How the Other Eighty Percent Lives: A Snapshot of the Conscientious Working Poor in America

[kimberlysteele]

There are two classes in the US and possibly the world and only a single test is needed to determine which is which: there is the class of people who have had anxiety about affording groceries and the class that has never had to worry about affording groceries. In our current era of remoteness from anyone who grows a hundred percent of their own food, dependence upon the grocery store for daily sustenance is a given. On one side of the divide, we have those who have never skipped a meal for the reason they could not afford it. As much as certain people who used to fall into the Occupy Wall Street crowd want to think the upper crust is a tiny fraction of one percent who spoil outcomes for the remainder of the pyramid, the class of effortless grocery buyers that accidentally ruin everything are more like the upper twenty percent. This level is what I will call the salary class for the duration of this essay. The lower eighty percent is comprised of the lower middle class, the desperately poor, and everyone within that large spectrum. If you’ve never sweated the choice between a fast food meal and the last eighteen dollars in your bank account, it is likely you have never experienced being outside of the salary class.

Food, glorious food

Americans have a particularly warped relationship with food. Etheric starvation is especially pronounced here, hence our armies of diabetics, overweight, and obese citizens. Being dramatically overweight is a regular occurrence even among the wealthy in the US. The rich who are not overweight often go the opposite road of orthorexia, anorexia, and bulimia, enmeshing themselves in diet and exercise culture that hybridizes excessive pride in one’s physical appearance with obsessive lifestyle perfectionism.

I bore witness to an exhibit of this elite perfectionism once during a trip to Whole Foods. A mother and her young adult daughter were in front of me in the checkout line, both in a state of supermodel-esque near-emaciation. They were clothed in athletic gear that probably cost more than my monthly tax, title, and mortgage. They had a huge load of fresh produce on the conveyer belt. It took FOREVER for the cashier to scan all of their fruits and veggies, and to their credit, they were not at all impatient. The total of their groceries ended being over seven hundred dollars. The women expressed some wry amusement at the total, and the mother made a comment about the daughter being hungry.

Never in my life have I spent over three hundred dollars for groceries, and to add insult to injury, there is a supermarket down the street from Whole Foods that sells the very same brands of organic produce for a third of the cost. The two women did not have to care. They had plenty of money to burn.

The salary class

To be truly salary class, your wealth must come from sources outside of the work you do for money, if you deign to work at all. I grew up upper middle class and in my profound naivete, I did not realize that the key difference between my father and my friends’ fathers was that my salesman father earned his commission-based income in the direct, old fashioned way and my friends’ fathers provided mostly via inheritances and dividends. This is nothing new. Most of Jane Austen’s heroines end up marrying men whose “umpteen thousand a year” salaries come from investments. I have only recently come to realize this distinction on the soul level. If I had not been part of the lower classes after getting married, I don’t know that I would have truly understood the distinction.

The salary class kids are largely not OK. I have not seen many examples of salary class parents in my Generation X that have produced well-rounded, emotionally stable offspring. Severe drug addiction is par for the course as is severe depression. One boy I grew up with was obsessed with reliving being bullied in high school twenty years after the fact. His badly-managed trauma turned him into a depressive narcissist and a sex addict. A girl I grew up with name drops compulsively to this day — she has never figured out how to develop apparent self-worth. She is pathetic. Another girl has more substance addictions under her belt than Justin Bieber. Sadly two out of three of the aforementioned individuals has reproduced. These kids all had parents who gave them comfortable childhoods and a lack of financial limits that will last until their parents die and give them umpteen thousand a year from beyond the grave. It’s funny how little they’ve benefitted from never having to worry where grocery money is going to come from.

Meanwhile, back in the hood…

Most of my neighbors in the lower middle class neighborhood where I live are renters. Some of them are the non-conscientious poor, i.e. the “trash” of various races. White trash, black trash, Hispanic trash, etc. The trashiest of the trash depend on welfare, quietly deal drugs, and have lawns strewn with discarded furniture and bikes. Their loud fights are impossible not to overhear from their houses and yards. They are parasites and people like them are the primary reason the poor are so despised.

The backbone of the neighborhood (and thankfully the majority, at least for now) are the conscientious working poor. A single woman lives in a converted house apartment nearby. She has three jobs, one of which is Dollar Tree. Another is disabled and depends on her husband who works at Walmart. There is a family of Mexicans who immigrated a long time ago and raised their kids here: the whole family works. In rare cases where the conscientious working poor own property, they are typically quite house proud, pouring themselves and their strained resources into home improvement and maintenance.

To be the conscientious working poor is to feel you are always drowning. The second you believe you are getting ahead — not Lululemon and seven Ben Franklins at Whole Foods ahead but ahead in the sense you can afford you car payments for a couple of months — the System kicks you in the face and the undertow sucks you into the brine again. If you dare unclench, you are immediately threatened with losing your apartment and being forced to surrender your pets to the shelter. You are always oppressed by the specter of NOT ENOUGH MONEY, and on good days, you numb the consciousness of it by putting your nose to the grindstone and working harder or laughing it off. On bad days, it threatens to swallow you whole and crush you under its weight. It becomes much easier to hate Richie Rich and her clueless, designer-dressed entourage, but that kind of sepsis does not pay your bills so you do your best to shelve it. Besides, the trashy poor person you live next to is more of a direct threat, so any worrying time is usually spent on him. Being conscientious, working, and poor at the same time sucks ass and all of my conscientious working class neighbors know it intimately.

Cost of living is so bad that the average adult’s wage, side gigs and hustles included, equals about 1/17th of the buying power it had for a comparable young adult in 1973. I remember when a small bag of candy was ten cents and bread was under a dollar. A house that cost $150,000 was palatial and there were plenty of dumps comparable to the one my husband and I bought in 2016 that were $30,000 or less. No wonder so many adult children live with their parents: what other choice do they have? Often it is the parents who have nowhere to go. The 92 year old parent of a friend of mine is interred in a nursing home that costs $14,000 per month. Yes, what I just said probably deserves its own essay. I’ll give it some thought. At 14K per month, I have asked myself why the woman’s four children don’t just rent a house and a full-time, live in RN? Wouldn’t such an arrangement cost half the price or less? I guess nobody asked me.

Blame the rich

The rich women in Whole Foods and my salary class classmates are in many ways to blame for the current predicament of the lower eighty percent. When Richie Rich demolishes an already luxurious home or part of that home to build an executive mansion instead of making do in a more conservative, smaller house, it drives all property prices skyward and the taxes make it all but impossible for the conscientious working poor to buy the homes they deserve. When they buy seven hundred dollars worth of already-overpriced groceries, the stores raise their prices because they can. When they hire armies of questionably-documented workers to build, clean, and maintain their homes, the demand for that cheap labor makes it difficult for skilled laborers to compete. Every restaurant, warehouse, and store presents similar competition where poor illegal migrants compete for entry-level jobs. I tried explaining this to my salary class friend once and he did not get it. As Upton Sinclair said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.

I am not like the Occupy people. I do not want wealth redistribution. In fact, I eschew and rebuke all wealth that I did not earn. I will never own a single stock, not only because of my lackluster math skills, but because I have grown to hate and despise unearned wealth. To my mind, money made off of investments and stocks is unearned and that means it comes at the price of me having to earn it back in future lifetimes. Nope, DO NOT WANT. You’ll never know if I hit it big (with earned wealth, of course) because I will not live ostentatiously. I hate McMansions and I make no secret of this in my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. If unearned wealth somehow comes my way, I will do my damnedest to give it away as quickly as possible to a reputable charity. I think if more members of the salary class were like me, they would actually be better adjusted. There are more important and meaningful things than luxury and jet travel.

All in all, I am glad I was never salary class and I am grateful for my bohemian existence, even with its constant fear of financial drowning. Being thrown into this situation gave me insight into what most people are going through and enabled me to come down to Mama Earth rather than being another bored, depressed, confused, detached, perpetual tourist. I can do cool things I never would have learned how to do if I had been salary class: I can make all sorts of tasty meals from scratch, for instance, and the cost of groceries is closer to seven dollars instead of seven hundred. Little things make me happy and grateful in ways Richie Rich will never understand. Limits are powerful forces and financial limits can be taskmasters. As always, it is up to each one of us to make the best of what we are given, and in a perverse way, that can be easier when what you are given is a bit less.

Comments

[methylethyl]

I hear you.

Through conscientious thrift and careful planning and by the grace of God, we have always kept a buffer between ourselves and, say, going into debt. We've never had our power turned off for nonpayment or struggled to afford groceries. But also, we don't ever buy new things if we can help it, and remain keenly aware that we are *one* moderate household disaster (car wreck, house fire, medical expenses, long-term injury) away from the edge. We'll never be able to retire.

Extended family range from working stiffs like us, to prosperous salary people with nice houses, and... I am noticing some of the same things. The kids are not OK. The current crop of 16-30s, among the relatives: I'm worried about all of them, regardless of the tax bracket they grew up in, none of them seem to be OK. They are not holding down jobs, figuring out life, or getting married. The ones who are doing *best* seem on track to make lots of money, have a more or less permanent "partner", never reproduce, and displace parental instincts onto dogs. That's the pinnacle of achievement, and we just slide down from there, to permanently single, disinclined to work, antidepressants and weed, cross-sex hormones, temporary jobs interspersed with weekend pill benders and temporary boyfriends, had a kid with (likely drug induced) developmental problems that grandparents are now raising... it grieves me that I can't point to *any* of that generation in the family and say with confidence: "that one has a bright future for sure". This cohort is a historical bottleneck where a bunch of surnames die out.

When I ponder why so many young people have turned up at church these last few years... I think that's part of it. The culture they grew up in is a deathtrap and to some extent, the ones at church are the ones who've decided to use the emergency exit on that sinister carnival funhouse. If there's a future, they're it. Not the current crop of young adults in my family. I'm... deeply sad about it. I've tried the kind-auntie intervention thing and it's not enough.

[mistyfriday]

I grew up poor and while I never had to skip a meal way too many of them were top ramen.

There are paths to and beyond the 80th percentile that involve honest labor. There is a reason that the advice to join a trade keeps getting repeated. That said those with a salary class mindset usually get washed out within a year or two after they've populated multiple unofficial blacklists.

I remember in 2009 watching the nouveaux pauvres as they started shopping at WinCo and the Dollar Tree. They had such a prickly energy about them it was hard not to notice. Being poor isn't scary, not know how to deal with it is. More and more of the salary class is meeting the same fate.

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks for this, Misty, and thanks for "nouveaux pauvres", that is a keeper. I have heard that college enrollment is way down. It makes perfect sense because of how badly the collegiates of 2020 - 2023 were burned: paying top dollar to stay at home or trapped in a dorm room on a Zoom call in lieu of actual human interaction. Considering most young adults go to college in hopes of finding a relationship -- this is largely unsaid but we all know it is true -- there is zero reason of going if there is a constant threat of the rug being yanked out from underneath your feet because of monkeypox or whatever new scheme the CIA comes up with to rob the middle class. College wasn't worth the staggering debt in my day and it certainly isn't worth it now.

I think fear of being poor is most of what keeps the salary class going. It is the fire under their butts at all times.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you. I'm glad young people are going to church in your area, and I hope they find genuine community there. The salary class destroyed community as we know it and it will not be easy to rebuild.

I too know of plenty of salary class kids who are just hitting young adulthood and the prognosis is very grim. It is as if many of them are afflicted by autistic narcissism, which I have written about, but I have kept it behind a paywall so I don't have to wade through a field of trolls. To sum it up in bullet points, I point out the uncomfortable truth that narcissism often lies at the heart of autism, even of the severe, nonverbal kind. The autist is so caught up in his own hypersensitive drama, he is unable to feel for anyone else or recognize their needs as important as his own.

I saw the beginnings of Failure to Launch syndrome in my own misspent youth: while I was in college, several high school classmates of mine went the druggie/TV and gaming marathons all day route. Nowadays that sort of slacker is far more common than it used to be. Often they will eventually settle down and become more productive, but some will continue the hikkiko mori act for the rest of their lives.

[methylethyl]

I still hold out hope for some of them, but... right now I don't see any movement toward having an adult life worth living. They all seem to be in that dark zone where no amount of talking can get through, and they are gonna have to learn everything in the hardest possible ways, and we all hope the process doesn't kill them or leave them brain damaged :/

I kind of want to do the study, where you trace the current cultural decline via numbers of babies named for video game characters.

[kimberlysteele]

I think the real marker of decline may be in how few babies are being born regardless of what names they are given!

Attitudes Toward the Poor

[(Anonymous)]

Kurt Vonnegut had something very insightful to say about this:

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters."

I moved to New Zealand 25 years ago, and I will say that NZ is more like "the rest of the world" in that being poor, in and of itself, does not render you somehow "sub-human" like it does in America.

I think this is the Yankee Calvinist heritage at work. According to John Calvin, wealth is a sign of God's favor, and if you are poor, you are probably "reprobate and predestined to be damned" as well. New Zealand's religious heritage is more Anglican, Catholic and Methodist. I think that makes a big difference.

Michael Martin

[methylethyl]

True!

Re: Attitudes Toward the Poor

[kimberlysteele]

"Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous", Um, but Americans do have poor and virtuous folk heroes. Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, both poor and scrappy. John Henry was a freedman. Daniel Boone spent much of his life in a one room cabin and the last 20 years of his life neck-deep in debt. Harriet Tubman, another folk hero. John Hartford, also known as High John the Conqueror, an escaped slave who outwitted his would-be captors.

I do agree with you that Calvinism has had some vile legacies, one of which is televangelism. Televangelists think that because they're superrich, that means God is smiling upon them. They fail to understand both their own Bible while failing to consider that God may be testing them over a span of time longer than a single incarnation.