How Cheap it is To Feel Poor
Prelude on Empathy
I’m going to start off with empathy, because there will be little empathy in what follows. This is intentional. While exercises in empathy may educate us and broaden our understanding of our fellow citizens, there are those for whom empathy needs no exercise, for we are already Olympicly trained to extend it unto them. An exercise against empathy, then, where we fortress ourselves against their point of view, their feelings, may prove more educational.
And so, for a brief moment, let us adopt empathy towards the characters outlined below. They find themselves caught up in a dominating desire to consume, borne out of need to maintain the markings of middle class lifestyles, even when their purse cannot accommodate it. Given that this blog has compared shopping to gambling addictions, has dwelt on how our desires can turn against us, and has considered how purchasing becomes so suffuse with pleasure, I cannot say I am devoid of empathy for these people. I understand them. As outlined below, these sorts of characters have been, and are, some of my friends. But just because my first instinct is to understand does not mean that they deserve understanding without complication.
Certain Characters
America’s hollow middle class, published on 12/15 on Vox, is a weaker piece of reporting by a writer that I otherwise adore, Anne Helen Petersen. The article describes the lives of a number of middle class characters who have high income but low savings, the so-called income-rich and asset-poor which have captured the imagination of various publications. Another name for this group of people is the house-rich cash-poor, those with a large amount of equity in their home but with little invested in other savings instruments, and whose investments in land are financed by debt.
Those reading this essay should read Petersen’s first, for as lengthy as it may be, analysis of these sorts of characters, and the type of press they receive, is how this essay will explicate its points.
The thesis of Petersen’s reporting, in my mind, is as follows, with citation of Barbara Ehrenreich, writer of Nickle and Dimed.
As journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, it’s very expensive to be poor. It’s also increasingly expensive to be middle class, in part because wages for all but the wealthy have remained stagnant for the past four decades. Most middle-class Americans seem to be making more — getting raises, however small, sometimes billed as “cost of living” increases. Yet these increases largely just keep pace with inflation, not the actual cost of living.
I find both an aesthetic and analytic issue with Petersen’s essay, and I believe that this citation of Ehrenreich provides a useful microcosm of my critique. I will start with the aesthetic.
To extend the class analysis of Ehrenreich (or James Baldwin, who I think has a better claim to be progenitor of the phrase that being poor is expensive) up to the middle class seems to me to be one of two things: either it is deeply aesthetically, rhetorically provocative, calling for the creation of a united working and middle class; or it is merely a banal extension of the fact that all revolutionary verbiage ends up getting watered down and used as rhetoric for the petite bourgeoisie. To deem it the first of these, I would expect a dramatis personae that includes at least some members of the working class, but they do not appear. The only invocation of the working class is to note that Petersen’s subjects, and the middle class at large, takes great steps to distance themselves from the markers of the poorer classes. Given the essay explores how this desire for distance gets in the way of these middle class characters’ lives, one could possibly see this invocation as a subtle critique of such distancing, rhetorically linking their financial similarities despite middle class attempts at distance, but that does not quite square with how she approaches this sentiment—I will dwell on this more below, but Petersen empathizes greatly with these characters, and with the pernicious desire to not look poor, so if this note on the aesthetics of class distinction is to say that such distinctions are fictitious, with middle class and working class being one, I don’t know if the rest of the work upholds this decision. This, sadly, leads me to think that this just comes with the territory of a popular radical adage. At some point, it loses its particular sting. This is not Petersen’s fault per say, given society does this with ideas all the time, but I think that invoking this great rhetoric while applying it to a middle class with very different features than the poor, is messy at best, and cheapens the phrase itself and Ehrenreich’s work at worst.
But let us say that Petersen wishes, in this essay, to become the Ehrenreich of the middle class. Petersen is a genuine talent when it comes to cultural criticism, so I don’t oppose her making such an attempt. But, such an aesthetic move, to be Ehrenreich for the middle class, breaks down when one compares the aesthetic, and stakes, of Ehrenreich’s work to Petersen’s. Ehrenreich, in Nickle and Dimed, went gonzo, living in motels, working in the entry level jobs available to poor Americans, attempting the minor heroics of maintaining a poor person’s balance sheet, keeping dwindling income over compounding expenses. Petersen sticks to interviews, a sensible approach, but imagine if she had instead decided to go gonzo and, like Ehrenreich, live the high stakes tightrope lives of her subjects. What a pitch! “Drop me off in a nice house with a six figure salary and a pool and allow me to see the suffering of the middle class first hand.”
Which is to say that the work is an aesthetic let down because the stakes of these characters are far too low. This makes any dramatic features used in the work come off as a tad silly. Petersen gives her characters psuedonyms, but unlike informants in the witness protection program, the reason for redacted names is not to protect their lives from mob recrimination, but to make sure that their other wealthy friends don’t know that they are struggling to pay off SUVs and pools.
Delia, for example, is a real person, but Delia’s not her real name; she doesn’t want others knowing her family’s business. She also thinks all her friends and neighbors are in a better financial situation than she is. They don’t ever talk about it, but she thinks they have better rates on their mortgages, more equity in their homes — how else could they drive $60,000 SUVs and put pools in over the summer? But someone on the outside might look at Delia’s life and think something very similar.
Petersen frames this as sad dramatic irony. If Delia knew what we know and what Petersen knows, that Delia struggles quietly with money, that Janet struggles quietly with money, that all her socialite friends struggle quietly with money, then solace could be theirs.
But, because of the relatively low stakes here, it reminds me of the end of a farce. You could imagine Delia and her friends driving to Atlantic City, hanging out at Olive Garden, finally admitting, with glee, that this was all bought with credit cards, that they’re all delightfully in debt, each one, now that the flood gates are open, trying to one-up the other in terms of insolvency. It’s not the tender quiet struggle of In The Mood for Love; in my mind, it’s rich people being too stubborn and silly to actually be honest with each other. It’s Arno threatening to beat Howard’s face in because he resurfaced his swimming pool.
Aesthetics matter here because Petersen wishes to establish empathy for these people and their situation. But the flimsiness of the stakes makes it hard to empathize with these characters even if I were inclined to do so, which I am not.
But reporting is not just storytelling, it is analysis, and Petersen, by invoking Ehrenreich’s schema, cheapens her own analysis. The point of Ehrenreich’s (and, again, Baldwin’s before her) thesis is that as one gets poorer the cost of living increases, such that the poor and the middle class live in two separate worlds. For those unfamiliar, Ehrenreich’s thesis can be exemplified by the following: most poor people don’t have health insurance, so a needed surgery is not just a larger percentage of their paycheck, but actually has a steeper price than it would be for a rich person. If you’re poor, not only do you have less income, but you live in a more expensive world.
Petersen also has a thesis based on comparison, that of the middle class of today versus the middle class of the 1980s. But, she makes rather flimsy arguments as to how the cost of living differs between these two middle classes. Petersen notes that the income-to-debt ratio has risen. But this is an aggregate value across all consumers, not just the middle class, and a mean rather than a median, meaning there isn’t a way to safely figure out who is middle class or not. She cites the fact that consumer debt has risen to $14.3 trillion, but since she provides no baseline for where consumer debt stood during the halcyon 80s, I can’t judge how bad things have become, and once again, 14.3 trillion is across all consumers, the richest and the poorest and those in between. She notes a balloon in back rent due to the pandemic, but this seems a special exception, and a bit of accounting sleight of hand. If we compared 2019 to 1980, the height of the brutal Volcker recession, we may have had no envy for the middle class of the 1980s, and so comparing the middle class of 1985 to the middle class of brutal 2020 seems a little unfair (not to mention, again, the back rent number is not disaggregated to only focus on the middle class, and certainly includes a number of poor people).
The most compelling data for her argument is that more high income earners are renting rather than owning their own homes. This does show a change in expenses exclusive to the middle class: those who rent do not build equity, and cannot take advantages of tax deductions that homeowners receive. I will concede here. But I have much more to say on mortgages later in this piece, and this statistic provides an apt transition into my next paragraph, for while it is true that the rich now face a new charge in the form of rent, it feels a little disingenuous to whine about mere rent when the ballooned expenses of temporary housing and homelessness are but a few rungs lower on the class ladder. If it is expensive to be poor, and cheap to be rich, a transition from owning a home to renting a home just looks like the removal of an unfair discount rather than the imposition of a new and cruel expense.
But if we peek under the hood, and look at the consumer debt that Petersen’s characters accrue, I don’t think that we can look at the rise of consumer debt as a true problem. Our previously introduced Delia has to balance a possible vacation “on several credit cards.” As someone whose family vacations were exclusively camping trips in state parks, the idea that a vacation paid for on credit cards is part of an increased middle class cost of living is laughable. Worrying about this consumer debt takes at face value that the markings of the middle class are the cost of living for the middle class, which they are not. Cost of living is room and board, education, transport, the funds to pursue a hobby, childcare. I will not adopt the view that 60,000 dollar SUVs are part of the cost of living. I refuse out right to empathize with a view where this is the case. The point of that beautiful saying, that it is “expensive to be poor,” is to highlight the outlandish surcharges given to the poor. But there is no great new surcharge that the middle class of today faces. And I repeat once again, because it stands such repetition, the cost of keeping up with the Joneses by taking fancy vacations is not the cost of living.
At the union of the aesthetic issues with this piece, the analytical issues with this piece, and her invocation of Ehrenreich is the following: all of the increased expenses that the middle class of today faces, which are here to elicit empathy from the reader, are examples of the outsized expenses that the poor face. The housing crisis may claim 30% of a rich person’s paycheck, but a poor person pays the price of displacement and gentrification, and the already delineated surcharge found in temporary housing and in homelessness. The middle class pays $4,900 a year out-of-pocket for healthcare, whereas the poor, being largely uninsured, do not experience a distinction between out-of-pocket and insured healthcare; they are what hospital billing staff term “true self-pay,” those who must foot the entire bill, and the “self-pay” that the middle class faces, with such a slim price tag as $4,900, would be envied by those true self-payors. Having worked for safety-net hospitals and FQHCs, charitable organizations which focus on these true self-payors, I can tell you that those with insurance live in a different reality than those without.
The piece, lacking in the aesthetic or analytic, only has merit by giving us a window into how the other half lives, that is, with a deep sense of entitlement and without any of the actual cash that they purport to have.
Feeling Rich
No one has ever felt rich. Some have known they are rich. Some have felt relieved to not be poor. But no one has felt in their heart-of-hearts rich.
When I first moved to Madison, I met a young woman from Seattle, who I will call Ivy. A moment of vulnerability between her and me came while driving through the woods of Wisconsin. It was early in our friendship. This may have been the first such vulnerable moment. Ivy looked at the woods and remembered how she grew up in a similar part of Seattle, far from the urban core. In high school, she practiced some sort of aquatic sport, and to practice in the Puget Sound, the team’s bus would have to roll along a highway not far from her house.
One day, with disdain, a crew mate of hers remarked how ugly and remote this locale was, what a shabby sort of boonies. Ivy winced. This crew mate, of course, did not know that Ivy lived here. She simply was expressing her urbane taste. Ivy, like so many people who have heard the elite turn their home into the butt of a joke, felt, in that moment, poor. I felt touched that she would share such a memory with me, this little pocket of pain.
But Ivy is not a typical American. She would not be chronicled in Petersen’s essay. Later, I learned that she was the only child of a Chinese business woman of some prominence. Drama later arose over the fact that her mother wanted to purchase a condo for her in Madison, a means to free her daughter from rent and a wise investment in the bubbling housing market of tech-hub Madison. She attended Lakeside School, ranked in 2019 as the 14th best private high school in the country. She was rich without qualification.
The rich never feel how rich they are. In part, that is because there will always be richer people out there, like the snotty crew mate in Ivy’s anecdote. When rich, you attend rich high schools, which will inevitably have richer people, and will have all of the catty classism of high school but on a different scale. This mechanism arguably informs the pain that Delia feels, seeing her richer friends make extravagant purchases.
Even after witnessing Ivy’s true class background, that first vulnerable moment I shared with Ivy is something I can empathize with, and I do not have antipathy towards her. But I believe that is only the case because I knew Ivy, and I have never met Delia. I do not expect the readers of this essay to give Ivy the same benefit of the doubt.
Being Rich
Petersen’s protagonist’s presence in the middle class is, at some level, more the product of accounting than anything else. Delia’s combined household income, for example, is $160,000. With two dependents, this means she is indeed in the middle income distribution for her household size, as Pew Research, cited by Helen Petersen, attests. But, I do note, that according to Pew, for a three person household, the middle class ranges from $48,500 to $145,500. This middle class range, to me, is ridiculously large, and I don’t think that the lives of those in the first half of the middle class bear much resemblance to those in the second. But, more importantly in Delia’s case, this range means that if she had one child rather than two, then she would be in the upper class. Certainly, I think child care in this country is ludicrously expensive, and I don’t think Delia should be penalized for her decision to have a bigger brood. But I am at least reminded somewhat of those who say the poor should have fewer children to not incur so much expense, making me hesitant to empathize here. This is particularly true because I don’t think, for most of the poor, a reduction in the number of children would actually impact their class standing. For Delia, on the other hand, clearly the economic tradeoff exists. Either way, I don’t think we butcher language if we round up, in Delia’s case, and call her rich, and from the global vantage point, she inarguably is.
Other biographical details solidify this fact. Delia herself makes $115,000 on a teacher’s salary, which means that she is protected by a union, that she has summers off, and that she is in the top 10% of teachers nationally by income (the threshold is $97,500). Her husband may now be a carpenter who makes $45,000, but in the early 2000s, he owned a construction company. We are not looking at the proletariat here; we are looking at capital fallen on harder times.
The main problem that Delia has financially, it seems, is that she had the bad luck of purchasing her home at the height of the 2000s real estate bubble.
They hung on to their house as long as they could, but by 2012, they were drowning. They ended up shutting down her husband’s business and short-selling the house, leaving them with no equity.
Their home hadn’t been foreclosed on and their credit was still intact, but they suddenly felt seven years behind
The housing bubble is a disgusting stain on capitalism’s history, and indeed, Delia and her husband were duped the same way so many were. Yet, to get personal, my family was much harder hit than Delia’s. While Delia’s husband had to relinquish a company, such wealth that my family has never cherished, my mother lost her job. We were lucky to not have her as the main breadwinner of the household. This is not to say that Delia did not experience discomfort, pain even, when selling her house. But Delia fell seven years behind when she was already ten years ahead, as her current income can readily attest.
Picking on poor Delia does little, of course, but she is Petersen’s main character, the embodiment of this hollowed middle. Why didn’t Petersen instead investigate the life of Nicole, who is introduced but in the final paragraph?
“The walls are closing in,” Nicole, who lives in South Carolina on $65,000 a year with no savings and no support system, told me. “The chasm between income and expenses just grows. I don’t know where the system will break. But it will, if we don’t do something about it.”
This, to me, is the strangest part of this essay from an aesthetic point of view. Petersen follows someone that is rich, who has had more opportunity than the vast majority of human beings, and then at the end briefly hones in on someone who actually looks middle class to me. Nicole, unlike Delia, does not whinge about her financial status and the desire to keep up with the Joneses, but instead calls for revolution, or at least hints that deteriorating conditions may incite such a thing. It would be like if Parasite followed a day in the life of the Park family, melodramatically portraying how tough it is to hire a good English tutor for your daughter, only to introduce Song Kang-ho and his impoverished family in the final shot with a subtitle noting that people like Park will one day be lead to the slaughter. Tonally, what a mess!
How Expensive It Is To Feel Rich
Delia and her family may not be rich by Petersen’s standards, or in their own eyes, but their consumption notably is. Given this is a blog about consumption, this fact most intrigues me. This hollowed middle class to me then feels like a parasitic, zombie version of the middle class, consuming at the level of the middle class without having any of the cash. Petersen makes this argument, when she notes that:
In truth, the American middle class has become less of an economic classification and more of a mode: a way of feeling, a posture toward the rest of the world, predicated on privilege of place. Which is why it’s so untoward to talk about the economic realities; the rising panic over medical bills exists on a different plane than the ineffable feeling of “normal.”
If they are not an “economic classification,” that is, not defined by their relationship to the means of production and investment in land and stocks, and instead base their class markers around “feeling normal,” a normalcy that is mediated through consumption, as evidenced by the pools and the $60,000 SUVs, then Petersen spells out in plain English what I am going to expand upon here, which is that the hollow middle class has retained their biggest sin, oversized-consumption, a sin which I don’t believe we should show empathy.
It is through consumption choices that the middle class does harm, and it is because of consumption choices that alliances between the working class and the middle class are oft fraught. The middle class does not, like Jeff Bezos, turn fulfillment centers into COVID death mills. But, they buy things from Amazon, thus making Bezos’s decision profitable. And the environmental toll of their consumption, collectively, adds up: it is the richest 1% of the global population (a group that includes Delia) who have contributed 15% of cumulative global emissions since 1990. This is not just the fault of the richest of the rich, the top .01%, given that the top 10% of the global population by income (those making over $38,000 per year) have produced 52% of cumulative emissions in the same period. The American middle class, then, is a major culprit in environmental degradation and labor abuses.
Much discourse tries to hide this link. An adage that I find lacking is the oft cited statistic that 20 firms are responsible for 33% of emissions. But, as an economist will tell you, a seller always has a buyer. Certainly, just as we can calculate GDP by looking at the revenue streams of a nation, we can calculate global emissions from the vantage of the firm, and just as we can also calculate GDP by tabulating all purchases, all consumption, we can look at emissions based on buyers rather than sellers. Shell and Chevron are not extracting oil for no reason: they are doing this to sell gasoline to power plants and gas stations, so that the middle class can have air conditioning and a trip to the beach.
Now, indeed, there are purchasers that have nothing to do with the middle class. The United States Military is such an example; their various branches purchase 269,230 barrels of oil a day, whereas the average American car owner burns through only 12 barrels of oil yearly from driving. The vile imperialism of the United States will need to end if climate change is to be stopped—this is a fact of accounting.
But just going off the back of the envelope, we can see that the middle class commuter still does more damage a year than the US Military. 365 multiplied by 300,000, to convert daily oil consumption to a yearly value, is 109,500,000. If we say the middle class is 50% of America’s adult population, and that 90% of Americans regularly use a car, then we get .5 multiplied by .9 multiplied by 230,000,000 (that’s the adult population) multiplied (finally) by 12 (our barrels), which is 1,242,000,000. This is 10x the emissions produced by the United States military, again, just from cars, which ignores aviation, the emissions from food production, and the oil expended to cool our homes and charge our laptops.
We can fuss over these back-of-the-envelope calculations and modeling, but I believe we would need much wishful thinking to believe that the American middle class, and the middle class of rich countries writ large, can continue to consume the exorbitant amount of carbon necessary to create the “normalcy” that Petersen’s characters so desire. That they now finance this over-consumption through debt rather than through assets makes little difference.
Which is to say that we pay for Delia’s decisions to take a vacation on a credit card, no matter how tragic a subject Petersen can make out of her. This vacation doesn’t seem to make Delia feel happy. That the middle class does not have the means to purchase the lifestyles that have brutalized the planet has not prevented them from doing so. That they can’t even be happy about it should evoke no pity.
How Cheap it is To Feel Poor
But, then, isn’t this the old right wing adage? That people ought to “live within their means.”
Sure, but what means! The characters in Petersen’s essay have mortgages with regressive interest rate deductions, giving them the advantage over renters of paying pre-tax income for housing. How nice of the IRS to have extended these means to them, but yet more is extended still. The American financial ecosystem’s reliance on mortgages has rife negative externalities, best explicated in The 30-Year Mortgage is an Intrinsically Toxic Product by Bryne Hobart.
Hobart’s essay is more than just an expose: it is a colonoscopy of our shitty modern financial system. Hobart examines the volatility inherent in the mortgage market—namely, that mortgages are fixed-income bonds, and therefore subject to interest rate volatility, and that they are one of the few bonds that have prepayment as an option. Bonds that allow for pre-payment are incredibly cushy for those taking out the loans, since they allow debtors to weather high rate times by paying low locked-in rates, and still reap the benefit of low rate times by prepaying the mortgage and refinancing. Anything that accommodates a debtor hurts a lender, and so banks that deal in 30-year mortgages need fiscal protections in order to balance out the risk of a product which becomes less-valuable in high rate times, as any bond does, but also becomes no more valuable in low rate times due to prepayment. These fiscal protections, in the form of Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Hobart compellingly argues, leads to increased volatility in the bond market at large. This bond market volatility pronounces the boom and bust cycle of capital, leading ironically to the poor job market that Petersen’s underemployed characters suffer through, and to the loss of Delia’s house. (Yet, remember, that those suffering through recessions most are not those chronicled in Petersen’s essay, but rather Black people whose wealth fell by 133% the rate of white people in 2008, and the poor, those who make up the downward slant of our current K-shaped recession.)
It is not just that the middle class should not live beyond their means that I rage against. I rage against the fact that we have fucked over our economy so absolutely so that the middle class can be allowed and encouraged to spend beyond their means. We allow people to buy more house than they have the means to afford, and poor people pay out of pocket to allow them to do so with loans so cushy that they could not exist without government intervention, and then we hand them SALT deductions and interest payment deductions on top.
For the poor, we offer loans so cruel that they should not exist. The surcharges that the poor experience when they try to live beyond their means boggle. While the rich get Klarna to buy Pelotons with interest free loans, the poor face payday lenders whose rates can be 1800% APR. While the rich peruse credit card options with 18 months of introductory 0% APR, the unbanked pay up to 10% of their salary just to cash their paycheck. The rich get tax deductions on their palatial assets, the unhoused pay double to live in a residential motel. The poor must spend their means to even access their means, let alone to live beyond it, even when living itself requires that. And then, what if they live beyond their means and purchase with frivolity? Let us extend them that same empathy towards over-consumption that one might give those people chronicled by Vox, and note that the hedonic treadmill is real, that shopping has all the seductions of gambling, that the Joneses will not be caught no matter your station in life.
What a world we have made—not only does everyone, from the rich to the poor, pays when the middle class lives beyond its means, but everyone, from the rich to the poor, pay for the means themselves.
Anne Helen Petersen and Class
What baffles me most about this essay is that Petersen is the great auteur of middle class exploitation. She understands how the pressures of current day capitalism has turned once financially-stable and emotionally rewarding office jobs into cesspools of burnout. How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation describes how this process has reduced an entire generation into emotional puddles. My friends deal with the burnout Petersen has, in Didionic detail and intimacy, depicted. The costs of this burnout are more personally depicted in this former essay: millennials who can’t vote because they are too burned out to register, millennials who throw away $1,000 because they can’t fill out the insurance paperwork. She even understands the woes that surround consumption, taking shots at the $11 billion dollar self care industry, and noting how we are compelled to spend our money treating ourselves to useless crap. This essay also eloquently mixes differing layers of the class strata: Uber drivers, Patagonia social media managers, retail workers, Buzzfeed writers, all commingle on the page. The working class, the gig class, the middle class—when it comes to analyzing how we sell our labor in this day and age, Petersen hits the mark. If she had written about Nicole, instead of relegating her to the strange final word, maybe we might have seen how the middle class was hollowed and stirred into the working class.
Yet, even this may be too simplistic. Petersen’s work compels because it identifies the social causes of personal problems: that is, our all-consuming, burnt-out, lifehacked culture in which we constantly have to optimize ourselves for productivity. But Petersen stops at personal problems. Errand paralysis, the purchasing of useless goods, the anxieties of students staking their entire identity on their first job out of college, these are important things to catalog. But they stop at the individual. Because she does not trace out the impact of the middle class’s consumption habits on the working class, she can’t trace the difference between a software engineer’s burnout and an Uber driver’s burnout. The former benefits from the latter’s exploitation, with Uber’s busting of cab unions allowing them to offer the software engineer a ride at a discount rate. She hails Amazon Fresh as a necessary part of a middle class millennial’s time optimization, without considering that, in doing so, this middle class character cuts into the time of the Amazon delivery driver.
She understands, like I do, and like Delia doesn’t, that most of the things that the burned out, anxious members of the maybe middle class buy are useless. The most beautiful lines in “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” are as follows:
In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive. You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unfu*k yourself.” You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “anxiety baking,” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.
If we can’t fix our burnout problems, or any of the psychological brutalities that the modern middle class faces, with a vacation, why should we uncritically accept Delia’s multiple credit card vacation? And, if Petersen argues that the middle class modality is consumption in pursuit of normalcy, while burnout and financial precarity precludes such normalcy, how can we not then be critical of the hollowed middle class as a whole?
I think, again, like with Didion before her, Petersen’s myopia is in the fact that she focuses on the individual. If we live in such a burnt-out hellscape, then maybe we can forgive Delia for trying with all her might to feel normal. She might seem tragic. But I do not pity Delia, and I don’t believe anyone should.
How Expensive it is To Feel Normal
Petersen, thankfully, has outlined the solution to Delia’s problem. At the end of How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, she leaves us with two different thoughts, one collective, and one personal.
Until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, how can we hope to lessen or prevent — instead of just temporarily stanch — burnout? Change might come from legislation, or collective action, or continued feminist advocacy, but it’s folly to imagine it will come from companies themselves[…]
I don’t have a plan of action, other than to be more honest with myself about what I am and am not doing and why, and to try to disentangle myself from the idea that everything good is bad and everything bad is good. This isn’t a task to complete or a line on a to-do list, or even a New Year’s resolution. It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work.
The answer, at the aggregate level, is to advocate against these bad conditions. And the answer at the personal level is to be more critical of our everyday life and actions—I borrow vocabulary here that Petersen does not use, but that I am reminded of, from Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life.
Yet, she doesn’t offer up either of these solution to Delia, maybe because “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” is memoir whereas “America’s hollow middle class” is reporting. Telling someone how to live their life is, unless you’re a life coach or a politician, uncouth. But Petersen knows that the need to feel content, to escape from the crushing need to optimize, is part of life’s work, and my favorite life coach Mark Manson would agree. To feel normal, Delia and other members of the middle class who have attached their soul to consumption and consumerism will have to look long and hard inside.
It also may be because there is a similar dynamic when it comes to the middle class as when it comes to the companies that Petersen knows won’t change—again, sellers and buyers. I don’t know if the middle class will find a way to shed its class markings anytime soon. I, a freshly minted member of the upper class, certainly struggle with this—I buy nice rice cookers, use Amazon Fresh, and enjoy vacations. To return to Bryne Hobart and toxic mortgages, the death of home ownership, a middle class dogma in which even those of my beloved Generation Z believe, is likely necessary to reduce the volatility of modern capitalism. Getting back to normalcy is going to be costly.
Ah, but aren’t I being empathetic here, admitting that ending home ownership is going to hurt many people emotionally? Well, despite the prelude, empathy remains my prime modality. I know people like Delia well, and understand her struggles in a way I will never understand the struggles of the fabulously wealthy. I, like Petersen, believe that an Uber driver and a surgeon have more in common than a surgeon and Elon Musk. But good empathy comes out of love, and a desire to help people, and in order for empathy to not be useless it must be critical, it must know when to feel and when not to feel.