In 1989, I was visiting a friend who lived in Neuss.
Back then it wasn’t a one-horse-town so much as a village with an option on a future time-share horse.
Just before the bridge into Düsseldorf … quite literally on the bank of the Rhein … there was a tiny boutique.
In the window of said boutique there were various items of apparel, the most expensive of which was a pullover selling for DM 3,000 — approximately GBP 1000 at the time (GBP 2,467 in 2019).
On the other side of the bridge (pretty much, if not literally, opposite) was another tiny boutique, in the window of which the cheapest pullover cost DM 3,000!
Now, I don’t care if the thing was ‘knitted’ by an old, toothless Eskimo woman as the last thing she did before being put out onto the ice to die in the traditional manner (and it doesn’t matter whether the Eskimos ever really engaged in that practice or not) … no pullover is worth two-and-a-half thousand pounds!
Unless, of course, you are so wealthy that anything less than that doesn’t make a dent in your wherewithal … doesn’t make you notice that you actually spent any money (like you or I purchasing one for a penny) — in which case it is the only way for anything you purchase to be of any value to you and for you to feel that your life of vapid materialism is meaningful (because the measure of life is the monetary value of your possessions, not any kind of ‘spiritual’ yardstick).
So, the utility of a bottle of wine costing (not being worth) £260 … let alone £4,500 … lies in the fact that, for anyone who can actually afford to spend that amount of money on 70cl of juice … squeezed from grapes by the sweaty, cheesy feet of peasants without shoes, who spend their days stepping in and out of farmyard dung before sticking them in your wine … nothing costing less than that has any utility at all.
It’s not that there is a utility to it so much as it is in an exercise in the avoidance of the futility of purchasing anything cheaper.
In fact, its utility lies in its distracting your from the futility of your own existence; because, with very few (if any) exceptions, the lives of people with that much money are pretty meaningless: they need not strive, let alone struggle, for anything they desire … no whim (or none that do not involve the agency of another in a position to exercise their own free will) is beyond their reach … and, short of foolishly risking their wealth on ill-advised endeavours, there is nothing they can do in Life that will ever seriously challenge them ¹.
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¹ Yes, they might engage in personal challenges, the failure at which results in the existential pain that is no different for anyone failing to achieve a goal … but it’s only possible to feel existential discomfort about not being the best skier on the piste if you don’t have to worry whether you can afford a new pair of shoes for your next job interview and, therefore, not really the same thing at all.
