Adventure

There's rich and there's rich. There's a number beyond which stuff starts to get boring. I'm not sure what it is, but it's the point at which you run out of restaurants to frequent and clubs to join and clothes to buy and you start thinking bigger. You start thinking about going to space and colonizing Mars — and exploring the dark depths of the deep blue sea. It is the reason that Elon Musk sold his seven homes and chucked out most of his possessions and torments his staff by sleeping at work. It is also part of the reason that five men are now sadly believed to have died while aboard a missing submarine after a "catastrophic implosion." If we didn’t love to hate the rich, this would have been seen for what it is: a tragedy.

The plight of the Titanic submariners has engulfed the media over the past week and demanded the attention of countless rubberneckers to catastrophe. Parts of that attention are due to morbid curiosity, or the ghoulish nature of social media's animosity toward the super rich; those who Ben Dreyfuss terms "the abnormal people" on his Substack: "They heard the news, read the stories, took in all of the information that made you sad, and their first reaction was: anyone who can afford a $250k tourist trip deserves to die." But another slice of attention is due, at least in part, to the audacious nature of their chosen craft.