the.com/high life
The lifestyle you can't afford, narrated as if you already own it.
means A life of wealth, luxury, and fashionable leisure — the champagne-and-penthouse existence of the well-off.
from A straightforward 19th-century compound of 'high' (meaning elevated in rank or status, as in 'high society') plus 'life.' It traveled into other languages too — French borrowed it wholesale as 'le high life' to describe fashionable aristocratic living, which is a nice irony: English exporting a phrase about exclusivity for others to covet.
- origin
- Term predates jazz age, from 1800s British upper-crust slang
- malt liquor irony
- Miller High Life markets itself as the champagne of beers
- economics
- Usually financed by debt, not actual wealth
- peak symbol
- Caviar, yachts, and not checking price tags