The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, Breaks

Schadenfreude but.. also not. Nobody wants to have a home beset by a ticking clock you can't stop, rich or poor its the minor irritation which nags. For the poor it's the constant hunt for newspaper to wrap themselves in over a steam vent. For the rich, it's losing your free breakfast in a Michelin starred restaurant you have to spend $15,000 pa in by contract, but which is closed by covid.

Oh well. Anyway..

I get conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand it's highly unlikely anyone in that tower would get a shred of empathy from the common man (and highly unlikely this is even one of their 5 other homes), but on the other it's just a damn shame that some of the most prominent landmarks in the greatest city in the world are crappy places to live at. I'm not of the opinion they're eyesores - the nyc Skyline was stagnant for decades until these needles came in. One way or another progress in that regard is good?

for once, a subsection of rich people get a taste of what most regular people go through on a daily basis

just goes to show that this project might have spent more money on marketing and advertising rather than on their engineering and architect departments.

Noise is what turns me off from high rise residential buildings. When you watch the construction, many don’t event have concrete walls between apartments on the same floor, and I am ready to guess the concrete floors are as thin as required to keep the weight of the structure down. Add to that all-glass external walls, and I only heard stories from friends who live there that you hear everything your neighbours do, particularly walking on wooden floor.

I get the schadenfreude. I used to dismiss the suffering of people who were “beyond” the survival levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. This changed for me when I read that Peter Singer himself focuses on influencing survival-level needs for those in poverty because they are more immediate and are more quantifiable.

He said something like, “Well-off people suffer, of course, but those types of suffering are more difficult to measure and entail interventions beyond vaccines or food distribution. I don’t focus on those types of suffering because there so much of the basic kind and also because it’s too hard of a problem.”

When I segmented suffering by the individuals’ place on Maslow’s hierarchy, it helped me develop more compassion for the rich than is in vogue. “Oh, that guy driving that Lamborghini isn’t hungry, but he might be the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”