From Town & Country, Sep 26, 2019 :
Enlightenment is the new status symbol for the elite, and Jack Dorsey, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Marianne Williamson the undisputed gods of the wellness aristocracy.
Last November, Jack Dorsey, the brains behind Twitter, declared that he had gone on a 10-day silent retreat in Myanmar to practice Vipassana, considered the oldest form of Buddhist meditation. Sounding more like the Monk of Silicon Valley than the Disruptor of Wall Street, Dorsey explained that giving up “devices, reading, writing, physical exercise, music, intoxicants, meat, talking, or even eye contact with others” was a “detox of all the noise in the world.”
....MUCH MORENever mind that he conveniently forgot about Myanmar’s violence toward the Rohingya minority, and not to mention that much of that noise is amplified through the platform he invented. More telling was the inadvertent revelation of the latest status symbol reserved for the one percent: enlightenment. While you were busy downloading Headspace and livestreaming Peloton, the extremely rich have been locked in a holier-than-thou arms race to purge themselves of screens and discover inner peace.Meet the spiritual snobs.Hashtag MindfulnessThey may swear off their phones and social media feeds, but open yours and you’ll find them aglow and gloating in an ashram more remote than Wakanda, tagging their posts #breathe. There they are at the Wanderlust Kundalini & Radiant Body immersion at Snowshoe Mountain, reminding you how gorgeous they look without makeup—through a Mayfair filter. Or at the Advanced Intuitive Healing training course at the Den in L.A. (three months, $1,500), learning how to fix the holes in their auras. You might even see them at Kanye West’s exclusive Sunday Service, at an undisclosed location, singing hymns alongside Buddhist power couple Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry.The rich and famous often drink their own organic, locally sourced Kool-Aid. At some point along the way they begin to believe they can achieve a special connection with the metaphysical by luxuriously depriving themselves of earthly desires, preferably somewhere quiet and above the fray, like on David Geffen’s yacht, docked in the Sea of Cortez.
