Tourist of Money

I’ve been watching The White Lotus lately. Rich people on vacation. Problems that feel poetic. Lives so insulated, even their disasters are catered.

And it reminded me of a brutal truth I’ve lived but rarely said aloud: For the well-off, the world bends to their comfort—and it’s usually the spines of the poor it bends upon.

There is no middle in middle America. You’re either rich, or you’re poor, or you’re pretending hard enough to survive the illusion. And if you weren’t born with wealth that predates you—wealth that pays for mistakes and absorbs every crash—you’re just visiting. A tourist. A welcome guest… until you’re not.

“Middle America” was sold to us like a stable bench where you could sit, raise a family, maybe even retire. But the wood’s rotted through. It’s not a bench anymore—it’s a seesaw, and if you’re not anchored by generational wealth, you’re just balancing until the next gust knocks you down. Lose your job, get sick, watch one unexpected bill become the start of a slide.

And “rich” doesn’t just mean having a Mercedes or a big house. It means being buffered. It means your parents own property, your college debt got paid, your emergencies are someone else’s checkbook problem. That’s generational wealth. That’s the invisible elevator some people are riding while others are stuck fixing the stairs.

I’ve toured that life. Had the title. A competitive salary. The home with a plaque out front and equity in the walls, in the ‘historic district’. For a few years, the world let me feel like I belonged. I knew the jokes. I could pass the table. Wore the right jacket. Shook the right hands. Smiled like I wasn’t doing mental math under the tablecloth.

Sometimes, they saw my darker skin as just a tan.

I was a tourist to the “nice things.” Allowed in the gift shop, got the day pass, never handed the deed. Being a tourist, I heard what they say when they think only their own are listening. I’ve been in those rooms. Saw the rot. It’s not even just the parents. Their kids may be worse, their innocence a form of brutality, because they didn’t know any better, and hadn’t yet learned to hide it.

Being the tourist meant my daughter’s friends were from similar affluent places—the business practice home, the lake home, the city home, the “home” home. At 11, she already feels that pressure to fit in. When she goes out with friends and wants to pay for something, she asks to borrow the Platinum Amex—not the battered old Chase debit. It’s the prop she needs.

That card isn’t for miles. It’s for masks. It’s silvery, it’s metally, it’s socially accepted. That should be the tagline.

It breaks my heart that she figured that out on her own. That she knows. Maybe not the full weight, but enough. Enough to know that carrying it means fewer weird stares from a friend or a store clerk. Fewer salespeople scanning you while you walk through Sephora.

That’s what makes my heart break. Not that I have to perform, but that she’s learning the choreography also, too early. That even she knows the debit card carries shame in certain rooms. Not because it’s less functional—but because it tells a story. So I pay the high yearly fee—so she can pretend.

So I can, too.

Having lost my job recently, I feel like the tourism passport has been revoked, and I’m stuck trying to translate a foreign language of despair to the people I love—while pretending to still speak fluent stability.

I was always on borrowed time. I have yet to tell my daughter. Am I trying to protect her? Or am I trying to protect her version of me? The one where her dad has it handled. Where the world isn’t crumbling behind the drywall. Where adulthood still has some kind of safety net beneath it. Trying to shield her from the heartbreak of knowing that even the strongest-looking adults are just kids with mortgages and secrets.

Meanwhile, my soul is already back in the Bronx, searching the couches and counting quarters for laundry again.

Some days, I wish my daughter had grown up with a little of that; a little of the Bronx. Not the pain but the clarity. She has never known hunger. Never flinched when opening a kitchen cabinet anticipating roaches. Never had to walk with her head on a swivel, checking the corners. She’s never developed that instinct to know the difference between truth and TRUTHS—the raw, undeniable realities of class and survival. Maybe there would be more appreciation. More grit.

At her age, I was eating white rice and Spam and dreaming of a life with working A/C. Her sadness is about the vacations we haven’t taken. The filtered ones. The “reel-worthy” ones. She’s had four trips to Disney by 11, but Instagram says it’s not enough. My first “vacation” wasn’t until I was 25; Mt. Airy Lodge in the Poconos, where “all I had to bring was my love for everything.” Corny as hell, but to me it was a goddamn milestone. It meant I’d made it. For a second.

Now I live in a house that’s supposed to prove something. You know the dream: 4 bedrooms, finished basement, nice yard. I look at it now, and it’s falling apart. So much going on in life that no one is really focused on taking care of it. I don’t know if I built a home or just constructed a set. We hoarded comfort items. Now we’re drowning in them—and in the debt that came with them. I feel just as poor today as I did in the Bronx, but with nice stuff.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, I have no job, and I am supposed to be the provider. It’s May 23rd. I haven’t paid May’s mortgage yet. Not because I forgot—because I’m calculating. Stretching timelines. I’ve sent many applications, but having sat on the other side of the hiring desk, I know the truth: it’s nearly summertime. No one wants to focus on hiring and interviewing. It’s vacation time!

It’s nearly summertime, but at home, it’s nearly winter.

Meanwhile, my body decides this is a great time for an oil change. My hip feels misaligned. My knee clicks like a dying cassette. One of my organs—kidney, liver, fear—aches. I don’t have insurance. I’m taking thyroid meds from Mexico. Wrong dosage. No labs. Just trying to keep myself functioning enough to not unravel in front of my family. Because when I go untreated, I get moody, lost-in-a-fog moody. Blank. Crabby.

It’s 10 a.m. My daughter’s still asleep. Depression sleep. She fights the demons of OCD and anxiety. Her own battles that I can only listen to and try to lighten the load. The kind where waking up is too heavy. Her food’s on the table, cold now. My partner’s out taking her mom to a doctor’s appointment. Because that’s what we do—we’re the sandwich generation. Pressed between the needs of the people who raised you and the ones you’re raising—no space to breathe, no room to fall apart.

And The White Lotus keeps looping in my head. Those people get to make mistakes that don’t cost them their homes. Their dignity. Their kids. Me? I don’t even have the right to collapse. I have to keep performing. I watch it because it’s a little vacation, watching them vacation. A vacation from this reality.

If I wrote my life out as a sitcom today, here’s the logline:

Dad’s out of work, pretending things are fine while spiraling. Daughter’s battling mental health and hiding under the covers. Mom’s taking her own mom to the doctor while living with chronic pain.

Meanwhile, the house is falling apart, the mortgage is unpaid, the fridge is full of comfort food, and the only thing thinner than the health insurance is the patience left in your soul.

Cue the laugh track. Theme song by The Replacements or Nine Inch Nails.

Bullshit, it’s my life right now. And the worst part? There’s no third-act rescue. No quirky neighbor swooping in with a check. Just you, staring out the window while your organs rebel and the world expects you to post about gratitude.

The White Lotus is like watching a vacation on a fault line—beautiful on the surface, rotten underneath. And yeah, it is a trigger for anyone who’s ever felt like they were just background furniture in someone else’s luxury. You see those characters—flawed, insulated, coasting on generational wealth—and it’s infuriating because their fuck-ups don’t ruin them. They get bailed out by the system they were born into. Their mistakes are quirky. Character-building. But if you or I slip up, even once? It’s eviction notices. It’s debt collectors. It’s a GoFundMe for basic healthcare.

That show rubs your nose in the reality divide. The rich don’t just live better—they live elsewhere. Like on a different gravitational pull. The world adjusts for them. Time slows down, consequences soften, everyone caters.

Meanwhile, you’re here hoping your hip pain isn’t a $15,000 problem. You’re the guy who could have been mistaken for one of them once—house, title, salary—but now the cracks are showing and you’re not even allowed to ask for help without shame attached.

It’s a brutal mirror. But you’re not crazy for being wrecked by it. You’re aware. You’re still in it. And even if it hurts like hell, you’re not numbed out like them.

This is winter in my house. While the world sips mojitos and scrolls vacation reels. But I’m still here. Still loving. Still showing up. Still raising a daughter who doesn’t know the Bronx but might still carry the best of it in her.

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