Critically acclaimed “Gilmore Girls” starring Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel is a cult classic and one of the greatest American television shows of all time. Thirty-two-year-old Lorelai is a single mother to her gentle and intelligent daughter Rory Gilmore, whose acceptance into a prestigious high school becomes the premise of her coming of age. Lorelai is unable to afford her daughter’s tuition, prompting her to plead to her wealthy parents for help. Lorelai’s relationship with her parents, Emily and Richard, has been strained ever since she fell pregnant with her daughter at sixteen years old and decided not to marry her daughter’s biological father. Her down-to-earth and progressive values were never appreciated by her traditionalist father, who manages a large insurance firm, and her mother who manages their estate while delegating to housekeepers.
Emily Gilmore agrees to finance her granddaughter’s tuition on one condition: as grandparents, she and her husband will no longer be shut out from Rory’s life, and both Lorelai and Rory are to attend Friday evening dinners with Emily and Richard to update them on Rory’s academic progress. Lorelai reluctantly agrees to appease her mother in order to secure her daughter’s enrollment at a high school that offers the promise of Rory being one day accepted into Harvard University.
The show is beloved for its portrayal of multigenerational family dynamics. The changes that Lorelai and Rory experiences unfold as each Gilmore Girl tries to forge their own path as individuals who are culturally identified with the working class, but are forced to reckon with the pressure and judgment from the upper class, including families of the children who attend Chilton High, and Emily and Richard Gilmore.
America has had a longstanding conversation about wealth and poverty. One could say that this conversation is about class and equity, a conversation that has been further ignited by President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Critics have argued that the program promotes quitting, undermining those who paid their loans, while proponents like Senator Elizabeth Warren advocate that the program alleviates the burden that disproportionately affects working-class families.
Gilmore Girls makes it very clear that if not for Lorelei’s wealthy parents, her daughter would not have had access to elite education. It’s a fictional story that is honest about the realities of how privilege creates opportunity, yet unrealistic about the solution. Most people do not have rich parents to financially open the door to expensive milestones.
The blockchain was created from an anti-establishment sentiment to this issue. Decentralization by its very nature shifts power from institutions to individuals. Blockchain real estate gives more people access to investing in property; instead of having to possess the capital to purchase a property in its entirety or the capital and credit to receive loan approval, fractional real estate can be bought and sold with real money.
The challenge of real estate financing is coupled with supply shortages and rising prices. By purchasing shares of a property through tokenization, real estate crypto investments offer people with the choice between a fraction or a whole, as opposed to simply “all or nothing” as with traditional real estate investing.