All of the prior examples featured a brush with homelessness, demonstrating from hard and practical experience that these insights were not gained by a person within the top of the economic bracket dispensing theoretical advice untested by the crucible of lived experience.
All six examples featured a rediscovery of the old ways that enabled them to recognize opportunity and wealth that is normally overlooked and dismissed by those who have chosen the new way over that which has worked for most of human history.
However, these experiences also demonstrate that people you might consider to be middle class are dropping out of its bottom, and some are struggling to use social and interpersonal tools from the middle class to navigate a different situation.
And people don’t want to say “I’ve dropped out of the middle class,” so I’ll state the situation differently:
A substantial number of Americans (60-100 million) in that income range increasingly report difficulty affording what previous generations associated with a middle-class lifestyle: homeownership, savings, raising children, and financial resilience. The issue is less that millions have formally “fallen out” of the statistical middle class and more that the economic experience of being in that income band has changed.
On the order of 60-100 million Americans live in households whose incomes were once widely associated with a middle-class lifestyle but no longer reliably purchase one in many parts of the country (source).
This represents a difficult transition for those who have abandoned old ways in favor of the new - people feel they did the right thing, and yet now they struggle to make ends meet - advice on how to view overlooked opportunities that are worth more than money because the advice helps people recover and repair their dignity.
The new ways encourage us to rip and run, to discard people as if they were disposable, searching for someone better on a purely transactional basis… but without the benefit of actually having money.
In other words: it doesn’t pay to conduct your affairs transactionally when you don’t have the basis to sustain transactional living in the first place; the people down here conduct themselves differently.
And that’s a good thing if you come from the salt of the Earth people who used to conduct themselves in exactly this manner.
My grandma Ruth would say “prosperity ruins a people; they forget who they are and where they come from,“ but this does not preclude people from coming home.
Now it’s your turn. You don’t need millions of dollars, you don’t need permission, and you don’t need to be famous. Someone, somewhere is cold, and my recommendation is to leave one place warmer than you found it.
A surprise: once you begin adding worth to the world, you start seeing warmth everywhere.
The glimmer isn’t really about change, it’s about perception. Yesterday you might’ve walked past a broken chair, and today you’re wondering if someone could repair it.
Yesterday you saw an old Mechanic, and today you see 40 years of accumulated wisdom.
Yesterday you saw an abandoned building, and today you’re wondering what children could build there. That’s the glimmer.
The glimmer: once your eyes changed, your relationship with tomorrow changes for the better.
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