The Upper Middle Class Prison

This is probably one of the best articles you’ll read about how the upper middle-class is ostensibly a prison of its own, with the bars being “upper class striving.” It uses the Hulu series Fleischman Is In Trouble as its backbone. That’s a good show, if you haven’t seen it. I’d recommend.

This paragraph gets to the heart of the issue:

That’s because even though you’re making lots of money, it’s mostly salary income, you’re facing “lifestyle inflation” with kids and home prices and private schools and so forth, the marginal dollar you make gets taxed heavily, and so “your ability to move the net worth range is collapsing.” You may be technically a millionaire, but the money is bound up in your home, every kid is potentially a half-million-dollar college price tag down the road, and all your work goes toward sustaining your current lifestyle. You have the demands of wealth, basically, without its promised sense of security and ease.

Essentially, you’re rich — but not the type of rich where you can truly enjoy the “victory” of being rich. You’re rich in the way where you need to keep spending money to showcase that you’re doing life “right” in the eyes of your peers. America is littered with subdivisions like this, where the entire goal is to showcase how successful you are, even if the success you’re showcasing is morally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically bankrupting you.

Then, this paragraph is the root of a middle class and upper middle class mental health struggle:

The system’s legitimacy depends on that notional promise — that all people should have to work for their position, to achieve something extraordinary, to fully earn their place. But the biggest prize in the competition is to escape, at least somewhat, from its punishing demands.

I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where a lot of the show takes place. I lived in it. My parents were “rich,” but not “really rich.” When I was 20, in college by then, I wrote a paper about my dad for a sociology class, and I opened the paper with him traipsing in from work every day, sometimes looking haggard and beat-down. That was one of my associations with “money” and “success” and “wealth,” so in many ways it’s probably pretty logical that professionally I’m adrift and when I do work, I spend a lot of time writing articles for other people while wearing stained gym shorts. I just never saw the “ascension” as something theoretically valuable. I kinda came to dislike checking boxes.

Finally pull-quote wise, lemme give you this:

Recently, the socialist writer Freddie deBoer wrote a post expressing mystification at all the cultural discussion about “generational wealth,” a phrase that has risen in Google searches over the past few years. No doubt there’s some randomness to the Google trend, but one non-random explanation is that the same exhaustion with meritocratic competition that seems palpable on college campuses — the mental-health crisis, the desire for ever-more-relaxed academic rules, the appeal of ideologies that dismiss competition as a form of toxic “whiteness” — also encompasses a yearning, not to drop out, but to escape upward, into a more fully aristocratic lifestyle, the world of “nepo babies” rather than SAT-stressed kids, where you have the resources to free your family from the doom of the meritocrat, the situation where you’re constantly aware of your own privilege but never quite secure within it.

That is kinda how I felt growing up, yes. There’s always a notion of “looking up.” Even f’n Bill Gates has to periodically “look up.” Maybe some French guy, or some Indian guy, or Elon, or Bezos … maybe for that six-month span, they have more coin. There’s always an additional rung somewhere on the ladder.

OK, one more pull quote:

DeBoer finds this baffling and frustrating: “Your grandkids can’t get a job like everyone else? You want to create more idle rich? The world doesn’t have enough trust fund babies already?” Morally these seem like easy questions. But at the upper levels of the meritocracy, the myopia of class experience can muddle them: You might convince yourself that being slightly richer, one crucial level up, a little more “generationally” secure, will make your kids better people than you’re allowed to be, because they won’t be quite so harnessed to the machine, so handcuffed to overwork and ambition. Even though you yourself have the key to the handcuffs all the while.

Marie Osmond recently made “news” by saying she ain’t leaving money to her kids:

I think for most people, the stated goal of accruing wealth (esp. generational wealth) is “my kids will be better off.” That’s definitely a goal, but oftentimes the real goal is to feel relevant and successful in your own present-day skin, like you “won” in some form or fashion. It’s just more appealing to discuss that through the prism of your childrens’ success. In reality, we know that a lot of rich heirs and Nepo Babies are driving around with hookers in the trunk, and they’re skating the legal system as they do so — but still, we think we’re providing them some form of security, convenience, stability, not having to be “part of the machine.”

Stuff like Instagram has made all these conversations more perilous, because you look at the perfect wife, the perfect kids, the perfect dog, the perfect house … and you think “Man, that would be cool. I’d have less worries then!” In reality you’d possibly have more worries, because once you get to that perch and those 1,843 likes on an Easter family photo, well, you need to retain that perch, because the fall from that perch is the worst possible thing in your mind. So now, in a weird economy where maybe one spouse wants to work less, the pressure is immense. What will happen if you lose the club membership? What about public school? A new neighborhood? But Mike and Gary are killing it this year. What happened to you?

Would I say a $300,000 income (the subhead on this post is a quote from the Hulu TV show) and the ability to vacation in cool places and have a large home is akin to a “prison?” No, not physically in the least. But emotionally and mentally? Yes, in some ways it can be.

The “Joneses” thing is absolutely real. In reality, it’s bullshit and all you need to do is find your particular path to happiness, which varies drastically by person, family, dog, and child.

Takes?

One final thought here: at the end of that original New York Times article, the author links this study on “deaths of despair,” which is a very complicated (and yet oh-so-simple) topic of late:

That particular article linked attempts to tie “deaths of despair,” which most people paint as a drug crisis, to the decline of religion (another common theme).

It’s ironic that “deaths of despair” was linked after a classism article, because a lot of the current problems with American society come from this weird intersection of:

Refer a friend

• How money moves
• How opportunities feel fleeting
• How it seems tech and greed have outpaced humanity
• How people see others “succeeding” and wonder what happened to their “shot”
• The moralization of work ethic
• Easily available drugs and street drugs
• Bars on every corner

If you’re always striving for something slightly bigger and better, but it’s always getting pulled from you like Charlie Brown and the football, wouldn’t that set you on the wrong path? It has for me, many a time. Just something to consider.