I recently watched Jay Kelly, George Clooney’s new film about an ageing superstar who realises, perhaps too late, that in giving everything to his career he left very little for the rest of his life.

While success and admiration are always present for him, what is missing are the quieter, stabilizing things like family, friendships and a sense of community.

Hollywood has been telling similar stories for a long time. The Great Gatsby to Citizen Kane to The Wolf of Wall Street, the message repeats itself across decades. Lives that look exceptional from the outside can feel surprisingly empty from within. Wealth dazzles, but it does not anchor.

But apart from the usual life lessons these stories want us to learn, what is interesting to me is how these stories frame the problem of inequality.

They rarely question the system that allows such extreme accumulation of wealth in the first place. Instead, the tension is made personal. The failure is one of character, of balance, of priorities, of neglected relationships. The economic and social structure itself fades into the background, as though it were natural and beyond examination.

For most people, this level of wealth is not just distant, it is structurally unreachable. Yet it remains aspirational. These stories invite admiration for the lifestyle, and then soften that admiration by showing the emotional cost attached to it.

We are reassured that while some have far more, they are also paying a price with their empty lives!

This framing does something subtle. It helps us to accept the inequality, not just in income, but in lived experience. Aspiration pulls us toward identifying with an elite life, even as our own realities are far from it.

The loneliness of the super-rich is presented as a kind of moral equilibrium, allowing material inequality to feel less important.

Perhaps the deeper cost of these stories is not what they reveal about the rich and the powerful, but what they normalize for society. They justify inequality and make it tolerable to those who are and will always remain outside of such richness.

Worth thinking about 🤔