" Here, as long as you followed the rules, you were okay. As long as the conversation was polite, it didn’t matter what was being said. Of course, this led to a lot of boring conversation, a lot of dull iterations of the name game. You know how old houses always look good? Whether mansion or tenement or saltbox, if it was built more than a century ago, it has a certain air of elegance. But when you think about the small rooms, the outdated layouts, the bad electrical wiring, you realize you’d never actually want to live there.
That was like the world of the rich. From far away, it looks enchanting. Up close, you realize the elegance is just a product of stasis. It’s easy to be tricked into thinking something is beautiful. "

― Anna Pitoniak , Necessary People