By Monica Radu

Whenever the Kardashians come up in conversation, a common reaction is that they are not “relatable.” While that is true, relatability is not necessarily the goal. Much of everyday life already reflects familiar struggles, including balancing work, family responsibilities, financial pressures, and exhaustion. Those experiences are well known and widely shared.

For anyone less familiar, The Kardashians follows the Kardashian-Jenner family, a group of celebrities and business owners whose fame began with reality television and expanded into fashion, beauty, social media, and brand entrepreneurship. Their lives are highly visible, carefully curated, and shaped by extraordinary economic privilege and public attention.

What shows like The Kardashians offer is a glimpse into a world shaped by extreme wealth, status, and consumption—experiences most people will never encounter firsthand. From a sociological perspective, this is exactly what makes the Kardashians useful to analyze.

Reality television often exaggerates social inequality, privilege, and consumer culture in ways that make underlying social structures more visible. These shows highlight how affluence shapes access, opportunities, and public perception. In that sense, the Kardashians are less about being relatable and more about revealing how power, fame, and consumption operate in contemporary society. Of course, there is a risk in centering elite figures like the Kardashians, as focusing on the ultra-wealthy can inadvertently reproduce the attention and visibility that sustain their power.

Reality TV Isn’t About Reality, It’s About Status

Media actively shapes how we understand society by reinforcing certain values, norms, and power structures. Reality TV gives us a front-row seat to social hierarchies by showing who holds power, who receives admiration, and who is allowed to be “messy” without facing “real” consequences. The Kardashians operate at the very top of those hierarchies, which is exactly what makes them sociologically interesting. Their class position and visibility also demonstrate how social stratification, conspicuous consumption, and cultural capital operate.

Research from Pew Research Center shows that Americans are highly aware of economic inequality and are increasingly conscious of wealth differences, even as consumption-driven media normalizes elite lifestyles. In this context, shows like The Kardashians help frame wealth as visible, aspirational, and culturally meaningful. As a result, even seemingly ordinary aspects of family life like parenting, romantic relationships, emotional labor, and work are transformed when resources are unlimited and public attention is constant. What looks like “normal” stress or conflict plays out differently when it’s buffered by money and status.

From the perspective of social comparison theory, watching the Kardashians offers a reference group that allows viewers to assess difference, hierarchy, and privilege. Observing lives shaped by extreme material advantage helps clarify where we stand socially, economically, and culturally. In that sense, the appeal lies not in relatability, but in distance. It’s about observing how wealth reshapes experience itself.

And Yet… Sometimes It Is Relatable

Here’s the part that always surprises me: every once in a while, the show does feel relatable. Not because of the money, but because of the parenting chaos that cuts through it.

Two moments stand out to me: the first is when Kim complains on her birthday about having to watch YouTube unboxing videos with her kids (if you know, you know). Not luxury content. Not glamorous content. Just loud, repetitive, algorithm-driven kid content that no adult would choose voluntarily. That moment is relatable because parenthood is structured in ways that reduce adult autonomy, regardless of income. What makes it especially striking is that it disrupts the carefully curated image the show typically presents. Reality TV is built on performance and brand management, yet moments like this feel genuine precisely because they interrupt that performance, when real-life demands override curation.

The second moment comes during Kim’s law school graduation party, when she’s giving a speech and two of her kids start fighting. She has to stop, redirect them, and then return to a moment she worked years for. Sociologically, this captures what scholars call the mental load, the invisible, ongoing work of anticipating needs, managing emotions, and keeping daily life running, even during moments meant to be personally or professionally meaningful. Research consistently shows that this cognitive and emotional labor falls disproportionately on mothers, who do most of the planning, organizing, and monitoring of family life even when tasks appear to be shared.

What connects these moments is a loss of control. Despite wealth and status, certain social roles, especially parenting, still impose limits on autonomy. These scenes also highlight an often-overlooked constraint: time. Money can buy flexibility, but it cannot eliminate time scarcity. Attention is still finite, interruptions still happen, and meaningful moments still compete with competing demands, even at the very top of the social hierarchy.

These moments do not contradict the idea that the Kardashians are not relatable; they reinforce it. The relatability here is not about emotional similarity or shared lifestyles, it’s structural. The same roles produce similar tensions, even when they are lived under radically different conditions. That’s why these scenes tend to resonate so strongly with audiences. Viewers (like me) latch onto them not because they humanize wealth, but because they reveal the limits of it.

So no, the Kardashians are not relatable in the traditional sense, but they don’t need to be. Their value lies in what they make visible: how power and visibility reshape experiences, and how even at the top of the social hierarchy, roles and expectations continue to structure behavior. Reality TV like this is not about seeing ourselves on screen. It’s about seeing society, magnified, exaggerated, and impossible to ignore. This kind of analysis matters because it helps make visible the social structures that continue to shape inequality, power, and status.