Frank
Bruni: Why Is Everyone Complaining?
When there are upgrades everywhere, from the gym to the
airport, it's hard to feel like you have enough.
Apr 30, 2024
It was pitch-dark when I showed up at the box office of what
was then called the Hartford Civic Center at 3 a.m., to be in place when
tickets for the Queen concert went on sale, several hours later. It was the
early 1980s, I was a teenager, and this was the surest path to the best seats.
Back then, your proximity to the stage had less to do with a fan’s financial
reserves than how quickly and heroically you’d acted to get your tickets. There
was something egalitarian about it. My friends and I ended up in the eighth
row, and I caught Freddie Mercury’s tambourine when he threw it into the crowd
during the final song.
Today, the seating maps for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour
revealed scores and scores of price tags, tailored to the precise desirability
of the vantage point. In the U.S., the most expensive tickets cost many
thousands of dollars more than the least, so that a father of three posting
pictures of his family among the Swifties could be announcing to the world his
ability to drop ten grand on one night’s entertainment. At the back of the
stands, with half a view, sits the family that could only afford to drop hundreds.
There have always been big gaps between how the rich, the
middle class, and the less fortunate live. But these days those gaps are
increasingly enormous, and increasingly obvious. We have long advertised our
place in the pecking order with our homes, cars, clubs, and clothes; there are
now extravagances, fringe benefits, and microclimates of exclusivity that
didn’t exist before. Meanwhile, social media gives us constant, intimate
glimpses of how different life is for the people one rung above us, and the people
one rung above that, and the ostentatious winners at the top of the ladder. The
result is a culture of grievance among those who have plenty, but not enough.
In September 2022, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget
Office published a report examining
changes in family wealth distribution in the U.S. between 1989 and 2019.
National wealth tripled in that time, but disparities widened. Whereas in 1989,
families in the top 10 percent held 63 percent of total wealth, they held 72
percent of the wealth by 2019. Meanwhile, the share of wealth possessed by the
bottom half decreased, from just over 3.5 percent to 2 percent in that same
period.
“Back in 1983, 66,000 American households were worth at
least $10 million,” wrote Peter
Turchin in The Atlantic last year. By 2019, controlling for
inflation, the number of households worth that amount “had increased tenfold.”
There were also huge increases in households worth $5 million, far outpacing
population growth. This was fantastic for the new elites, of course, but their
coffers swelled at the expense of ordinary workers, whose share of wealth was
shrinking.
At the same time, Americans were being told that a college
education, with as many advanced degrees as possible, is a passport to the
high-earning echelons. An increasing number sought such opportunities—more than
the upper classes could absorb. “More and more people aspiring to positions of
power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots,” wrote Turchin.
“The competition among them has corroded the social norms.”
Our worries about the shrinking pie make us more anxious to
get ahead. When I was a teenager, school essentially came in two sizes: public
or private. Now, the latter features costly but popular add-ons: the separate
tutor for standardized exams; the individual sports coach; the independent
college admissions consultant who, for a hefty fee, does more plotting and
pacifying than school counselors are able to.
In fact, add-ons are everywhere now. At a fancy gym like
Equinox, where membership already costs a bomb, clients can pay extra for
personal trainers. Clients can also pay a surcharge for a better locker room.
And other customers notice. In fact, other people noticing is part of the
point: it encourages them to pay up.
There are worse things than not having the most experienced
personal trainer, or the best Taylor Swift ticket, of course. We live in an age
of plenty, compared to the Americans of 80 years ago. Back in 1945, according
to the University of Houston’s College of Education, “nearly a third of
Americans lived in poverty. A third of the country’s homes had no running
water, two-fifths lacked flushing toilets, and three-fifths lacked central
heating”—whereas now the vast majority of Americans have their most basic needs
met.
Yes, many forces still cause anxiety for today’s Americans.
Climate change has terrifying implications. The Great Recession temporarily
wiped out the savings of tens of millions of Americans. The Covid pandemic
exacerbated economic problems.
But we don’t fear that missiles will rain down on us in the
U.S., not in any real and immediate way. We haven’t been engaged in a military
conflict that necessitated a draft since the Vietnam War. The Great Recession
wasn’t the Great Depression. In the last fifty years, we’ve seen astonishing
scientific progress, including medical advances that have alleviated our
suffering and technological developments that have made life easy with the
touch of a phone.
But happiness typically has less to do with a person’s
reality than with what they’d been encouraged to hope for, what they’d deemed
possible, and the yardsticks all around them. The increasing wealth of the
United States at the end of last century upsized Americans’ expectations, while
our desires were whetted by marketing that got better and better at making
consumers want, want, want. When a country fills people with longings, and
tells them nothing but hard work stands between them and material satisfaction,
it encourages astonishing achievement—but also disappointment, which can
quickly become grievance.
Paradoxically, our privilege makes us more conscious of what
we don’t have. “Progress, a wit once said, was fine for a while but it went on
too long,” the longtime political analyst George
F. Will wrote in November 2022. Now that the struggle to attain
subsistence has been banished by plenty, “many hyper-politicized Americans have
filled the void in their lives with the grim fun of venting their animosities.”
In today’s America, resentment is everywhere, stoked by the
highly visible and relentlessly multiplying badges of affluence all around us.
Everywhere, from planes to sports arenas, luxury boxes take up more space than
they used to. If you can’t quite afford to access them, you can still pay to
feel special—though not as special. Everything comes in gradations,
from queues to dining options, so that if you can’t ascend to celestial levels,
you can at least reassure yourself that your purchasing power is greater than
the plebeians. And so, the cycle of grievance continues.
