1.
On an episode of his podcast SmartLess with Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, Jason Bateman said he wished he was a server at a restaurant. “I’ve always secretly had a fantasy to be a waiter just so I could work each table to figure out what they need me to be to get the best tip. Like separate audiences, you know?” After Hayes brought up tip pooling — when restaurant workers combine their tips then divide them up between workers rather than each server keeping the tips they specifically got — Bateman asked, “Is that really the way it works?”
Co-host Will Arnett quickly pointed out how obvious it was that Bateman had never had a “real job.” He said, “My obsession is watching Jason…when people describe real world jobs because God bless you and I love you Jason, but you’ve never…he grew up in the show biz, and he’s been an actor since he was a kid.” However, Bateman got him back when he asked if Arnett had ever had a job where he worked for tips – the answer was no.
2.
Bateman isn’t the only star to have a weirdly romanticized or unrealistic idea of the average worker’s life. Speaking to Vanity Fair about how lonely it was to film on location, Alicia Vikander said, “I’ve seen what can happen to people in my industry. If you have an office job, you can step away for a bit. But there are times that myself or colleagues have been through something and, well, I can’t understand how they went on to the red carpet afterwards. To be met by people asking, ‘How are you doing?’ Given what they had just been through? Most people would not be able to step out of their house.”
While her comments on having to maintain a public facade in hard times were fair, her statement on an office job felt a bit clueless. I don’t know what office job she’s thinking of where she could easily “step away” due to being lonely or going through a difficult time.
3.
Gigi Hadid also appears to wish she had an office job. Speaking about her new cashmere line, Gigi Hadid said, “You can’t model forever. I was creative, and that is where I saw my life going. I already had been thinking about cashmere, but I think it [pregnancy] just made me think about how much more settled I would feel to have an office space job. I can take my daughter there with me.” Uh…where the heck did Gigi get that information?
4.
Elizabeth Banks was also pretty out of touch about parenting when she talked about going without help for the holidays. [We] had no help, no nannies, no babysitters. It was crazy. You forget how difficult it is to wake up in the middle of the night, how exhausting it is,” she said. “I lost all my nails. I did dishes and cleaned bottles for 10 days, so I lost all those nails!”
She also made some questionable comments about having one kid vs. two. “Two is very different from one. When you have one kid, you feel like you can jet set around, and you can throw him on the hip, and you get your life done,” she said. “You don’t realize how easy one is until you have two. Now I’m really a mom. Oh, I am a mom now! This is for serious — I am responsible for two people now.” This comment feels particularly out-of-touch about the difficulty of parenting one child, given the amount of help she seemingly usually has, based on her quote about the holidays.
5.
Meghan Markle was similarly accused of being out of touch when she said on Ellen that having one child is like a “hobby” but that having two is “parenting.” Both Banks and Markle fail to understand what it’s like to parent without hired help, and the comments felt insensitive to those who work hard to parent a single child.
6.
In another parenting example, Justin Timberlake once said that 24-hour parenting during lockdown was “not human.” Speaking about the constant time around his one child (he has since had another), Timberlake said, “We’re mostly commiserating over the fact that just 24-hour parenting is just not human.” His comments felt extremely out of touch for the people who have to do 24-parenting all the time, not just in a pandemic.
7.
One more parenting example – when Salma Hayek said of her children, “You have to work very hard to please them all. If you are making pizza, there is one who doesn’t like cheese and another that hates tomato. Our chef sometimes looks so downhearted.” While the quote started out relatable enough, it quickly became apparent that the difficulties of pleasing all your kids are just a *bit* different when you have, say, a personal chef.
8.
I always think it’s funny when celebrities try to act like they relate to the average person’s money problems. Like Whoopi Goldberg, who caused backlash last November when she stated on The View that she commiserated with the many Americans dealing with financial troubles. “I appreciate that people are having a hard time. Me, too — I work for a living!” she said. “If I had all the money in the world, I would not be here, OK? So, I’m a working person, you know?”
She continued, “My kid has to feed her family. My great-granddaughter has to be fed by her family. I know it’s hard out there.” Goldberg has a $60 million fortune and a multimillion-dollar-a-year gig co-hosting The View.
9.
Sharon Stone proved she has no idea what “blue collar” means in an interview with InStyle. Speaking about a role in a Rita Ora music video, she described herself, Ora, and Taika Waititi as “a very blue collar group,” adding. “We work.” She also complained about having to spend money. “It’s very expensive to be famous. You go out to dinner, and there’s 15 people at the table, and who gets the check? You get the $3,000 dinner check every single time.” Someone should probably point out that no one is forcing her to go to $3,000 dinners with 15 people at fancy restaurants in the first place and that anyone with $3,000 to spend on dinner is certainly not blue-collar.
10.
Speaking as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at the Cannes Film Festival, Cate Blanchett similarly claimed to be “middle class.” Discussing refugee stories and her own privilege, Blanchett said, “I’m White. I’m privileged. I’m middle class. And I think, you know, one can be accused of having a bit of a White savior complex. But to be perfectly honest, my interaction with refugees in the … field and also in resettled environments has totally changed my perspective on the world.” Blanchett is reportedly worth $95 million, so it’s safe to say she has a pretty skewed idea of what makes someone middle-class.
11.
In 2009, Natalie Portman proved how differently the rich and famous experience recessions by calling the recession an “exciting time.” Her full quote reads, “I think it’s kind of an exciting time. I mean, everyone is cutting back. It’s happening in every industry — including our own. All of a sudden, people are doing jobs that they hate, and they’re not making as much money as they thought they would, or they’ve lost their jobs entirely. I’ve started to see people looking more toward their own passions and what really excites them.”
12.
Simon Cowell said something similar that proved how little he understands about being poor. “Money brings you security and choice. You can make decisions in a different way if you have a lot of money,” he said. “But when you have nothing, you have a naivety and a more fearless attitude because you have nothing to lose.” Cowell grew up with well-off parents but almost went bankrupt at 28 after racking up credit card debt and buying a Porsche and a house, forcing him to move back in with his parents.
“To get money, you have to be successful, which means you have to work bloody hard, which I did,” Cowell continued. “I paid myself £5,000 a year, paid off my debts, and learned more from the whole thing than anything else. I wasn’t ashamed; I just accepted it.” While it’s certainly admirable to get yourself out of debt, I don’t know if I would call being “poor” because you bought a house and a Porsche (and now have to live with your well-off parents) quite the same as “having nothing.”
13.
Grimes also proved she knows nothing about poverty by claiming that Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, “lives at times below the poverty line.” She claimed he moved them into a “very insecure $40,000 house” without security and that she had to eat “peanut butter for eight days in a row.” The interviewer noted that she lives in a “nice house” that was “no Versailles” (though it was a house with a pool in Austin with a view of the Colorado River).
14.
Back in 2011, Adele — then a multi-Grammy-winning artist with two albums under her belt — caused ire when she complained about UK taxes. “I’m mortified to have to pay 50%! [While] I use the NHS, I can’t use public transport anymore. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I’ve gotta give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [the album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.” Considering Adele doesn’t have to use the trains and has plenty of money even with high taxes, people were left feeling like the quote was out of touch.
15.
Adele also said she couldn’t afford to live in London. “The kind of house I have in LA I could never afford in London. Ever,” she said, after stating that she didn’t want to live in London because it’d be too difficult to parent in the rain. “No, I looked at houses. It’s like hundreds of millions of pounds. I don’t have that much money at all. I’d throw up.” However, Adele does actually own property in London. She also owns a three-home compound in LA worth over $30 million. Given that most people struggle to afford a home at all — and that British homes equivalent to her LA compound were probably castles at that size — her “struggle” was pretty unrelatable.
16.
Sydney Sweeney once made some comments about not being able to take a break from her acting career that were not very well-received. Speaking about her desire to have children young, she said, “If I wanted to take a six-month break, I don’t have income to cover that. I don’t have someone supporting me; I don’t have anyone I can turn to to pay my bills or call for help.” She also said, “they don’t pay actors like they used to” and that actors no longer get residuals with streaming shows.
As for the income she does get, she said, “I have to give 5 percent to my lawyer, 10 percent to my agents, 3 percent or something like that to my business manager. I have to pay my publicist every month, and that’s more than my mortgage.” At the time, Sweeney had a $3 million home. The backlash surrounding Sweeney’s comments mostly centered on it being an impossibility for the vast majority of people to take six months off from their jobs. Even though Sweeney’s comments were about pregnancy, it’s still impossible for most new parents to take six months off. Average parental leave is 10 weeks, with most of that oftentimes unpaid.
17.
Social media star Dixie D’amelio made some pretty clueless comments about college, saying, “I fully got into college [in] August of 2019, and I decided not to go just because traveling back and forth was going to be a lot,” she revealed to Vogue, adding, “I was also really scared because I saw someone make a TikTok saying that they would play my songs at a frat party and that’s really what like turned me away from going to school because I don’t think I could handle that level of embarrassment.” Given that the cost of college makes it prohibitive for so many Americans, D’Amelio’s comments felt pretty insensitive and blind to the realities of others her age who can’t afford to go.
18.
She also talked about not wanting to work anymore on The D’Amelio Show, listing her business ventures and saying there was “no pressure” to follow through with them. Her use of the term “anymore” also raised brows, as D’Amelio’s job was then largely appearing on her family’s reality show and posting TikToks.
19.
I’m not going to say Kim Kardashian doesn’t know real struggle, but she certainly seemed unaware of the realities some people face when she compared her troubles to those of an 18-year-old with cancer. Speaking about her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries, she said, “I spoke to a girl today who had cancer, and we were talking about how this is such a hard thing for her, but it taught her a big lesson on who her friends are and so much about life. She’s 18. And I was like, that’s how I feel.”
20.
Speaking of Kim…in an interview with Allure, the interviewer asked Kim Kardashian if she ever felt guilty for setting an unrealistic and unattainable body standard. She replied, “If I’m doing it, it’s attainable.” She also said, “I really, genuinely care about looking good. … It’s not easy when you’re a mom, and you’re exhausted at the end of the day, or you’re in school, and I’m all of the above. I do my beauty treatments usually late at night. After everyone’s in bed, I’m doing laser treatments.” Kim’s words attracted criticism online, with people pointing out that many people are not able to afford to access laser treatments. Kim’s beauty routine products alone cost $3000.
21.
The pandemic was full of examples of celebrities having no idea what it was like for those less fortunate. For example, Ellen Degeneres angered fans when she compared lockdown (which she spent in her mansion) to jail…proving she knew nothing about jail or the average person’s experience in lockdown.
22.
Madonna also came off pretty out of touch about how COVID was affecting the average person when she filmed a lockdown message in a bathtub of roses in her mansion, calling COVID “the great equalizer.”
23.
Gwyneth Paltrow proved how little she relates to those on food stamps when she tried her hand at a food stamp challenge back in 2015, attempting to spend only $29 on groceries for the week. She only made it four days, and her tweet about what she bought had people pointing out just how out of touch it was. Her items included eggs, brown rice, black beans, and tortillas — great! The other times were mostly leafy greens, along with seven limes. This was not exactly realistic for a family or even one person, and it failed to demonstrate how much easier it is to buy sugary, prepackaged foods when you don’t have a lot of money. It also wasn’t even close to enough food for a week, especially considering it all seemed to go towards one meal — tacos.
24.
Ariana Grande might be a hard worker, but she proved how little she understands how hard someone in physical labor or a low-wage job might work when she called herself “the hardest working 23 year old human being on earth” on Instagram. She deleted the post after people online pointed out that those struggling to provide for their families in minimum-wage jobs were probably working harder.
25.
And finally, she may have been joking, but I have to end this post on the time when Mariah Carey didn’t seem to know what a bill was — or that you have to pay for electricity.