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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is a very long article about something that has been known for a very long time: middle class existential angst.

Yeah. I feel like he spends a lot of time trying to say it's not about the bourgeoisie when it pretty clearly is. People have been writing about this phenomenon and this particular way of looking at social status from the mid 19th century to today. It's the same with "late-stage capitalism". People have been saying capitalism has entered a particularly "ignorant" stage for decades. Just because API's are now involved (I guess?) doesn't mean it's a revolutionary insight.

Nobody thinks "late-stage capitalism" is a revolutionary insight. The term is proliferating because it resonates with more and more of the public. Somebody thought of it decades ago, but we've reached a point where swaths of people feel we've really hit it, whatever it is.

P.S. I don't think lsc is about "ignorance". Maybe just me but I take it as a general state of consolidating wealth & government capture. Like a game of monopoly- in the middle everyone has opportunity, everyone is growing, it's fair and everyone is mostly happy. But in the end, small advantages snowball, influence is consolidated, power is entrenched, and the good parts of capitalism vanish.

In the old fashioned view of class in the UK the middle class were always seen as uncomfortable as they were the only ones who really worried about status - the "working" class didn't care and the upper class (i.e. nobility, not simply people who have lots of money) automatically have social status and can't lose it so they don't worry about it either.

The drama of having too much opportunities but not being sure of which one will make you a millionaire.

Millionaires are already there, the poor have no opportunities to entertain the part of the brain that makes us anxious about failure.

I really enjoyed Rao's writing on the Gervais Principal, but I've never read anything else by him that really clicked with me. This piece in particular is winding, meandering, and nonsensical.

Sounds like what a friend of mine likes to call "the pain of easy living".

We come from a billion+ years of organisms that have had to strive and fight for everything. Not necessarily all the time; there are brief times when resources are free and easy for some species (like, "a disease kills of 95% of your species and you're the only thing around that eats grass" or something; for the survivors it's suddenly a cornucopia), but they don't last this long, nor are they ever this easy. It's not hard to see why our genes haven't really prepared us for this wealth.

I would rather say that it is more like disenfranchisement of middle and small landowners in the late XIX century in Europe.

Land lost it's store of wealth status, governments aimed at land reforms and wealth creation shifted to areas like railways and textile industry. The land-owning class had been reduced to 'poverty' within generation.

Lots of XIX century literature is around the subject of people getting 'reduced to poverty' but desperately trying to keep appearances.

I googled a bit but couldn't find any analysis of middle class existential angst. Care to link me to something?

A couple reference points, among many, could be the 1968 film "The Swimmer" or the 1999 film "American Beauty". It's probably best expressed through fiction: reading factual descriptions may prove useless.

It's an American thing to idolize the middle class, and it's a human thing to be deeply discontented with what you have idolized, so really you have a lot of choices in the genre.

Try Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (1961).

It reads almost like it could have been written today. Definitely deserves to be more popular.

Alone wrote a series of three blog posts in 2012 ostensibly about hipsters on food stamps. It's an interesting analysis about downward social mobility and the defense mechanisms against the resulting anxiety.

I think it's relevant to middle class angst and a precursor to the Premium Mediocre concept. What could be more premium mediocre than buying fancy food on food stamps?

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...

infinite jest by david foster wallace - the author is himself the embodiment of middle/upper class existential angst and it seeps into all of his work

will also second revolutionary road by yates, and the swimmer by cheever, although they are a bit dated at this point

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