They were the type of people who pretended that they weren’t all about money, but it’s all they were really about. It was the delusion of the privileged, built upon not having to care about money because they had more than they deserved. They claimed they weren’t greedy but their stock portfolios begged to differ. 

She’d called him materialistic, speaking with the same self-serving attitude as they. She claimed that she didn’t judge people by how much they made, but her actions said otherwise. She was a high-priced call girl, looking to sell herself to the sleaziest of men. It was beyond her comprehension that these smiling, tan halfwits, with their pictures of their boats, and their cars, and their houses were the bane of the world, that only men who were as greedy as toddlers would amass what they had amassed, do what they did, driven by love of things, not people. They were emotionally stunted and could never give her the love she professed to want. They did not have the capacity. Oh, yes, they all feigned love of human kind, donating to charities, praying in church, but there was nothing behind it but a need to lord it over everyone else, to show their superiority. They were the people who made other people’s lives hell for their own gain. That was what she pursued and told herself that she was sincerely interested in them. Rot. She was a gold digger, and she knew it but would never admit it to herself, believing that she was “worth” it, worth being a paramour to wealth, nothing else. She really cared about nothing else. 

And she liked the ugly ones. She always had. Men who, without their bank accounts, would be considered throwbacks, men far below her attractiveness level, because, secretly, she hated herself, and sought to demean herself with her choices. She’d done a bang up job on that account. So she kept adding them, these narcissistic men with their stables of single women, imagining herself as beautiful and seductive as the younger ones, the ones these men really wanted. She wasn’t, and never had been. And it never occurred to her to ask herself what these men saw in her. It was someone easy to take advantage of. These men saw women as whores to collect, though they played as if every woman they met was special and unique. They were con men. But she was fully prepared to play the part of the dutiful housewife, as she had before, cheated on, abused, neglected, not really loved, just a fixture, as long as it meant access to the money. 

That’s what she really was, as stunted as the men she desired, as low and superficial, as insincere, and as greedy. But she told herself she was none of those things, and hoped for love … by which she meant financial security with a shallow, loaded male. She would never have real love, but she would never know it. She was incapable of growing as a person, in capable of learning. And she was ugly. 

She’d called him mentally ill. These were the people who were mentally ill, more predator than human, willing to do away with everyone they wasn’t useful to them to obtain what they wanted. People who were so shallow and self-absorbed that nothing they ever did had any impact on their souls. If it had, they would not be what they were. They were poster children for capitalistic excess, conspicuous consumption, and pure avarice, but they all saw that as the definition of “good.” They were children playing dress up, playing banker, playing investor, playing real estate mogul, playing house, and contributing nothing of real value to the world. And she was one of them.