Sometimes CHH posts read like a soldier’s journal entries. “Today we battled against the Privilege Checkers, a most annoying foe. Tomorrow I fear we’ll face off against the tradwives again…”
It’s actually exhausting. It brings me back to the tweet about the lady who posted about loving morning coffee conversations with her husband in her backyard and she got ripped to shreds for it. I think so many people go to social media just to rage bait themselves. Idk I guess they run on bitterness lol
What was the nature of the complaints? That she didn't hate her husband as much as the heterofatalism crowd demands? That she's happy at all in a relationship? That she likes coffee and only rich people can afford that?
Yes, I think that was exactly the critique, that a lot of people don’t have good relationship, relationships, etc. or the time to enjoy morning coffee. Lol.
There was a tweet my friend showed me once that I initially thought was a parody - the OP of the thread was just a guy going on about how much he loved his wife, and a reply told him he was being insensitive because some people have experienced their spouses dying or gone through painful divorces.
Only toxic people are left on social media. After the pandemic, even the introverted normies went back to real life so only the toxic & mentally ill people were left. Negative feedback loop commenced so now the internet is a shithole ggwp
Lots of people are miserable. Their lives are not meeting expectations. They are not finding love, career success, wealth, fulfillment, happiness.
A small but VERY VOCAL subset of that group is convinced that it's all someone else's fault. These people go on Twitter to rant and wail at people who seem happy and content.
Anyone telling you to "check privilege" or whatever, has embraced victimhood. Your happiness and success cannot be a result of hard work and smart choices, it just can't - because admitting that would mean that my loneliness, lack of achievement, terrible credit score, etc....are somehow my fault? NO!
I think you raise an interesting point about the people sounding off like this being largely unhappy with their lives. In my late 20s, I had some horrible anxiety issues. I completely stayed off social media during that time 100%. I knew that seeing seven people I used to go to high school with post about their engagement and their pregnancy announcements would send me into a tailspin since my main accomplishment was seeing a therapist and trying to deal with my debilitating anxiety. I just wish some of the miserable people would realize that with small steps and reasonable choices, You really can get to a point where you enjoy your life. Life has hard seasons, but it also has really sweet seasons. I think that’s what’s missing from a lot of the check your privilege discourse.
I think when clinically anxious or depressed people retreat into social media, it is essentially giving into their illness. They find the content to stoke their anxieties. They find communities and common voices of other mentally ill people to reinforce that nothing is their fault or in their control. It’s a feedback loop.
While there is some overlap, especially today, i dont think its inherently toxic to check someone’s privilege or hold space for those higher up on the oppression ladder
Respectfully, if you have a mental picture of an "oppression ladder" and which rung a certain person would occupy, who can say what to who, and who can and cannot reply in kind - you are projecting victimhood scores onto people.
Is it fundamentally wrong to think a black person probably has a more intimate view of racism than a white person? I don’t see how being mindful of that is bad. Like anything it can be taken to an extreme but being oblivious isn’t good either
I can confirm as someone who has gone down the social media misery rabbit hole hard several times in my life - I can track the times when I was worst about this to when I was loneliest and most adrift. I'd just moved to a new city, was feeling like I wasn't going anywhere in my career, had had a bad string of luck in friendships or dating, or all of the above. When I'm the most comfortable in my offline life, I'm both spending less time on social media overall, and the time I am on there is better-spent on healthier pursuits.
Social media gives lots of things that are addictive to miserable people: either it's wallowing in it and having people confirm your worst feelings about yourself; it gives you even more pathetic people to let you feel better; it gives you opportunities to get a shot of righteous by starting fights; it lets you use greater social causes either for those self-righteous fights or to distract you from your "smaller" life troubles. The latter also gives you the chance to feel like you "accomplished something" (by even just paying attention to a cause!) even when you're not doing much to rectify your bad job/money/dating/family situation, along with giving you a distraction from that. I've tried to be careful when I'm falling into those holes too often, to use that as a warning sign to check on what's going on in the rest of my life. But that level of self-awareness about it was hard-won over long periods of time, it doesn't usually kick in right away, and most don't have it.
This is and just intense amounts of jealousy like CHH mentioned. Especially among creative types (writers, comedians, wannabe politicos) who are upset that people they feel are lesser are doing so well. Like I saw people *outraged* that Ezra Klien can command a five figure speaking fee (even calling it a grift which, god that word has lost all meaning). This is incredibly normal but oh boy are folk oddly mad about it.
Like how "gaslighting" just means "lying" now on a lot of the Internet, "grifting" just means "making money." (Or at least, "making money on something I personally think is worthless." But if the person paying for it doesn't agree, then it's not a grift! They are getting what they paid for!)
I don't care if someone on the internet is rich, wears expensive clothing, or travels to fancy destinations.
I do get annoyed by people who propose solutions to problems that are unaffordable to the vast majority of people without any self-awareness of it. "Your car broke down again? Why don't you just get a BMW like I did!" Or "my job got really stressful too, so I took a year off of working to live in a villa in Tuscany. You should try it!"
The person didn't say this because the car didn't break down frequently, she said it because it supposedly came with a service plan to fix it for free.
Are there people who actually say things like "Why don't you get a BMW like I did?" that sounds so completely socially clueless as to almost be parody....
“Frankly, it’s “out of touch” to assume there’s no meaningful difference between $150K and $250K“
I think people lack both “imagination” and “numeracy”. If they are getting by on $75K, they genuinely just “cannot imagine” what it would be like to make $250K. It happens all the time with tragedy (like a tornado or a violent crime in the neighborhood) - people just “cannot imagine” something being true until they personally experience it. Many such cases. And then on “numeracy”, people seem to think “$75K to $250K is a big increase and $250K to $250 million is also a big increase, so they are the same”. No, because math.
This goes back to the original point of "check your privilege." The point was that as a white person, it's hard to imagine what it's like to live as a black person, which has some important truths to it. But I think it's actually pretty easy for people making 75K or 250K to imagine each other's lives.
Also applies to the sweater thing. Someone complaining about a $40 secondhand eBay sweater is probably lamenting that they can't buy the same thing for $8 at Goodwill anymore. It used to be that someone with $250k household income wouldn't be caught dead shopping at a thrift store for poor people, but now they're both shopping eBay and the poor person is effectively priced out of (their) "reasonably priced" cotton sweaters. I mean if you're making $30k a year you can't really afford to buy a used(!) cotton sweater for 3x the price of a new polyester one from Walmart.
It's kind of unfortunate people from completely different socioeconomic classes are using the same eBay and the same discussion forums for "affordable clothes", even if there's nothing particularly unfair about it.
The thing is, that it matters when it comes to intersections with public policy.
The trad wife thing matters because a pretty large political movement is regressively pushing it on women without acknowledging that the aspirational tradwife has other people raising her kids while she makes content.
The Taylor Swift thing vaguely matters because anyone still giving or receiving “follow your dreams” type advice should probably at least confront the fact that most people in entertainment or the arts had rich parents.
One more example; Elon Musk is seen as the paragon of risk taking and something we need more of. That’s all well and good but Elon Musk has never taken anything the median American (hehehe) would recognize as a real risk in his life.
The national prominent media is basically written for and by the top 10% because these households do 50% of all consumer spending now. So when the New York Times or whatever, describes Gen Z struggles in terms of how selective Goldman Sachs internships are now, people should say something.
This is very true and also I think not really what CHH was talking about. In particular, Taylor Swift's follow-your-dreams stuff and whatever Elon Musk's Bitcoin millionaire followers think about how non-startup-founders are basically subhuman are great examples of people genuinely being out of touch.
Versus on the other hand, for example, I've seen people get blasted for discussing politics in certain ways or spending large amounts of time doing so because according to whoever is mad, the median American is probably too poor and busy and uneducated to participate in such discussions and therefore the discussions are meaningless and a bad use of time that show how disgustingly privileged all the participants are.
See also the tweet mentioned above about the lady who enjoyed a cup of coffee in her backyard with her husband. She wasn’t a nepo baby or out of touch billionaire, she was just…an ordinary woman who happened to have a loving spouse and a yard. How dare she when children are starving, er I mean when people are single and renting! /s
Taylor Swift is not your friend; however, a happy marriage and decent job are not zero sum things where some lady in some suburb enjoying her husband’s company doesn’t mean that some OTHER person is deprived of a partnership, etc.
Tl;dr I think the concept of “privilege” has gotten flattened to the point of being meaningless, and social media and para social relationships have NOT helped. In the days before social media, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Christmas list could be corralled within Town & Country magazine and only her intended audience would see it.
Yeah, it's at the point where a lot of very *sincere* social media fights and meltdowns are people doing the Onion article about "how DARE this man build a birdhouse when JonBenet Ramsay's murder remains unsolved," but those people actually mean it (or at least want you to believe they do)
There's a fourth major theme which is sort of implied but I think it's important. Maybe I just notice it because it drives me nuts. People love to argue and will ignore logic to do so. If I said, "some people like chocolate ice cream", it's axiomatic that some dickhead would say, "I know LOTS of people who HATE chocolate ice cream!" This leads to an annoying dance of covering bases in which people will add qualifiers to everything they say as if they are arguing with themselves, "Some people like chocolate ice cream, but I know that some people don't like it and I'm not trying to speak for the non-chocolate lovers here! And some other people are indifferent of course, but there are some people out there who like chocolate ice cream (please don't hate me)." So of course they are gonna seize on your $250K think and roast you.
A key thrust of my writing on Substack is owning my own good fortune but not coming off as a smug rich jerk. It's important because the depiction of the wealthy in media, whether fictional or not, is of a class of people who, generally, are not only smug but awful.
Taylor Swift is a laudable exception in that she does not pretend to be "normal" or "median" AND she has a sense of noblesse oblige in the admirable way she treats the people who work for her.
Many of the people she works with, like her band, have been with her since she was 18 or 19 years old. Seeing her lavishly reward loyalty and hard work is, to me, the good kind of noblesse oblige.
I went to the JFK Library / Museum yesterday, and it was disorienting to hear rich people talking about service to their community and making a difference in the world.
It's funny to think of Mitt Romney, who actually lives that life of service, but still talks like an obnoxious rich guy all of the time instead of an idealistic public servant. We need more idealism and less ideology.
This right here is the magic phrase. If something isn't for you, MOVE ON. It's weird that we say that the internet has allowed everyone to get their own curated little feeds and yet there are so many people who see something that isn't for them (a movie, a game, a $4,000 handbag) and just NEED to tell the world that it shouldn't exist because it's not something THEY think is good/worthwhile/whatever.
My favorite is people complaining about how much sugar is in a dessert. Yes, we are all shocked that something called cranberry cookie butter cheesecake has two cups of sugar. This is then followed by people bragging about how much sugar they cut from the recipe or saying they haven't eaten sweets since 1978 because sugar is poisonous.
I do think almost all dessert recipes are too sweet, but, like, I just cut the amount of sugar. I don't understand the need to comment and the sanctimony.
The best is when they cut so much that it tastes like shit, or do some kind of insane substitution that fundamentally changes what dish it is (the person on Reddit who tried to make eggnog with goose fat instead of milk comes to mind), and it's like girl, well, that was why that was in the recipe. If you didn't want to make this recipe, maybe, idk. Don't make it. Find another one. There's a difference between one or two logical substitutions, and Ship-of-Theseus-ing it into a completely different thing and then being shocked it isn't anything like the first thing. You can (usually, depending) sub one type of cooking oil for another one; you can't sub the milk in a milk-based drink for goose fat and expect it to still taste like it's milk-based.
My friend who uses TikTok (I don't) told me that people there have started using the phrase "bean soup" to describe "throwing a fit because not everything is for you" over something exactly like this. Someone had created a recipe for this soup that had 10 different types of beans in it that was supposed to be high in iron to make people feel better during their periods or something like that.... and despite the "10 different kinds of beans" part being featured, and it being called "bean soup," half the comments were something like "I'm allergic to beans, what do I do?" "I don't like beans, can I make this without beans?" "I think you're being exclusionary toward people who don't eat beans."
I think the context collapse of social media just makes everyone a bit miserable. Twitter really maximizes this problem but the drive by people who can read your tweet and then from a totally different context start opining about it is kind of just a gigantic powder keg where little sparks are always dangerous.
I feel like people didn't have as parasocial bonds with celebrities in the past. Like when I was growing up like there was weird gossip on the radio about say Tupac but it seemed to me like a character in the music videos not an actual human being so much.
I agree; I think this is a big driver (if not THE driver) of all this handwringing and “check your privilege” type stuff. For me it was the 80’s and Madonna, and believe me, nobody thought Madonna was their bestie even when we were all buying lace crop tops and rubber bracelets to imitate her style (to be fair, those could be attained on the cheap). People have always imitated the rich and famous in so far as they could, but, this idea that someone like Taylor Swift or whoever has to be “relatable” and is your social media friend is new, and pernicious.
Checking your privilege is independent of celebs though. It’s more an ethnic studies academia thing about how a white person should be mindful about speaking over the sense experience of a POC or other marginalized person.
And as such, it was a useful concept. I think it would be fine to have it - in a not-academic-jargon sense - applied in every day life as “let POC speak for themselves.” (Or people w/disabilities or LGBT people.) The wording might have to be changed a bit.
But released from the confines of academia and allowed to roam free in the wilds of social media, “check your privilege” has come to mean “Welcome to the crab bucket.” How dare you have a happy marriage and nice house.
The thing that I see more often than I'd like that genuinely is out-of-touch is the type of article the NYT runs where super rich people say they're struggling on absurdly high salaries because they're spending their high salaries. My husband even falls prey to this kind of thinking sometimes because he grew up rich. I always remind him that if we're "struggling", it's because we chose to buy a 5-bedroom house in the inner Bay Area, which actual middle-class people can't even considering doing. Spending most of the money we make is not the same as "struggling".
There's a weird understanding of what "the middle class" is in America that undergirds this type of article. For most Americans, they think of the middle class as a class of people who can easily afford a certain lifestyle rather than just being the middle 50% of the income distribution.
This was in the back of my mind today after reading this post this morning. The NYT has come out with some startlingly “out of touch” articles over the last decade, along the lines of what you’re talking about and also assumptions about, say, what the average 40 year old woman’s romantic life looks like.
I think the internet just lacks context. You have an endless feed that's Nara Smith making oreos from scratch, followed by someone lecturing you about the poor, followed by CHH saying you are too poor to know the difference between $150k and $200k, followed by Matt yglesias saying billionaires are actually good people, followed by a woman who freebirthed and died because she couldn't afford a doctor followed by Bernie asking for $27.
With TV, you know Larry David is a billionaire, or that Martha Stewart is, or that meghan markle has no clue how to spend her millions tastefully. And it stays there for 30 minutes, with breaks for ads targeted to a rough idea of who the core demographic of the show is, not hypertargeted to your interests. It's not shocking your system with a new idea every second the way a social feed is and defying any compartmentalization.
I pretty much agree with you 100%! It’s funny, one of my other favorite follows on Substack is a woman who talks about buying workhorse items for her closet. I absolutely love her content, and you can tell she and her husband are high earners. She frequently suggests sweaters that cost $200. I saw someone posting that she’s a horrible person because she suggests people buy cashmere on sale. I know perfectly well I can’t buy quite as many $200 sweaters as the woman I follow does but occasionally I can buy one, and I love her content. People get so funny on the Internet.
Ha, I follow this woman too, and it is obvious that they earn a good income, and also that anyone who actually followed her advice to buy all the workhorses she suggests would a) be spending a pretty penny b) need an extremely large closet. But I think she’s pretty conscious of that and does a good job suggesting alternatives (saying that as I realize that we’re probably in similar income brackets so hard to say how it would appear to other people).
This is so funny - I started laughing at the *forty dollars* for a sweater.
In all seriousness though, I think that the conversation about families making $150k vs $250k is genuinely interesting when you weigh trade offs, because the "extra" $100k often comes at the expense of more paid childcare, possibly a second car or high commute costs, etc.
I was sole breadwinner with a spouse and 3 kids, and my husband going back to work meant temporarily incurring a ton of unexpected costs for long term gain since it was summer - having to buy a second car, put all of our kids in camp all summer, including a 4 year old with limited options, etc.
My spouse makes less than that and there are other downsides - more stress for me, more driving to camps, someone who isn't home to grocery shop, take the kids to appointments, or deep clean. The outsourcing costs are there in addition to intangible costs.
My husband took a state university job though, so our kids will get free college tuition and he'll get a pension. That's the bigger factor, less the salary
Again, Back When I Was Young in the Jurassic age, Mom’s job as a teacher or government clerical worker often enabled Dad to be an entrepreneur or take on some high-risk but high-chance-of-gain type of work, because she had the benefits, pension, and far lower but steady salary. What’s different now is that dads can be the ones with the more low-paid but secure and benefits-heavy jobs that “scaffold” the other earner’s salary.
Yep, this is the same arrangement we ended up seeking out. The three highest costs tend to be housing, retirement, college - having 2 out of 3 covered by a job with less pay is the goal. My father in law worked at a college, so my husband went to a highly ranked college tuition- free
Oh totally, I forgot that one - I do feel less stress about needing my job, given that we could still pay bills if I lost it.
Another tangible is that as the higher earner, I can max out a healthcare HSA and childcare FSA which is less stressful. I had a high deductible plan and HSA anyway as a sole earner but it helps to max it out for the initial costs.
Sometimes CHH posts read like a soldier’s journal entries. “Today we battled against the Privilege Checkers, a most annoying foe. Tomorrow I fear we’ll face off against the tradwives again…”
It’s actually exhausting. It brings me back to the tweet about the lady who posted about loving morning coffee conversations with her husband in her backyard and she got ripped to shreds for it. I think so many people go to social media just to rage bait themselves. Idk I guess they run on bitterness lol
What was the nature of the complaints? That she didn't hate her husband as much as the heterofatalism crowd demands? That she's happy at all in a relationship? That she likes coffee and only rich people can afford that?
Yes, I think that was exactly the critique, that a lot of people don’t have good relationship, relationships, etc. or the time to enjoy morning coffee. Lol.
There was a tweet my friend showed me once that I initially thought was a parody - the OP of the thread was just a guy going on about how much he loved his wife, and a reply told him he was being insensitive because some people have experienced their spouses dying or gone through painful divorces.
Oh now we're just assuming the median American can afford a yard?
They could have yards if we just got rid of capitalism!
Yeah it was literally like “WOW not all of us have a yard, a husband, and free time how dare you”
Only toxic people are left on social media. After the pandemic, even the introverted normies went back to real life so only the toxic & mentally ill people were left. Negative feedback loop commenced so now the internet is a shithole ggwp
Lots of people are miserable. Their lives are not meeting expectations. They are not finding love, career success, wealth, fulfillment, happiness.
A small but VERY VOCAL subset of that group is convinced that it's all someone else's fault. These people go on Twitter to rant and wail at people who seem happy and content.
Anyone telling you to "check privilege" or whatever, has embraced victimhood. Your happiness and success cannot be a result of hard work and smart choices, it just can't - because admitting that would mean that my loneliness, lack of achievement, terrible credit score, etc....are somehow my fault? NO!
I think you raise an interesting point about the people sounding off like this being largely unhappy with their lives. In my late 20s, I had some horrible anxiety issues. I completely stayed off social media during that time 100%. I knew that seeing seven people I used to go to high school with post about their engagement and their pregnancy announcements would send me into a tailspin since my main accomplishment was seeing a therapist and trying to deal with my debilitating anxiety. I just wish some of the miserable people would realize that with small steps and reasonable choices, You really can get to a point where you enjoy your life. Life has hard seasons, but it also has really sweet seasons. I think that’s what’s missing from a lot of the check your privilege discourse.
I think when clinically anxious or depressed people retreat into social media, it is essentially giving into their illness. They find the content to stoke their anxieties. They find communities and common voices of other mentally ill people to reinforce that nothing is their fault or in their control. It’s a feedback loop.
They are also probably choosing to follow celebrities and influencers on social media who are setting these ridiculous expectations.
While there is some overlap, especially today, i dont think its inherently toxic to check someone’s privilege or hold space for those higher up on the oppression ladder
Respectfully, if you have a mental picture of an "oppression ladder" and which rung a certain person would occupy, who can say what to who, and who can and cannot reply in kind - you are projecting victimhood scores onto people.
That will never help anyone.
Is it fundamentally wrong to think a black person probably has a more intimate view of racism than a white person? I don’t see how being mindful of that is bad. Like anything it can be taken to an extreme but being oblivious isn’t good either
I can confirm as someone who has gone down the social media misery rabbit hole hard several times in my life - I can track the times when I was worst about this to when I was loneliest and most adrift. I'd just moved to a new city, was feeling like I wasn't going anywhere in my career, had had a bad string of luck in friendships or dating, or all of the above. When I'm the most comfortable in my offline life, I'm both spending less time on social media overall, and the time I am on there is better-spent on healthier pursuits.
Social media gives lots of things that are addictive to miserable people: either it's wallowing in it and having people confirm your worst feelings about yourself; it gives you even more pathetic people to let you feel better; it gives you opportunities to get a shot of righteous by starting fights; it lets you use greater social causes either for those self-righteous fights or to distract you from your "smaller" life troubles. The latter also gives you the chance to feel like you "accomplished something" (by even just paying attention to a cause!) even when you're not doing much to rectify your bad job/money/dating/family situation, along with giving you a distraction from that. I've tried to be careful when I'm falling into those holes too often, to use that as a warning sign to check on what's going on in the rest of my life. But that level of self-awareness about it was hard-won over long periods of time, it doesn't usually kick in right away, and most don't have it.
I think the skeleton key to this is that social media is totally dominated by depressed people.
This is and just intense amounts of jealousy like CHH mentioned. Especially among creative types (writers, comedians, wannabe politicos) who are upset that people they feel are lesser are doing so well. Like I saw people *outraged* that Ezra Klien can command a five figure speaking fee (even calling it a grift which, god that word has lost all meaning). This is incredibly normal but oh boy are folk oddly mad about it.
Like how "gaslighting" just means "lying" now on a lot of the Internet, "grifting" just means "making money." (Or at least, "making money on something I personally think is worthless." But if the person paying for it doesn't agree, then it's not a grift! They are getting what they paid for!)
It is one of those things where once you think of it, you see the evidence of it everywhere because it really is SO true.
I don't care if someone on the internet is rich, wears expensive clothing, or travels to fancy destinations.
I do get annoyed by people who propose solutions to problems that are unaffordable to the vast majority of people without any self-awareness of it. "Your car broke down again? Why don't you just get a BMW like I did!" Or "my job got really stressful too, so I took a year off of working to live in a villa in Tuscany. You should try it!"
I agree, except for the implication that BMWs don't break down all the time
The person didn't say this because the car didn't break down frequently, she said it because it supposedly came with a service plan to fix it for free.
Are there people who actually say things like "Why don't you get a BMW like I did?" that sounds so completely socially clueless as to almost be parody....
Yes, I did not make that up.
Amazing. Everyday I learn something new ....
This stood out to me:
“Frankly, it’s “out of touch” to assume there’s no meaningful difference between $150K and $250K“
I think people lack both “imagination” and “numeracy”. If they are getting by on $75K, they genuinely just “cannot imagine” what it would be like to make $250K. It happens all the time with tragedy (like a tornado or a violent crime in the neighborhood) - people just “cannot imagine” something being true until they personally experience it. Many such cases. And then on “numeracy”, people seem to think “$75K to $250K is a big increase and $250K to $250 million is also a big increase, so they are the same”. No, because math.
This goes back to the original point of "check your privilege." The point was that as a white person, it's hard to imagine what it's like to live as a black person, which has some important truths to it. But I think it's actually pretty easy for people making 75K or 250K to imagine each other's lives.
When you lock in a certain lifestyle comfortability, the increase in income actually doesn’t matter (unless you really want to lvl up your lifestyle)
Also applies to the sweater thing. Someone complaining about a $40 secondhand eBay sweater is probably lamenting that they can't buy the same thing for $8 at Goodwill anymore. It used to be that someone with $250k household income wouldn't be caught dead shopping at a thrift store for poor people, but now they're both shopping eBay and the poor person is effectively priced out of (their) "reasonably priced" cotton sweaters. I mean if you're making $30k a year you can't really afford to buy a used(!) cotton sweater for 3x the price of a new polyester one from Walmart.
It's kind of unfortunate people from completely different socioeconomic classes are using the same eBay and the same discussion forums for "affordable clothes", even if there's nothing particularly unfair about it.
The thing is, that it matters when it comes to intersections with public policy.
The trad wife thing matters because a pretty large political movement is regressively pushing it on women without acknowledging that the aspirational tradwife has other people raising her kids while she makes content.
The Taylor Swift thing vaguely matters because anyone still giving or receiving “follow your dreams” type advice should probably at least confront the fact that most people in entertainment or the arts had rich parents.
One more example; Elon Musk is seen as the paragon of risk taking and something we need more of. That’s all well and good but Elon Musk has never taken anything the median American (hehehe) would recognize as a real risk in his life.
The national prominent media is basically written for and by the top 10% because these households do 50% of all consumer spending now. So when the New York Times or whatever, describes Gen Z struggles in terms of how selective Goldman Sachs internships are now, people should say something.
This is very true and also I think not really what CHH was talking about. In particular, Taylor Swift's follow-your-dreams stuff and whatever Elon Musk's Bitcoin millionaire followers think about how non-startup-founders are basically subhuman are great examples of people genuinely being out of touch.
Versus on the other hand, for example, I've seen people get blasted for discussing politics in certain ways or spending large amounts of time doing so because according to whoever is mad, the median American is probably too poor and busy and uneducated to participate in such discussions and therefore the discussions are meaningless and a bad use of time that show how disgustingly privileged all the participants are.
See also the tweet mentioned above about the lady who enjoyed a cup of coffee in her backyard with her husband. She wasn’t a nepo baby or out of touch billionaire, she was just…an ordinary woman who happened to have a loving spouse and a yard. How dare she when children are starving, er I mean when people are single and renting! /s
Taylor Swift is not your friend; however, a happy marriage and decent job are not zero sum things where some lady in some suburb enjoying her husband’s company doesn’t mean that some OTHER person is deprived of a partnership, etc.
Tl;dr I think the concept of “privilege” has gotten flattened to the point of being meaningless, and social media and para social relationships have NOT helped. In the days before social media, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Christmas list could be corralled within Town & Country magazine and only her intended audience would see it.
Yeah, it's at the point where a lot of very *sincere* social media fights and meltdowns are people doing the Onion article about "how DARE this man build a birdhouse when JonBenet Ramsay's murder remains unsolved," but those people actually mean it (or at least want you to believe they do)
Not that its particularly relevant to this discussion, but the 50% thing is kinda bunk. According to this, more like 20%-35%: https://www.thestreet.com/economy/are-the-top-10-of-american-consumers-really-driving-50-of-spending-economists-debate
Thanks for the info!
There's a fourth major theme which is sort of implied but I think it's important. Maybe I just notice it because it drives me nuts. People love to argue and will ignore logic to do so. If I said, "some people like chocolate ice cream", it's axiomatic that some dickhead would say, "I know LOTS of people who HATE chocolate ice cream!" This leads to an annoying dance of covering bases in which people will add qualifiers to everything they say as if they are arguing with themselves, "Some people like chocolate ice cream, but I know that some people don't like it and I'm not trying to speak for the non-chocolate lovers here! And some other people are indifferent of course, but there are some people out there who like chocolate ice cream (please don't hate me)." So of course they are gonna seize on your $250K think and roast you.
Published on the same day Matt Yglesias defends billionaires. Coincidence ... or coordinated psyop??
Lmaoo this is like the 4th time this has happened
Wait... he has defended billionaires 4 times? Or defended them 4 times on the same day as you were publishing a vaguely related article? Oh Maddie...
Has anyone ever seen CHH and MattY in a room at the same time…?
Ugh, now I have to go read that :)
A key thrust of my writing on Substack is owning my own good fortune but not coming off as a smug rich jerk. It's important because the depiction of the wealthy in media, whether fictional or not, is of a class of people who, generally, are not only smug but awful.
Taylor Swift is a laudable exception in that she does not pretend to be "normal" or "median" AND she has a sense of noblesse oblige in the admirable way she treats the people who work for her.
I thought the bonuses she gave her staff were incredibly generous.
Many of the people she works with, like her band, have been with her since she was 18 or 19 years old. Seeing her lavishly reward loyalty and hard work is, to me, the good kind of noblesse oblige.
I went to the JFK Library / Museum yesterday, and it was disorienting to hear rich people talking about service to their community and making a difference in the world.
It's funny to think of Mitt Romney, who actually lives that life of service, but still talks like an obnoxious rich guy all of the time instead of an idealistic public servant. We need more idealism and less ideology.
"could you not just…ignore it?"
This right here is the magic phrase. If something isn't for you, MOVE ON. It's weird that we say that the internet has allowed everyone to get their own curated little feeds and yet there are so many people who see something that isn't for them (a movie, a game, a $4,000 handbag) and just NEED to tell the world that it shouldn't exist because it's not something THEY think is good/worthwhile/whatever.
NYT cooking recipes full of helpless comments: “I don’t eat beef, can I substitute tofu for this beef pot roast?” “WAY too much sodium…”
My favorite is people complaining about how much sugar is in a dessert. Yes, we are all shocked that something called cranberry cookie butter cheesecake has two cups of sugar. This is then followed by people bragging about how much sugar they cut from the recipe or saying they haven't eaten sweets since 1978 because sugar is poisonous.
I do think almost all dessert recipes are too sweet, but, like, I just cut the amount of sugar. I don't understand the need to comment and the sanctimony.
So much sanctimony. In comments for a recipe! For chrissakes!
The best is when they cut so much that it tastes like shit, or do some kind of insane substitution that fundamentally changes what dish it is (the person on Reddit who tried to make eggnog with goose fat instead of milk comes to mind), and it's like girl, well, that was why that was in the recipe. If you didn't want to make this recipe, maybe, idk. Don't make it. Find another one. There's a difference between one or two logical substitutions, and Ship-of-Theseus-ing it into a completely different thing and then being shocked it isn't anything like the first thing. You can (usually, depending) sub one type of cooking oil for another one; you can't sub the milk in a milk-based drink for goose fat and expect it to still taste like it's milk-based.
My friend who uses TikTok (I don't) told me that people there have started using the phrase "bean soup" to describe "throwing a fit because not everything is for you" over something exactly like this. Someone had created a recipe for this soup that had 10 different types of beans in it that was supposed to be high in iron to make people feel better during their periods or something like that.... and despite the "10 different kinds of beans" part being featured, and it being called "bean soup," half the comments were something like "I'm allergic to beans, what do I do?" "I don't like beans, can I make this without beans?" "I think you're being exclusionary toward people who don't eat beans."
I think the context collapse of social media just makes everyone a bit miserable. Twitter really maximizes this problem but the drive by people who can read your tweet and then from a totally different context start opining about it is kind of just a gigantic powder keg where little sparks are always dangerous.
I feel like people didn't have as parasocial bonds with celebrities in the past. Like when I was growing up like there was weird gossip on the radio about say Tupac but it seemed to me like a character in the music videos not an actual human being so much.
I agree; I think this is a big driver (if not THE driver) of all this handwringing and “check your privilege” type stuff. For me it was the 80’s and Madonna, and believe me, nobody thought Madonna was their bestie even when we were all buying lace crop tops and rubber bracelets to imitate her style (to be fair, those could be attained on the cheap). People have always imitated the rich and famous in so far as they could, but, this idea that someone like Taylor Swift or whoever has to be “relatable” and is your social media friend is new, and pernicious.
Checking your privilege is independent of celebs though. It’s more an ethnic studies academia thing about how a white person should be mindful about speaking over the sense experience of a POC or other marginalized person.
And as such, it was a useful concept. I think it would be fine to have it - in a not-academic-jargon sense - applied in every day life as “let POC speak for themselves.” (Or people w/disabilities or LGBT people.) The wording might have to be changed a bit.
But released from the confines of academia and allowed to roam free in the wilds of social media, “check your privilege” has come to mean “Welcome to the crab bucket.” How dare you have a happy marriage and nice house.
The thing that I see more often than I'd like that genuinely is out-of-touch is the type of article the NYT runs where super rich people say they're struggling on absurdly high salaries because they're spending their high salaries. My husband even falls prey to this kind of thinking sometimes because he grew up rich. I always remind him that if we're "struggling", it's because we chose to buy a 5-bedroom house in the inner Bay Area, which actual middle-class people can't even considering doing. Spending most of the money we make is not the same as "struggling".
There's a weird understanding of what "the middle class" is in America that undergirds this type of article. For most Americans, they think of the middle class as a class of people who can easily afford a certain lifestyle rather than just being the middle 50% of the income distribution.
This was in the back of my mind today after reading this post this morning. The NYT has come out with some startlingly “out of touch” articles over the last decade, along the lines of what you’re talking about and also assumptions about, say, what the average 40 year old woman’s romantic life looks like.
I think the internet just lacks context. You have an endless feed that's Nara Smith making oreos from scratch, followed by someone lecturing you about the poor, followed by CHH saying you are too poor to know the difference between $150k and $200k, followed by Matt yglesias saying billionaires are actually good people, followed by a woman who freebirthed and died because she couldn't afford a doctor followed by Bernie asking for $27.
With TV, you know Larry David is a billionaire, or that Martha Stewart is, or that meghan markle has no clue how to spend her millions tastefully. And it stays there for 30 minutes, with breaks for ads targeted to a rough idea of who the core demographic of the show is, not hypertargeted to your interests. It's not shocking your system with a new idea every second the way a social feed is and defying any compartmentalization.
I pretty much agree with you 100%! It’s funny, one of my other favorite follows on Substack is a woman who talks about buying workhorse items for her closet. I absolutely love her content, and you can tell she and her husband are high earners. She frequently suggests sweaters that cost $200. I saw someone posting that she’s a horrible person because she suggests people buy cashmere on sale. I know perfectly well I can’t buy quite as many $200 sweaters as the woman I follow does but occasionally I can buy one, and I love her content. People get so funny on the Internet.
Ha, I follow this woman too, and it is obvious that they earn a good income, and also that anyone who actually followed her advice to buy all the workhorses she suggests would a) be spending a pretty penny b) need an extremely large closet. But I think she’s pretty conscious of that and does a good job suggesting alternatives (saying that as I realize that we’re probably in similar income brackets so hard to say how it would appear to other people).
This is so funny - I started laughing at the *forty dollars* for a sweater.
In all seriousness though, I think that the conversation about families making $150k vs $250k is genuinely interesting when you weigh trade offs, because the "extra" $100k often comes at the expense of more paid childcare, possibly a second car or high commute costs, etc.
I was sole breadwinner with a spouse and 3 kids, and my husband going back to work meant temporarily incurring a ton of unexpected costs for long term gain since it was summer - having to buy a second car, put all of our kids in camp all summer, including a 4 year old with limited options, etc.
My spouse makes less than that and there are other downsides - more stress for me, more driving to camps, someone who isn't home to grocery shop, take the kids to appointments, or deep clean. The outsourcing costs are there in addition to intangible costs.
My husband took a state university job though, so our kids will get free college tuition and he'll get a pension. That's the bigger factor, less the salary
Again, Back When I Was Young in the Jurassic age, Mom’s job as a teacher or government clerical worker often enabled Dad to be an entrepreneur or take on some high-risk but high-chance-of-gain type of work, because she had the benefits, pension, and far lower but steady salary. What’s different now is that dads can be the ones with the more low-paid but secure and benefits-heavy jobs that “scaffold” the other earner’s salary.
Yep, this is the same arrangement we ended up seeking out. The three highest costs tend to be housing, retirement, college - having 2 out of 3 covered by a job with less pay is the goal. My father in law worked at a college, so my husband went to a highly ranked college tuition- free
Oh totally, I forgot that one - I do feel less stress about needing my job, given that we could still pay bills if I lost it.
Another tangible is that as the higher earner, I can max out a healthcare HSA and childcare FSA which is less stressful. I had a high deductible plan and HSA anyway as a sole earner but it helps to max it out for the initial costs.