Living Small

My parents, primarily my mother, raised me to enjoy a better life than they did, and you know what? -- I don't think I managed it. Let's just concentrate on the socio-economic aspects. My parents, a salesman and a nurse (who only worked sporadically until the divorce), were solid members of the burgeoning postwar American middle class. They bought a spanking new house with a huge yard in a pleasant suburb. They had three kids without thinking much about it. We had occasional family vacations. My dad bought a new car like clockwork every two years.

Now, to put it mildly, I am far better formally educated than my parents were; my mother struggled to make sure that I would be. But to what ultimate avail? I have never done, or felt myself able to do, most of what they did rather automatically. I've never owned property, never had my name on the deed. I've never been interested in having kids, but if I had been, I don't know when I would have managed it financially, and three would be incomprehensible! My vacations have been few and far between (and essentially solo), and I have never bought a new vehicle.

It could be that I am a failure of unique and historic dimensions; hey, I'm willing to entertain that possibility. Certainly I didn't always play my hand well. But the upshot is that I slipped out of the middle class, not recently but pretty much from the get-go after my finishing college in 1980, although I couldn't have realized it at the time. The Seventies, of course, was the decade when the ground-rules of the "American Dream" -- not well established, maybe they only really existed from 1945-1970 -- began to change. I caught that inverse wave with a vengeance (and graduated into a terrible economy -- the recession of 1980-1982 is now part of taught history).

So the notion of "living large" is laughable to me, and my occasional extravagances -- another book, another suit, a high-end beer I don't really need -- are puny in the scheme of things (which is not to say that I don't feel guilty about them sometimes). If I were ever to try to live large or recklessly, the fates would slap me down so hard that I would never forget it -- if I was still alive to think about it. The moments in my life when I have so much as edged towards living a little better, I have been humbled, badly; sometimes put back to square one for my impudence. No, living small is the only option for me. I have no real understanding of people who can live large and get away with it -- but I should, because I went to college with them, those already rich through their families, and those who became rich by making shrewd career decisions in the new meritocracy. You could triple my income and the level of my lifestyle, and I still wouldn't be remotely consequential in their context.

Part of the story of our times is how the perception has become ingrained that if you raise wages for the ordinary worker, it will wreck the economy, but if you deprive plutocrats of an nth part of their winnings -- say, a slightly smaller six-figure bonus? -- they will lose all incentive to perform (and yet what good they are performing, I generally couldn't tell you). It's like the two groups aren't even members of the same species anymore. One is doomed to live smaller and smaller, reduced to postage stamp scale; the other, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, is "bored beyond belief with wealth beyond imagining."