Sublime

Much of leisure, for the aspirational class, has become productive.

Today, material goods are plentiful but their ability to reveal or enable social mobility is increasingly limited. There is no longer a dominant leisure class; in its place the aspirational class is rewriting the patterns of consumption while simultaneously disengaging in conventional material conspicuous consumption.

Today’s aspirational class prizes ideas, cultural and social awareness, and the acquisition of knowledge in forming ideas and making choices ranging from their careers to the type of sliced bread they purchase at the grocery store.

While their symbolic position sometimes manifests itself through material goods, mostly they reveal their class position through cultural signifiers that convey their acquisition of knowledge and value system—dinner

The ostensible democratization of consumerism obfuscated inequality and essentially lulled society into thinking everyone had a slice of the pie and would mask real issues of wealth disparity.

Rather, the aspirational class is formed through a collective consciousness upheld by specific values and acquired knowledge and the rarified social and cultural processes necessary to acquire them.