Sleep, silence, real friends and a free afternoon. Out east, the newest status symbols cost more than a Ferrari, and most of them cannot be bought at all.

Two Men at Lunch

Picture a long table at a July lunch in Southampton. This is a composite, built from the kind of afternoon that repeats itself every summer between Westhampton and Montauk, but you have sat at this table.

One guest spends twenty minutes on his new car. The color took four months to approve. The waitlist was eleven months long. He has photos.

The man across from him says almost nothing about himself. When someone asks how his summer is going, he says he has slept eight hours a night since Memorial Day, his phone has been off since Friday, and tonight he is having dinner with three friends he has known since college. Then he goes back to his tomatoes.

Watch where the table leans. It leans toward the second man. Nobody says so, and nobody would admit it, but the car got polite nods and the eight hours got questions. How do you do that? Who runs your calendar? Where is the dinner?

That small shift in attention is the subject of this series. The newest status symbols in the Hamptons are not new things. They are old things, the kind your grandparents got for free, that modern life has made scarce.

Why are basic things becoming status symbols?

Basic things become status symbols when most people can no longer get them. Status follows scarcity. When sleep, free time, privacy, health and old friendships grow hard to come by, having them starts to signal rank, the same way a rare car or an exclusive address once did.

The brand strategist and educator Eugene Healey has built a following explaining this shift, which he calls post-luxury. In a recent TikTok video he argued that status has been moving out of objects and into behaviors: building community, developing niche expertise, even getting quality sleep. His sharper point is that these are elements of ordinary human life that were lost somewhere along the way and then sold back as luxury. When basic needs turn into luxuries, he says, understanding how status works stops being trivia and starts feeling like a matter of security.

He also points a finger at the phone in your pocket. Social platforms, in his telling, are status games, marketplaces where people collect social and cultural capital and trade it for money or access. Once everything you eat, read and do can be posted, every choice becomes a possible signal.

You do not need to accept all of that to notice the pattern on a Saturday in Bridgehampton. The man with the new car is playing the old game. The man with the eight hours is playing the new one.

From Veblen to the Sleep Score

The old game has a long history. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen named it conspicuous consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class: purchases whose real job is to be seen. For most of the twentieth century the rules stayed simple. Buy the visible thing. Park it where people can see it.

Then the visible thing got crowded. Logos spread to outlet malls and knockoffs. The response at the top was what we have called the logo tax and the rise of quiet luxury, signals only insiders could read. We have argued that quiet luxury was always a con, a way to exclude while looking modest.

Post-luxury is the next move. Columbia Business School professor Silvia Bellezza published a framework in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2023 describing how high-status consumers adopt alternative signals that show distance from traditional luxury goods. In plain English, when everyone can buy the bag, the people at the top start showing off what the bag cannot buy.

The New Status Symbols at a Glance

New status symbol What it replaced Why it is scarce now Read the story
Eight hours of sleep The private jet Roughly a third of American adults sleep less than the recommended seven hours The sleep flex
A young biological age The Birkin Health became measurable, and measurement made it rankable Biological age
A free afternoon The bigger house Busyness became a badge, so unscheduled time became rare Time
Being unreachable The front-row table Everyone is reachable and everything is posted Unreachable
Old friends The club card Money buys access, not history Old friends
Knowing things The logo Expertise takes years and cannot be rushed Knowledge
Not caring All of the above Almost nobody can stop keeping score Not caring

Sleep: the flex you take lying down

Eight uninterrupted hours is now a boast. The CDC recommends at least seven hours a night for adults, and in 2022 about 39 percent of adults aged 45 to 64 reported getting less. That age group is the core of a Hamptons dinner party. So the man who sleeps well is announcing something specific: nobody owns his mornings. Read Forget the Lambo. The Real Hamptons Flex Is Eight Hours of Sleep.

Health: your biological age is the new Birkin

Longevity clinics turned health into a number, and anything with a number can be compared. On the East End, an IV drip runs a few hundred dollars and a concierge medicine membership can run $5,000 to $25,000 a year, according to our peptide therapy guide. The bragging right is no longer the treatment. It is the result. Read Your Biological Age Is the New Birkin, and for the market itself, our map of Hamptons wellness clinics.

Time: the afternoon nobody can schedule

In a 2017 study of more than 6,000 adults in four countries, researchers led by Ashley Whillans found that people who spent money to buy themselves time reported greater life satisfaction. Few people do it, even when they can afford it. Out here, the man who can say no to a Friday call is richer than the man with a bigger house and a full calendar. Read He Has $500 Million. What He Really Wants Is a Free Afternoon.

Privacy: the luxury of being unreachable

Manhattan’s best private clubs ban phones, and the ban has become the point. As we reported in why NYC’s elite clubs banned phones, privacy is the one luxury you cannot post. Healey has made the same argument about being chronically offline. Read The Most Exclusive Thing in New York Is Being Unreachable.

Friendship: the club card cannot buy history

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed lives since 1938, and its clearest finding is that the people most satisfied in their relationships at 50 were the healthiest at 80. Money can buy a seat at Zero Bond. It cannot buy the friend who knew you before you had it. Read Money Bought Him the Club. It Couldn’t Buy Him Old Friends.

Knowledge: the man who actually knows things

At a polo match, the person with the most status is often the one who understands the game. Knowledge takes years to build, which makes it the one asset new money cannot rush. Read The Man Who Actually Knows Things Wins the Room, and our essay on good taste.

Indifference: the last status symbol

Healey closes his video with a joke: next week, someone will announce that not caring about status is the new status symbol. We take the joke seriously. Read The Last Status Symbol Is Not Caring.

The Catch: a new game is still a game

Here is the complication. A sleep score can become a leaderboard. A longevity protocol can become a competition. A curated group of old friends can become one more velvet rope. The new symbols are healthier than the old ones, but the comparison reflex that drives them has not gone anywhere.

Research suggests that reflex runs deep. In a 1998 Harvard survey, Sara Solnick and David Hemenway found that about half of respondents would rather earn $50,000 while others earned $25,000 than earn $100,000 while others earned $200,000. We explored what that does to people in Everyone Out Here Is Loaded. Nobody Feels Rich., and in The Louder the Flex, the Deeper the Insecurity.

Healey’s own warning is the right one. Status, he says, is “a useful lens, but a terrible worldview.” If every choice becomes a move in a game, you lose the ability to tell what you actually like.

I agree with him, and I say that as someone who co-founded a polo event and helps run a society magazine. Status is a fascinating thing to watch. It is a poor thing to live for.

What this means for brands

For a luxury brand, the shift is an opportunity rather than a threat, provided the brand sells what has become scarce. A watchmaker can sell time and craft. A hotel can sell privacy. An event can sell belonging, the reason people return to the same field at Polo Hamptons every July to see the same faces. As our piece on why access is the only status symbol that matters argued, what cannot be bought directly is what people value most. The brands that place themselves inside those experiences, instead of shouting over them, earn standing the logo never could.

Back at the Table

By three o’clock, the lunch has broken up. The man with the new car is showing the photos to someone at the bar. The man with the eight hours is walking to his car, which is ten years old, to drive to a dinner that will not be posted anywhere.

He is not playing a better game. As far as anyone can tell, he has stopped keeping score, and that is the one thing at the table everyone wanted and nobody could buy.

Frequently asked questions

What is post-luxury?
Post-luxury describes a shift in status signals away from expensive objects and toward behaviors and experiences, such as sleep, free time, privacy, community and expertise. The term is associated with brand strategist Eugene Healey, who argues that these were ordinary parts of life that became scarce and were then repackaged as luxury.

What are the new status symbols for the wealthy?
The new status symbols are mostly things money cannot directly buy: eight hours of sleep, a young biological age, unscheduled time, privacy and being offline, long friendships, deep knowledge of a subject, and visible indifference to status itself. They signal that a person controls their own time and attention.

Why is sleep a status symbol?
Sleep is a status symbol because it has become scarce. The CDC recommends at least seven hours for adults, yet in 2022 about 39 percent of adults aged 45 to 64 got less. Sleeping well signals that work, travel and social demands do not control your schedule.

Is quiet luxury the same as post-luxury?
No. Quiet luxury still sells expensive objects, just without logos, such as a plain $4,000 sweater. Post-luxury moves status away from objects entirely and into time, health, privacy and relationships. Quiet luxury hides the price tag. Post-luxury signals things that have no price tag at all.

Why do people care so much about status symbols now?
Social media made every daily choice visible and comparable, which turns ordinary decisions into possible signals. Eugene Healey argues that platforms work like marketplaces for social and cultural capital, which can be traded for money or access. That gives people a real financial reason to decode status.

Sources