Hello discoverers!

One of the more bizarre features of this era is that even people who are doing objectively well by any reasonable measure can’t seem to shake the feeling that they’re falling behind.

Financial journalist Hanna Horvath has written a very clarifying essay on why this might be happening. She traces how ‘middle class’ stopped being an economic category and became a psychological one – a story about the kind of life you think you deserve. Which means when the story doesn’t match the reality, the gap hits hard:

“‘Middle class’ has become a psychological container that absorbs all of this anxiety – the gap between self-concept and lived experience, between what you were trained to expect and what the economy actually delivers. The term ‘middle class’ holds a feeling. And right now, the feeling is dissonance. ‘I have what I was told would be enough, and it isn’t, and I don’t know who to be angry at.’”

Horvath argues that there are two distinct experiences at play. Some of us feel ‘material precarity’ – when the basics genuinely slip out of reach – and others feel ‘positional precarity’ – when you earn well but the life that income was supposed to buy keeps receding.

What unites both groups is structural. Neither is accumulating capital. Both live off income perpetually – although at different levels. The resentment from not being able to get off the treadmill – rather than flowing upward toward those who are hoarding vast amounts of capital and/or shaping policies – tends to travel sideways (hatred of ‘elites’) or down (hatred of immigrants).

“The family earning $75K and the family earning $350K have more in common with each other – structurally, in terms of their relationship to capital – than either has with the family whose wealth generates its own income without labor. Both are running on the treadmill. One is running slower, but neither is able to get off.”

When the big goals feel permanently out of reach, doom spending becomes rational: if the future you want isn’t coming anyway, you might as well buy the thing that makes today bearable. Meanwhile, “they’re dealing with an entire consumer economy that’s been redesigned around making the base tier uncomfortable enough to push you toward a premium tier you can’t afford.”

The result is a growing share of our society who did everything right and yet are one bad quarter away from a financial crisis. The psychological result is the same across both groups: “the inability to plan, to imagine a future, to trust that effort connects to outcomes”.

The misdirected anger isn’t an accident, Horvath writes. Rather than recognising their shared position, the two groups tend to organise against each other:

“The fallen working class turns atavistic – nostalgic for a past economy that included them. The educated-but-blocked class turns progressive – demanding systemic reform. Both are responding to the same structural forces. But instead of recognising that shared position, they organise against each other. The resentment becomes horizontal instead of vertical.”

I really appreciate that Horvath doesn’t just leave it at diagnosis. A phrase that stood out to me was ‘manufactured dissatisfaction’ – the idea that some of what we feel is structural and real, but some of it is the consumer economy doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping us in a state of aspirational lack so we keep spending, upgrading, chasing the next tier. Understanding this and separating the two is where agency begins.

Her most useful and immediately practical suggestion is really simple: name which precarity is yours.

“Money anxiety feels similar at every income level, but the mechanics are often different. If you’re in material precarity, the work is protecting the floor – building a buffer, reducing exposure to the extraction economy, making the system work for you where it can. If you’re in positional precarity, the work is harder to see because it’s quite psychological: separating what you need from what you were trained to expect.”

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai