I write today about what we call the upper middle class. These people are not the soaring elites of inherited wealth, or titans of tech or entertainment. The relative influence of any individual in this class may be small, but as a societal force, they are overwhelming. They are the 20 percent of the income ladder, a realm populated by people in finance, tech, law, medicine, and management consulting. Some aren’t quite that rich, but do control legacy institutions of cultural influence. This class (hereafter the UMC for short) doesn’t always control capital in the traditional sense, but they fill the same social function as the bourgeois Marx wrote about. Two writers who go by The Psmiths, in this illuminating debate on the work of cultural taxonomist Paul Fussell, categorize them well. As they note, this is the sort of thing that, once noticed, is hard to unsee in many parts of life.

UMC members are, effectively, the tastemakers of modern America, those who set the bar that a less affluent middle class tends to chase. (Hence the suburban tract home, the period piece TV show, the middlebrow bestselling novel, the Disney vacation, and the perception that anything French is fancy, all of which are outsiders’ imitations of what the UMCs do or consume for fun.) The UMCs are also those whom the class Fussell calls the high proles (the non-educated well-off, who give us our law enforcement and home repair and small business starts and Donald Trump) and the rebellious far left define themselves against. Social media has had some flattening effects, and also some obscuring effects, but the overall position is not really in question. They are our arbiters.

One could plausibly argue the successes of this class are the reason living standards in the US have pulled away from other first world nations. A few titans get a lot of the attention and their knock-on effects certainly employ a lot of this class, but they alone haven’t been enough to affect median income numbers, at least not directly. The US’s economic advantage isn’t in a narrowing middle class, and it certainly isn’t at the bottom. Instead it comes from this upper middle class doing well, first in high-end services and later in tech. Over time they have also absorbed a lot from what had been the counterculture in a previous generation and cultivated an economy of nicer grocery stores and higher-end home goods and a vast cultural universe of somewhat nice things.

But if the upper middle class is an engine for affluence and American taste, it also has its peculiarities. A quote I have heard but cannot properly attribute is that contemporary UMC Americans are the first generation of well-off humans who measure their value by how much, not how little, they work. The top of the pyramid used to be a leisure class who used their accumulated wealth to enjoy life, drifting into cushy jobs and free to busy themselves with frivolous travel and hobbies and social calendars and rituals that even today’s old money would find absurd. That slice of society toward the top has widened now, which is in some ways a triumph of American capitalism, bringing more and more people into what seems to be a genuinely more comfortable lifestyle.

If one lets it be, at least. This top of the pyramid is wider because people have poured themselves into a system dependent on consistent high wages and appreciating assets and getting into that place where one can enjoy the positive upward cycle of compounding investments and stock options and credit card perks. It is inherently more precarious than old money stability, and it demands steady new infusions lest one seem to slip behind. To the well-ordered mind this is not a horrible price to pay. But there are pernicious side effects that, given the UMCs’ place in the order of things, can come to define a general culture. These side effects have also, since my college days, driven me utterly nuts.

The first is the natural workaholism. It starts innocently enough; I remember the crystallizing moment in college being when an otherwise attractive girl launched into a discourse on how “busy” she was, and wore it with a badge of pride. A culture arose around that sentiment, unstated and insidious: if one was not busy, what was one actually doing to advance one’s position? If everyone else was putting in ten hours of study for that test, or working through the night in an entry level job, is someone who doesn’t do so falling behind? Her world was a world in which all doors are supposed to open with the right amount of “hard work,” measured not in ingenuity but in effort expended, no matter how fruitless. Of course much of this work was not fruitless; the truly savvy knew they had to pursue certain internships, certain prestige-inflected steps up the latter, if they wanted to seek out their aspirational place in the hierarchy they had internalized. But as good, non-judgmental folks, the UMC lets people choose the type of hard work they please, so long as they are doing a lot of work.

This obsession with work can beget perfectionism: occupants of this class can be tempted by a conceit to expect everything to work for them and are deeply flummoxed by things that do not. The most skilled UMCs are the ones who know how to take that in stride; I know plenty of people who are in comfortable control of their surroundings. But a few too many struggle to kill the anxiety for things that are beyond their immediate reach. For the most deeply trapped in this mindset, it is not hard to wind up in a world where everyone else exists as an accessory to one’s own self-actualization. I have, in a few instances, perceived this neuroticism beneath the surface of dating life in this world. When people are conditioned by an expectation of special treatment, the anxiety becomes second nature, and the threat of challenging interactions or things going wrong that can exact a huge toll on the members of this class. (And, perhaps even more painfully, the people who are not in it, but think that aping its work habits will let them rise into it.) UMC incentives, if unwatched, can craft people into good worker bees who are amateurs at everything else.

Another real allergy I have is to privilege-hoarding among members of this class. I get it, of course: people want their kids to succeed, and it hurts to watch a child run into obstacles. But the bulldozers who will hunt down and judge their teachers for daring to give their kid something less than an A, or judge a coach if their kid of mediocre talent does not start on a competitive varsity roster, are not a net positive for society. If you want to signal to me that your supposed desire for social equality does not run particularly deep, tell me about the need to buy in a certain community “for the schools.” (Read: a community where my kid does not have to associate with poor people, since the correlation between supposed school quality and income of the people living in the place is very high, and I don’t think the causal arrow goes the way most people in this class want to think it goes.) Are we shocked to learn that such kids can come off as coddled, unable to navigate basic challenges of adulthood, themselves irked at dumb little annoyances and perpetuating an unfortunate cycle into a world of limited trust and self-absorption?

More subtle are the societal effects of the rise of the UMC. As this class has grown more isolated into its own suburbs and neighborhoods, concentrated more into a few preferred schools and created its own sub-markets for higher quality products, it has detached itself from the middle class experience. Selective college admissions has gone from a tough game to an absurdity, with acceptance rates half of what they were when I played it not all that very long ago. This is the class that has bid up real estate, and while that market has strained the finances of nearly everyone, couples within the UMC are at least still grudgingly able to afford things. Nearly all new construction is now aimed at the margins attainable only by people in this class and above. It is not hard to see why people who do not get to go along for this ride have started voting for people who think the system is broken.

Finally, the UMC has a healthy amount of hypocrisy: its members often like to pretend they are not privileged. Much of this is innocent; many members of this class have always been high achievers among other high achievers, so they assume they represent a larger swath of the population than they do. They all go through the same workaholism and often have that sense of precarity, which makes it hard to conceive of oneself as ever having truly made it. Add in the endless mirrors of social media comparison, showing other beautiful people at their best moments and ignoring the drudgery of the work, and rarely do they ever stop to appreciate how well-off they are. The UMC has become an unwitting accomplice in creating a vastly unequal society, one very much at odds with the paeans to equity and equality so often espoused by this class’s loose liberal leanings. (Of course there has been a lot more symbolic privilege-checking since the rise of what gets loosely called “woke,” but most UMCs have not substantively changed the way they live.)

Resentment at the downsides of UMC life has grown, and there are now a few alternatives now on display. Politics offers a few tools, and there are a few on the left who would like to tax the hell out of this class. It’s a tough opponent, though: rallying against the nameless lawyer in Westchester County or the corporate vice president in Minnetonka is a lot harder than going after the eccentric and possibly dangerous billionaire. This class is also very politically connected and has enough numbers (and money) to swing elections. Alternatively, the right now enjoys bashing some institutions the UMC holds dear (colleges, legacy media, museums), but while it can make their lives less enjoyable, it lacks a grand, broadly accepted theory for revolution. The UMCs are, after all, the handmaidens of the economy that boosts everyone’s 401(k)s.

What interests me more are the subtler rebellions, the impression that this game is no longer worth playing. The past decade has seen the rise of the casino economy, a desperate hope of making it against all odds through very perverse forms of effort: chasing influencer status, day trading and crypto, prediction markets and gambling apps. These opt-outs are theoretically open to anyone; the barriers to entry are low. But unlike the meritocracy, which does at least make some conscious (if very imperfect) effort to boost people from modest means up through the system, all of the opt-out systems are much easier to navigate if you already come from or have some money: some parent to seed the habits or some income source to allow for more lottery ticket purchases, and the knowledge of a fallback when the bet doesn’t go through. The winners at the casino are very visible, but they are by definition a very tiny slice of society; it’s a system that rewards a small number at the top while everyone else pretty much loses. And victory in this world is often random, sometimes but definitely not always dependent on special talent or uncommon perseverance. The casino economy is, with scattered exceptions, a stratifying force.

And then there is the great big shrug and the full retreat, the anxious or exhausted ex-striver on a downwardly mobile path who tips into an impermanence of marginal employment and living situations, descents into the endless scroll or the potent array of drugs now at hand. There is a growing “what’s the point of spending all that money on college” movement, which is sensible enough if a kid has a clear desire and plan to, say, become a plumber or an electrician, but the data on outcomes show this is otherwise still pretty awful advice to give kids, leading to more drift and precarity outside of the support networks and positive soft social pressures of college. Most luridly in this space, there is the backlash, the edgelord who goes into the dark corners of the internet and comes out unhinged. These are all, to some degree, downstream of the world the UMCs created.

Their world is our world. The UMCs are a tough target for class warfare, and it’s hard to expect their political opponents on the left and right ever uniting in a lasting way. There is some panic about AI erasing white collar jobs, but my experience among UMCs suggests they are the most likely people to exert some control over these systems and make sure they work for them; if AI blows up on them, I don’t think it will work better for much of anyone else. The influencer power of the casino may continue to reduce their cultural cachet, but the stable money is still there, perhaps further strained but probably the surest bet for a comfortable life.

I write this critique largely from within. I was formed in this milieu, to some degree in Duluth and intensely in DC, and while there is more nuance as I age, it is still the most common social circle in which I find myself. I speak their language and I get a lot of my news and entertainment from the same places they do. The UMCs are often intelligent, able to carry good conversation, and often have wide-ranging interests, capable of building strong theories on sports and enjoying good books. They have taste, which is usually fun, though as in anything can tip into pedantry or absurdity in the wrong hands. When they are not being workaholics (in which case they are not around to be social anyway) or hypocritical (which is rare enough in open conversation), they are a good time.

None of us are as simple as the vague Fussell categories, which continue to change over time. But if my fate is to generally be in the UMC world, I will remain aware of that, and resist the worst of it. Work will never become life, and I will let my eventual spawn find their own way as much as they can rather than trying to clear away all obstacles away do the work for them. I will remain able to enjoy simple pleasures with the true middle class and rip a few beers at a dive bar with the proles and have fun in both settings, even as I also enjoy my art museums and niche novels and wine tastings. And if my financial station remains or grows more pleasantly above average, I will remember it and never take it for granted, and know that my arrival here is in no way a statement of my true human worth. This may be the greatest failure of the meritocratic classes, one it has often visited on the whole of society: we too often forget that a life spent chasing statuses and classes is, too often, a very thin and unsatisfying one.