There’s a joke that’s been making the rounds for almost a decade now. It goes like this: millennials can’t afford homes because they spend all their money on avocado toast and lattes. The punchline, if we can call it that, was most famously delivered by Australian millionaire Tim Gurner in a 2017 interview, where he suggested that young people should stop spending $40 a day on smashed avocado and four coffees.

It went viral for a reason. Not because it was insightful, but because it was so spectacularly, almost beautifully wrong.

The median U.S. home price has more than doubled in the last decade. Wages have not. Student debt has ballooned. Health care costs keep rising. And yet the most durable explanation offered to young people, by wealthy men in expensive suits, is that the problem is brunch.

The avocado toast discourse isn’t just stupid. It’s a symptom of something much deeper: a story that wealthy societies tell themselves to avoid reckoning with how wealth actually works.

The Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire

Ronald Wright, in his book A Short History of Progress, wrote something that has become one of the most quoted observations in modern political commentary. He suggested that socialism never took root in America because the poor don’t see themselves as an exploited underclass. They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The idea cuts right to the bone. The American Dream isn’t just a hope. It’s a cognitive frame. If we believe that wealth is the natural reward for talent and hard work, then our current poverty is not evidence of a broken system. It’s just a temporary condition. We’re not being exploited. We’re just not there yet.

This belief is incredibly useful, not for the people who hold it, but for the people at the top of the system. If workers believe they’re future millionaires, they’re unlikely to organize against current millionaires. If we think the game is fair, we play harder instead of questioning the rules.

The avocado toast myth is one of the smaller, dumber expressions of this same logic. It tells struggling people: we’re not poor because wages are too low and housing is too expensive. We’re poor because we lack discipline. The solution isn’t systemic. It’s personal. Cut the coffee. Skip the toast. Work harder. Save more. Someday, if we’re good enough, we’ll make it.

It’s a story that demands individual sacrifice while asking nothing of the system itself.

The Myth of Meritocracy

The philosophical engine running beneath all of this is meritocracy: the idea that in a free society, people rise and fall based on their own talent, effort, and virtue. Those at the top are there because they deserve to be. Those at the bottom haven’t tried hard enough.

On its surface, meritocracy sounds fair. It sounds better than aristocracy, where birth determined fate. But critics like Michael Sandel and Rutger Bregman have argued that meritocracy is, in practice, one of the cruelest ideological inventions of the modern era.

It launders inherited advantage as personal achievement. The child born to wealthy parents gets better schools, better nutrition, better social networks, better healthcare, and better access to opportunities at every stage of life. When that child grows up to be successful, meritocracy tells us this reflects their individual brilliance. It does not. It reflects, in large part, their starting position. The race was never equal. The winner was always more likely to be someone who started closer to the finish line.

It also shifts the moral blame for poverty onto the poor. If success is purely earned, then failure must also be purely earned. The worker who can’t make rent isn’t the victim of wage suppression or unaffordable housing. They’re simply someone who didn’t try hard enough, didn’t make the right choices, didn’t have enough hustle. This is not a neutral observation. It is a moral condemnation dressed up as common sense, and it’s devastatingly effective at preventing solidarity.

Most importantly, it obscures the mechanics of actual wealth extraction. The billionaire class does not, in the main, create wealth through superior talent. They extract it: through monopoly power, through the suppression of labor costs, through favorable legislation bought with political donations, through financial instruments that produce returns without producing anything. Amazon’s enormous profits are not evidence of Jeff Bezos’s genius. They are, in significant part, evidence of warehouse workers paid poverty wages, of small businesses priced out of markets they can no longer compete in, and of a tax structure engineered to protect accumulated capital.

When meritocracy tells us that billionaires deserve their billions, it performs a magic trick. It takes what is essentially a massive, ongoing upward transfer of wealth, from workers to owners, from public goods to private hands, and reframes it as a just reward for exceptional individuals.

The Math They Don’t Want Us to Do

Here’s a simple thought experiment. A person works 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. That’s 80,000 hours of human labor. In the United States, if that person earns $20 an hour, already above minimum wage in most states, they will earn $1.6 million over their entire working life, before taxes.

Elon Musk’s net worth, at its peak, exceeded $300 billion. That is not the product of one person’s labor. It is not even close. It is the product of thousands of workers, of public infrastructure like roads, internet, GPS, and government-funded research, of regulatory environments shaped by lobbying, and of financial systems that reward ownership at a structurally higher rate than work.

The billionaire doesn’t earn more than the worker because they work more. They earn more because the rules of the system, rules that were written and enforced by people who benefit from those rules, reward owning things far more generously than doing things.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is accounting.

So What Does This Have to Do With Avocado Toast?

Everything. The avocado toast story works because it hits a genuinely satisfying psychological note: the idea that individual choices explain individual outcomes. We like this idea because it makes the world feel orderly and fair. If we’re struggling, there must be something we can fix. Cut a coffee here, skip a brunch there, and watch the savings pile up.

But if we saved $15 every single day for ten years, every coffee, every toast, every frivolous little pleasure, we’d save roughly $54,750. The median down payment on a U.S. home is currently around $60,000. And that’s before accounting for the interest rates that have made monthly payments nearly unaffordable even for those who can scrape together a down payment.

The math doesn’t work. It was never meant to work. The avocado toast argument isn’t a financial plan. It’s a distraction. It keeps people focused on their own micro-choices while the macro-structures that actually shape their economic lives go unexamined and unchanged.

It is, in other words, a very well-dressed version of Wright’s observation: keep people believing that their poverty is a personal failing, a temporary condition, a problem of discipline rather than of design, and they will spend their energy blaming themselves instead of questioning the system.

A Different Story

None of this is to say that individual choices don’t matter, or that hard work is worthless, or that there’s something wrong with hoping to build a better life. Those things are real and valuable.

But there is a profound difference between acknowledging the role of individual effort and reducing every economic outcome to individual virtue. One is honest. The other is a story that serves power.

The people who benefit most from meritocracy mythology are not the scrappy, self-made entrepreneurs. They are the inheritors and the monopolists and the financiers: the people who extract enormous value from systems they didn’t build, protected by rules they helped write, while telling everyone else that the reason they’re falling behind is their spending habits.

The temporarily embarrassed millionaire is waiting for their breakthrough. They’re networking, hustling, cutting lattes, skipping avocado toast. They’re playing the game as they’ve been told to play it.

Meanwhile, the rules of the game are being quietly rewritten in rooms they’ll never be invited into.

Maybe that’s the conversation we should be having over brunch.

If this sparked something, Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit are both essential reading for understanding how the stories we tell about success shape the societies we live in.

As always, if you want to chat about it, find me on Bluesky.