To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue. — William F. Buckley, Jr.

To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue.

Author: William F. Buckley, Jr.

Insight: There's something sharp buried in this joke about wine snobbery. Buckley's pointing at a real modern exhaustion: the performance of having good taste has become indistinguishable from actual hospitality. You buy the expensive bottle, you arrange the glassware just so, you hope someone notices you're the kind of person who knows about wine—and somewhere in that anxiety, you've lost the actual point, which was supposed to be about sitting with people you like. The twist is that this cuts both ways. Yes, it's a gentle roast of pretentious hosts who treat their dinner parties like résumé items. But it's also true that truly serving people well—paying attention to what they actually need, what brings them comfort—takes real energy and thought in a way that just being wealthy doesn't. Money lets you buy the good bottle. Fatigue is what you feel after genuinely considering your guests, remembering their preferences, making them feel welcome rather than impressed. We still live in this tension. Instagram has made it worse in some ways, but the underlying struggle is old: the difference between looking like someone who has their life together and actually having anyone over who feels at home.