Morning caviar bumps. Rooms stacked floor to ceiling with designer boxes. A cat nibbling on gold-leaf treats made by a private chef. This is just another morning in the life of one of the internet’s most affluent influencers.

Meet Becca Bloom, TikTok’s Marie Antoinette and a USC alum. She landed a spot among the TIME100 Creators in 2025 for documenting her extraordinarily lavish lifestyle. But Bloom isn’t just another influencer; her brand of performative wealth reveals how we’ve turned consumption into aspiration, normalized detachment and worshipped excess.

In the eyes of many, Bloom lives the ultimate fantasy — a life where everything is gold-plated and made of silk, where the word “scarcity” is safely sequestered far, far away. Her content offers a glimpse at something wildly unattainable.

That feeling is the appeal. You get to watch her unbox jewelry or follow her to a destination wedding in Italy. Watching her videos feels like being brought into the fold, an invitation to indulge in what most would otherwise never encounter.

Yet, the fascination says more about us than her. There have always been wealthy show-offs. Bloom is merely another member of RichTok — a subset of creators who build their brands on luxury like Zachary Weiss or Skyelar Chase. We’re the ones eating up her videos. We gave her that popularity. In the scrollable court of Versailles, we’re not peasants; we’re spectators. 

That intimacy keeps audiences striving toward a goal they can never reach, propping up designer items and plates piled with caviar as the ultimate sign of success. The sheer volume of content normalizes something that is absolutely, utterly abnormal. It makes us feel as though we, too, can have that life.

But that has a cost.

At best, idolizing the lifestyles of billionaires pushes us further toward individualism. In the race to the top, everyone else is competition. If success is defined by someone else’s highlight reel, collaboration quickly becomes collateral damage.

At worst, the habit risks doing tangible harm to our mental health. Watching RichTok can feel hypnotic, but also draining. When the focus shifts from what one person has to what you lack, it’s easy to feel like you’re behind.

When a peer — a young influencer on your feed — pulls out a nearly $400,000 Bulgari necklace, the comparison sneaks in.

The logic is similar to USC’s designer bag culture. Everyone knows someone who shows up to class with a Chanel tote or a new Dior Saddle bag. It starts as a flex and then quietly turns into the norm. When everyone else is doing it, there’s a social pressure to keep up. Even if “everyone else” is actually 0.1% of people and keeping up is impossible, algorithms tell us otherwise. 

Researchers have even found that envy acts as a bridge between social media use and depression symptoms, meaning that comparing ourselves only does harm to our mental health in the long term.

All of that comes amid a worsening climate crisis, the planet unable to sustain lifestyles like the ones these creators tout. These aren’t just personal choices; they’re indicators of an increasingly dire class divide.

As it stands, the median retirement savings for the bottom 50% of American households is $0. Elderly Americans face a poverty rate of 23% according to The New School for Social Research — a number leagues higher than any other country in the G7, a collection of seven of the world’s industrial economies.

Meanwhile, the richest 1% of the United States owns a total of $25 trillion in stock wealth,  according to 2024 research by the Federal Reserve, which also found that 93% of the stock market is owned by just the top 10% of earners. 

It’s hard not to see the parallels to Marie Antoinette. The same system that allowed a handful to live in gilded comfort while others scraped by is the one we glamorize online. RichTok simply turns that structural inequality into entertainment — filtering centuries of injustice through ring lights and trending audios.

Weiss, Chase and Bloom’s work all create variations of a modern Versailles: lavish, untouchable, adored for extravagance while the world struggles outside the gates. Except, this time we’re not storming the palace — we’re double-tapping it. 

And it’s easy to see why. Proximity to Hollywood means USC regularly finds itself acting as a backdrop for films like “Legally Blonde” (2001), or swept up in Hollywood drama. Looks, money and power can feel like the only game in town. It’s in our nature, even if we don’t realize it.

Despite the comparison to one of history’s most famous beheadings, I’m not here to hate on Bloom. She’s a person living and sharing her life, which she has every right to. This article isn’t a take-down.

It is, however, about questioning what we consume. Who do we look up to, and why? Why does someone’s excess feel like our entertainment? History repeats itself when people worship the very systems that keep them small.

So, perhaps, it’s time to put down the cake, scroll with intention and remember that admiration doesn’t have to mean aspiration. The cat doesn’t need caviar, and neither do we.