Working-Class Luxury
All-inclusive resorts are a funny kind of fantasy.
They promise luxury and pampering, a place where — for a few days — you get treated like you’re important. Like you’ve risen a class or two. Like you suddenly matter more than you do on a normal Tuesday.
They let regular people feel wealthy for a week.
Because real wealthy people?
They don’t do all-inclusives. They don’t need them.
All-inclusives are built for the rest of us — the working class, the cold survivors, the nine-to-fivers who scrape together a little money to thaw out and reset. It’s working-class luxury. A pressure valve disguised as paradise.
And it’s good.
It gives ordinary people a chance to feel taken care of in a world that usually expects them to be the ones doing the taking-care.
But don’t confuse it with real luxury — not the kind you see in movies or in the lives of the ultra-rich.
True wealth needs privacy. Exclusivity. Space. And there’s none of that at an all-inclusive where bartenders are serving other bartenders and housekeepers are cleaning rooms for people who clean rooms back home.
At an all-inclusive, everyone is everyone else.
It’s the same working class, just shuffling roles under palm trees.
And yet, somehow, we start to pity the staff.
We look at the people pouring our drinks and think, *poor them.*
As if our lives — our commutes, our winters, our debts, our bosses — are automatically better than theirs.
But what do we really know about them?
Sure, some struggle. Poverty is real.
But poverty is real back home too — sometimes more invisible, sometimes more ignored. We all have neighborhoods we wouldn’t walk through at night. Whole towns left behind by industry. Whole communities where opportunity dried up decades ago.
And the excuses people use?
“Oh, but they get hurricanes.”
We get hurricanes too. And tornadoes. And wildfires. And mudslides. And ice storms that turn highways into graveyards.
“But their politicians are corrupt.”
Brother… corruption doesn’t have a nationality. It just has better PR in some places.
Meanwhile, the guy handing you your margarita?
He might be working on his master’s thesis on his lunch break.
A lot of these countries have free or affordable tuition — governments that proudly invest in developing the next generation. The people serving you might be more educated, more ambitious, or more future-bound than you’d ever guess.
And when the resort day ends, he’s going home to paradise.
He clocks out, walks out into warm air, sits in his yard, plays with his kids, kisses his wife, maybe makes love to her — all under the same sun you paid thousands just to borrow for a week.
You’re the one who has to leave.
He’s the one who gets to stay.
So maybe stop feeling sorry for the people who serve you when you travel.
They’re the working class, just like you — not beneath you, not lesser, not trapped.
Talk to them.
Ask who they are, what they’re studying, what they dream about.
Treat them like equals, because they are.
It’s the people who look down on others — no matter their station — who are the real losers in this world.
The wealthy parasites who take what they want, demand the world kneel, and feel nothing for the rest of us scrambling beneath their feet.
The workers serving you on vacation?
They’re not the ones to pity.
They’re the ones living in the very place you saved all year trying to reach.
Fact check me.