Wealth & Money Quote by Adriana Lima

City life, in Adriana Lima's telling, isn’t glamorous; it’s an attention economy where work and money crowd out everything else. The line lands because it punctures the usual mythology of the “big city” as freedom and possibility. Instead, it frames urban ambition as a kind of tunnel vision: people aren’t evil or cold, they’re absorbed, optimized, busy. Friendship doesn’t die in a dramatic betrayal; it just gets priced out by schedules, commutes, and the soft pressure to keep producing.

Coming from a model whose career was built in global capitals, the subtext carries extra bite. Lima is both beneficiary and witness of a system that treats time as a luxury good. Fashion cities run on networking, hierarchy, and constant motion; relationships can start to feel transactional, or at least interruptible. Her phrasing, “they don't give some value,” hints at something learned rather than innate: valuing friendship is a practice, and the city teaches a different curriculum.

The intent isn’t to romanticize small-town life so much as to call out a cultural trade-off. Money and work aren’t presented as immoral; they’re presented as totalizing. The depressing part is the quiet realization that you can be surrounded by people and still feel socially undernourished. It’s a critique of modern success metrics: if your life looks full on paper but empty in the group chat, the problem might not be you. It might be the environment that makes intimacy feel inefficient.