For the Uncomfortably Comfortable
The Bottled
Elite
Across America, professional elites are rethinking how they put in twenty-four. The shift coming could change real Main Streets forever (and probably for the better).
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Join 120,000 semi-rich, totally exhausted people (like you) figuring out WTF happenened....
There’s been a prestige inversion for white collar workers. Profits used to follow the product and prestige followed the profits. Not anymore.
Financialization has altered the job landscape and created a dynamic where employment is a certification (not unlike a college degree) awarded to people who get in, not people who build. That’s great news for low-conviction floaters....
The fight over free speech matters, but the fight over paid speech will ultimately determine the direction of American culture (whether the New York cocktail party crowd likes it or not).
Why? Because there’s a natural antipathy between people who think attention should be earned and people who don’t mind just buying it. And, yes, it’s exact the sort of elite conflict that has historically started in boardrooms and ended in the street.
You have close friends from college for a reason and it has way less to do with shared interests than you might think.
Proximity – propinquity, really – leads to friendship. Unfortunately, it happens to be the very thing the busy, high-earning Americans trade for convenience. What if we didn’t?
Prep Effects ➺ Semiconfabulators ➺ Caddyshackles ➺ Effable Studs ➺ Polo Bearishness ➺ Socialized Headline ➺ Passive Regression ➺ Oolong Tea Party ➺ Horace Mayonnaise ➺ Weaponized Ambiance ➺ Loyalty Programmed ➺ Resting Rich Face ➺ Desktoplessness ➺ Fractal Snobbery ➺ Excessive Thrift ➺ Gen Executor ➺ Engineered Elites ➺ Leveraged Despair ➺ Professional Chicken ➺ Empirical Violence ➺ Rich Friend Gaps ➺ High-Stakes Bullshit
➺ Friday - Oct. 10, 2025
Flat Affect
| A new study of of thousands of U.S. financial-services firms that cut management over the last two decades demonstrates that as organizations “flatten,” they replace the visible hierarchy of titles with an invisible one of temperament. After what the University of Vienna researchers euphemistically call “de-layering,” workforce scores on big five traits change: conscientiousness rose 2%, agreeableness 3.6%, and openness 3.4%. Not huge numbers, but enough to suggest sorting. Job security accrued those who performed agreeableness convincingly as power accrued to those who didn’t have to. |
The researchers found that these shifts had nothing to do with hiring – only attrition. Couple that with the fact the personality scoring came from HR sources and the picture becomes clear: Flattening companies aren’t finding more agreeable people, they are retaining workers willing to perform agreeableness. There’s a good reason for this: Without hierarchy, workers must secure cooperation through coordination, self-promotion, and diplomacy. Personality is actually more important post-layoffs. But it’s not simply that companies get nicer – it’s that niceness becomes mandatory. |
| C. Wright Mills saw this coming in 1951, when he described the rise of the “personality market,” in which “the personal or even intimate traits of the employee are drawn into the sphere of exchange.” He was mostly focused on front-facing workers, but the new study suggests the back of house is now involved. All roles become client-facing when coworkers are granted the autonomy to act as clients. Mills worried that personality would be commodified; he did not foresee a world where no one would be exempt from that exchange save those at the top – the few still allowed to say “fuck off.” |
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After the ‘unt
| In Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, Julia Roberts’s philosophy professor dresses in business casual with a layer of post-feminist polish and just enough glen plaid to acknowledge the dearly departed dons who would have preferred to keep her in the typing pool. The tailoring is perfect if a bit butch (very 1990s Julia) – sharp shoulders, soft wool, serious buttons. It’s all intentional. It’s all triangulation. And, yes, it looks about right. |
| Those unrumpled blazers are a long way from the nicotine-stained bathrobes Michael Douglass sported in Wonder Boys, a film with a somewhat similar premise and a starkly different romantic vision of academy. Released in 2000 (with that good Bob Dylan song), Wonder Boys portrayed college as a place where brilliance excused a near total lack of self-care. It was a place of ill-fitting ideas – more atelier than store. Corduroy and tweed held sway, but the guest speakers wore dark blue suits. At the time, it looked about right. Then the guest speakers took over. |
| What we didn’t know then was that higher education was getting reeled in by the service economy. In After the Hunt, academia is still a hothouse, but it’s also a public-facing professional nursery. Roberts’s Alma is tasked with preparing students for the market and dresses accordingly – despite the fact that philosophy departments tend to be the most rumpled enclaves on neoliberal modern campuses4. Like other Foucault-quoting continental philosophy professors – and specifically female continental philosophy professors – Alma dresses like she’s going to a meeting. In fact, she is. And when she gets there, there isn’t a rumpled analytic philosopher in sight, much less a writer in a bathrobe |
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Carded
| Chase just raised the annual fee on its Sapphire Reserve Visa from $550 to $795, justifying the hike with “over $2,700 in annual value.” That value isn’t cash – it’s a scavenger hunt of rebates: $300 in DoorDash credits, $100 back from Peloton, $15 monthly with Lyft Pink, 10x points on hotel bookings through Chase Travel, and scattered perks from StubHub, Instacart, GoPuff, and Relais & Châteaux4 (natch). There’s also Priority Pass lounge access and “limited offers” that expire faster than a decent camembert. At this point, Sapphire isn’t a credit card so much as what Dan Frommer at The New Consumer calls a “lifestyle subscription.” Amex Platinum (now $895) pioneered this model, bundling Equinox, Resy, and Fine Hotels & Resorts into a package aimed squarely at airport-Wi-Fi consultants and loyalty-program philosophers. It worked not just because there was value, but because the perks cohered into a lifestyle – a kind of financial phenotype. That logic now defines the category. Roughly speaking:
By orienting around perks, card issuers are diagramming the top 15% of American spenders—not maliciously, just effectively. They’ve realized that everything in your wallet is, in fact, a form of ID. |
STATUS REPORTS
Doc—45456
The Upper Middle “Self-Presentation Survey” examined how we present ourselves in social settings – particularly among perceived peers. Specifically, it dove deep on soft signaling.
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The Upper Middle “Outdoorsy Survey” examined how we engage with, conceptualize, and fetishize nature. The survey data suggests that Nalgene-carrying weekend trippers clustered in metroplexes valorize “pure” nature, but can’t necessarily afford it.
Doc—45456
Our “Where Next Survey” explored how we think about moving: not just where we might go, but how we consider what those choices say about our class position, taste, and willingness to compromise. The results indicate that we’re house-proud and restless,
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Zero-Martini Lunches
A live conversation series with authors and scholars on the forces shaping this privileged American life, “Zero-Martini Lunches” are Chatham House Rules forums where big ideas get batted around while everyone eats sad desk salads. The one Zoom meeting you’ll actually look forward to attending.