuelled 36 hours with Charlie Sheen). As the book’s
editor, and as an old friend of Lauren's, I jumped at the
chance to speak to her about why, even if we're not
building a 90,000-square-foot house in Orlando like the
subjects of her documentary The Queen of Versailles,
we still might have fallen into the trap of wanting more
than we can afford.
SW: You've documented hundreds of subjects: the Ger-
man-born hedge fund wizard who's wanted by the FBI
for fraud; strippers in Las Vegas; rap artists in Atlanta;
Russian socialites. Why?
LG: I've often looked at the extremes as a way to shed
light on the mainstream. Even though everybody says,
"Money doesn't buy you happiness," I don't think that
that's the principle by which people live. If you talk to
kids and ask them what they want to be when they
grow up, they say, "Rich and famous," but being rich
and famous is not a job.
SW: How has what we want out of life changed during
the past quarter century since you started out?
LG: We've gone from a culture that valued social mobil-
ity through hard work and education to a culture that
values bling and celebrity. Now, it doesn't matter how
you get the money, as long as you have it. Actually, it
almost doesn't matter if you have it as long as you look
like you have it.
SW: Still, a lot of people would say, "I'm not like that. I'm
happy with what I have." Are there more subtle ways
that we're all participating in this competition?
LG: We're living in this fantasy where we're comparing
ourselves to celebrities, as if their lifestyles are normal.
We watch more and more TV, and research shows that
the more TV you watch, the wealthier you think other
people are compared to yourself. And marketing is so
clever. There's something for everybody. This mini-
malist trend in home décor allows educated, cultured,
middle-class people to kind of justify their own materi-
alism. Having less and giving things away is a goal, but
what we see in a magazine like Dwell not only is very
expensive to achieve but also requires a huge amount
of maintenance, which for people with jobs and kids is
not that easy. It's another way to sort of fetishize our en-
vironment. Design has made it so that the house we live
in is not just a safe place to raise our family, which it was
in the old days, but it's actually this...fashion statement.
It's like a designer dress. It's really another side of the
same coin.
SW: Do you fall into that trap?
LG: I stopped at Target the other day to do an errand,
and almost unconsciously I picked up a cart, and before
10 minutes had passed, I had 10 items in my cart. At the
self-serve checkout, an item came up as $52. My son
said, "What is that?" And I said, "Oh, it's face cream." He
said, "Put that back." I didn't argue with him because he
was right. I was falling for some anti-aging face cream
that I had not planned on purchasing. It's hard not to be
influenced by these pressures in your daily life—wheth-
er you're actually buying or just admiring, or whether
they're making you feel inadequate just by their exis-
tence.
SW: What have you taken away from all these stories?
LG: I still go into a store and want those things and still
even buy them. But I do feel that if we spend a little time
trying to understand the forces we often act upon un-
consciously, it allows us a little power at least to choose:
Do I want to give in to this or not?