Jason Heppenstall

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.