Who’s pampered lives are you talking about exactly? The black kids in the school to prison pipeline, living in food deserts?

The day labourers and farm hands working to the bone for pennies because their immigration status makes them easily exploitable?

The women being forced to give birth, in a society that charges you money to give birth. And then demands you return to work the next day? Is it any of those?

What about burnt out corporate cogs who ostensibly make a “good living” because the number is higher than in the past, and they have paid vacation, even though they can’t use it and 2/3rd of their paycheque goes to pay for someone else’s mortgage? How about them?

Teachers making poverty wages while working free overtime and feeding, clothing and supplying the less fortunate kids in their classes out of their own pockets?

I mean, I’ll happily admit to you that Taylor Swift’s life isn’t a hellscape, since you seem taken with her. But she still lives in one, it’s just that she has the means and resources to ignore it.

Is it Taylor Swift existing that invalidates critique of capital? Or is it that were better off than the past? Or something else perhaps?

We’ve almost always been “better off than the past” at every point in history, when taken on a long enough timescale over enough people, even before the advent of capitalism. Similarly, there were filthy rich robber barons who exploited people and became rich beyond imagining in the past too, and also predating capitalism.

So, what is it?