We Can't All Be Broke

People are embarrassed to be wealthy

Ask an upper-middle-class person what tax bracket they’re in, and you’ll likely be met with silence. Not because they’re unaware, but because saying it out loud somehow feels vulgar. Money, in British (supposedly polite) society, is something you possess discreetly, like a family friend in publishing or a Chanel wallet in a Waterstone’s tote bag. Wealth doesn’t shout, it whispers. 

Financial role-play has become St Andrews’ Olympic sport of choice. This is, objectively, an expensive town — but you don’t need me to tell you that, just count how many students had to move to Dundee this year. Ball tickets near £80, events sell out at prices that would make Fixr’s accounting team blink, and a ‘quiet’ week can still involve bi-daily £5 coffees and £25 Deliveroos. And yet, against all conceivable evidence, everyone here seems to be broke. Or, maybe, they’re just pretending to be.

“I literally can’t afford it” has become less a financial statement and more a conversation accessory. It appears in group chats moments before ticket drops, in queues to an event that’s already sold out, in the prelude to purchases that are inevitably made. It does not mean I cannot pay for this — it means I don’t associate myself with the kind of person who can. Being rich is no longer social currency. In fact, it’s become embarrassing. 

Part of this is aesthetic. The era of loud luxury — monogram canvas, conspicuous labels, anything that screams this costs money — has fallen quietly out of favour. In its place: understatement. Neutral tones, clean lines, brands you only recognise if you already know them. It’s the ‘exclusive’ Longchamp work bag to the loud Chanel crossbody bag. ‘Quiet luxury’ is not just a trend, it’s a strategy. It allows wealth to exist without announcing itself, to be legible only to those fluent in its codes. Indie-ness operates in the same way: to look scruffy, to thrift, to appear effortless. Someone’s social class has become your costume.

But beneath the aesthetic shift sits something more uneasy. Wealth, today, carries a faint moral awkwardness. Its most visible forms — billionaires, tech empires, space tourism — have rendered it slightly grotesque. Even at a far more modest scale, that discomfort lingers. To be openly affluent is to risk appearing out of touch, excessive, vaguely unselfaware. So we edit. 

Parents’ wealth becomes a story of effort and enterprise — not incorrect, necessarily, but told in a way that subtly folds that effort into one’s own legitimacy. At the same time, students emphasise their limits. The budgeting. The restraint. The fact that this next purchase — the ticket, the outfit, the weekend — is definitely the last one. You participate with no frugality, but narrate it as a stretch.

The humanities classroom is the arena of this performance. Sitting comfortably in seats we only access through financial comfort, we spend hours distancing ourselves from the very structures that allowed us to spend £40,000 on a career-less degree, instead of choosing the heartier option of getting an electrician’s licence. Reflexivity, it turns out, is easier when you don’t have to act on it. 

The supermarket trope is perhaps the clearest example of this collective script. Everyone, it seems, shops at Aldi. Aldi is not just a supermarket; it’s a personality — shorthand for thrift, reliability, groundedness. Claims of Aldi-browsing and Morrisons-meandering aside, hands seem to be full of M&S bags, and no one can be bothered to go anywhere but Tesco.

In St Andrews, wealth is not something you display; it’s something you manage. You soften it, qualify it, wrap it in self-deprecation. You go to the ball, but you preface it with complaints. You buy the ticket, but you narrate it as a lapse in judgment rather than a ritual practice. You tuck your Van Cleef bracelet into your sleeve.

But this performance has consequences. When wealth is constantly disavowed — when expensive habits are narrated as reluctant indulgences — it becomes harder to distinguish between those who can participate and those who simply cannot. The language collapses the difference. Everyone is ‘broke,’ and so real financial exclusion disappears into the background. So the issue is not that people joke about being broke, or even that wealth is handled delicately. It’s that the pretence has become so widespread that it obscures the fact that, for some students, there is no pretence at all.

In a town where money has learned to whisper, it might be worth asking who jokes, who denies — and who, despite everything, is still being priced out of the conversation.

Illustration by Calum Mayor