- UPPER MIDDLE
- Posts
- What Gets Passed Down → Wolfing Stupid Pills → Hollywood Misdirector
What Gets Passed Down → Wolfing Stupid Pills → Hollywood Misdirector

Hey Neighbor. True story. Guy sitting in a New American restaurant just outside of Boston talking about food. “I’m sorry,” he says (though he isn’t). “I can’t do another foraging-forward coastal New England tasting menu.” His eyes roll behind the expansive lenses of his Oliver Peoples.
“My palate’s burnt out on Irish moss and autumn olives. I want a fucking ice cream.”
➺ Thanks to “Dog” (how simple) for the anecdote above. If you’ve heard something distressingly Upper Middle recently please share. It’s a point of pride that we do not make any of this up.
➺ Welcome to new readers. More than 3,000 people signed up this weekend. This thing is as contagious as the stomach flu ripping through Brooklyn.
➺ Never buy your dad a putter.

Upper Middle’s Q2, 2025 “Status Symbol” Survey is our attempt to find out how members of the oat milk elite are flaunting their social rank and how those efforts are going down with their less cringe-y peers. Data will be shared with survey participants and, as always, with members.

The key to a $1.3T opportunity
A new real estate trend called co-ownership is revolutionizing a $1.3T market. Leading it? Pacaso. Led by former Zillow execs, they already have $110M+ in gross profits with 41% growth last year. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO. But the real opportunity’s now. Until 5/29, you can invest for just $2.80/share.
This is a paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals. Under Regulation A+, a company has the ability to change its share price by up to 20%, without requalifying the offering with the SEC.

STATUS ❧ Intrusive Thinkers
![]() Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, Augustine Sedgewick’s new dad book about dads, is a cleared-eyed look at a fuzzy idea. In Sedgewick’s telling, fatherhood is a deeply felt personal relationship and a process through which men and children come to accept ideas – some smart, some ridiculous – about what they should expect from themselves and from the world. | ![]() |
Those ideas shift frequently and Sedgewick describes the feeling that leak through the cracks that result. There’s joy and love, sure, but also resentment, confusion, and that sullen anxiety prosperous dads pass to their desperately overachieving, CBT-dependent children.
Upper Middle spoke to Sedgewick by phone. The interview has been editing for length and clarity.
The idea of ‘The Breadwinner’ is core to our understanding of fatherhood, but you argue in the book it’s a relatively new concept that papers over the fact even successful modern fathers cannot guarantee outcomes for their children. What does it mean to win bread?
When we talking about the economic aspect of fatherhood, we're generally talking about the ability to provide. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, fathers provided for their families mostly through heritable things – land, status, or skills – passed down generation to generation. With the emergence of industrial wage work, the value of agricultural real estate and many skills collapsed at the same time status was disrupted. The value fathers had to their children sort of collapsed.
‘The Breadwinner’ emerged as an identity at the beginning of the 19th century in England. Bread is not something that can be passed down so with the identity comes the constant need to go out and get – and thus the threat of failure. The idea of being a breadwinner is paired with the fear of being a loser, which never goes away.
As you describe it, that anxiety comes to define the role of wage-earning fathers who aren’t in a position to pass down concrete skills or fruitful pastures. Why did even well-educated, kinda tweedy Americans – you give Ralph Waldo Emerson as an example – get obsessed with toughness?
Emerson received a great inheritance from his first wife's family, but the path there was not easy and he feared his son was going to have to cross the same ground. And, look, Emerson was not a stupid man. He was right. In the early 19th century, there was a cycle of booms and busts. Emerson accepted the idea that no fortune was safe – an idea we all kind of accept – because it wasn’t. He wanted to toughen his kid up because he knew what he didn’t know.[1]
That makes sense. It also makes sense that there would be a reaction to this kind of temperament-focused parenting. Can you explain what it was?
When children cease to be workers because there's no work at home they lose value as assets. So what emerges is this idea of children as inherently precious – not valuable in an economic sense, but in an emotional sense. Whether or not this is true, it’s psychologically compensatory because raising a child is a lot of work and we want it to be worth it.
Children’s preciousness gives value to the unpaid labor involved in parenting, which women take over as more men go to the factory or office. How does the increasing centrality of mothers in children’s lives affect the experience of childhood?
Around this time, men courts start to recognize women as ‘primary parents’ and parenting books start to get written for audiences of women, who are actively taking over responsibilities within the home. We imagine the domestic sphere as a refuge from from the nasty world of the market, but it’s not that at all. Women were claiming some power men long monopolized. Among the things that women, in their capacity as managers of the domestic sphere, teach their children are taste, manners, habits, and patterns of consumption.[2]
It’s funny how even two centuries later, we see similar patterns where mom is a class-coded figure of comfort and refinement and dad is this supposedly rational economic actor who seems irrationally tense most of the time. It’s not great! You’re a father. How did writing this book make you reconsider how you wanted to show up in that role?
Men have made the word father mean inventor, God, creator, king, leader, but linguists think the word derives from a sound babies attach to the first thing they recognize outside of themselves and their mothers. That sound, according to evolutionary biologists, activates a part of the brain that first evolved in male fish guarding eggs. We hear “Pa” or “Da” as a request for help, not a title. I think we need to let that in.

➺ How status researchers predicted the Pope by mapping the conclave. ➺ Are we teaching or are we teaching obedience? ➺ Another reason to hate Duke. ➺ They did it. They made vanity plates for crypto. Hey Jim, pass the Kool-Aid!

MONEY ❧ Ask Mr. Market
Ask Mr. Market is authored by Andrew Feinberg, a retired hedge fund manager who has beaten the S&P 500 for the last 30 years. He is the author/co-author of four books on personal finance.
Dear Mr. Market,
My friend told me that I did much better than the average fund investor analyzed in the most recent DALBAR study. Should I be happy?
Happyish in Honolulu

Dear Happyish,
For the moment, don’t lose the “ish.” DALBAR, the research firm best known for its funnier-than-it-should-be annual Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior studies, has been at it for 30 years and for all of those years it has documented fund investors wolfing stupid pills. They underperform the funds they invest in year after year, whether the market goes up or down. Why? With or without intent, they try to time the market and… don’t.
Last year, DALBAR found that the average equity fund investor underperformed the S&P 500 by 8.47%, a shocking amount. Fund investors made 16.54% vs. a 25.01% return for the S&P. These underperforming investors were net sellers every quarter and they almost invariably sold right before surges.
What the always depressing DALBAR studies reveal is that even people who don’t think they’re trying to time the market try to time the market. They’re so happy when their portfolio rises that they take a little off the table or, alternatively, they react to bad news by selling to reduce exposure, not realizing that the market will likely be higher when they reinvest that cash—if they ever reinvest it.
Investors practice all kinds of self-delusion, but DALBAR’s work points to one particularly persistent delusion, namely that the annual return of your mutual fund or index fund is the same as your return. It could have been, but it likely wasn’t. Performance is relative and the average investor’s instincts are horrible.[3]
If you want to be a better investor, never listen to your instincts. Your instincts were designed to help you avoid getting eaten by a lion. It’s natural to react. It’s unnatural to win by standing still.
Sincerely,
Mr. Market

➺ The term of the day: Terminal Lucidity. ➺ What recession probabilities actually mean. ➺ White-collar layoffs are not an aberration. ➺ Not a good time to live near techies – at least not if you own the house.

TASTE ❧ Technocolor
![]() Matt Belloni isn’t Nikki Finke. Finke, the scoop-a-day founder of Deadline Hollywood, was a terror. Belloni, the Puck writer and podcaster, plays one on TV. There he is snooping around in the season finale of The Studio. There’s his name dropped carefully as “Voldemort” in the season finale of Hacks. But is anyone really afraid of this guy? | ![]() |
Matt Belloni isn’t Nikki Finke. Finke, the scoop-a-day founder of Deadline Hollywood, was a terror. Belloni, the Puck writer and podcaster, plays one on TV. There he is snooping around in the season finale of The Studio. There’s his name dropped carefully as “Voldemort” in the season finale of Hacks. But is anyone really afraid of this guy?
Not really.
With few exceptions – Finke being one – prominent industry journalists get selected by prominent members of the industries they cover, who offer access. In Belloni, Hollywood execs have selected a sharp-elbowed, bullshit-calling former lawyer with an appetite for power lunch gossip. But that sounds more dangerous than it is. Yes, Belloni sometimes exposes professional incompetence. But he constantly obfuscates artistic failure.
In 2013’s To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov described the commodification of cultural consumption – the reverse engineering of taste from large data sets – as an outgrowth of “solutionism,” a form of thinking that recasts “all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized.” Belloni’s B2B2C work is premised on the solutionist idea that execs – specifically those working at streamers – exist in a feedback loop. Though that’s true to some extent, it’s mostly flattering to Belloni’s hundreds of thousands of non-Hollywood followers because it implies their streaming choices matter and that making movies and shows is the same as making B2B SaaS products (or w/e). At the end of the day, it’s all just problem solving.
Except it isn’t. Art is not a solvable problem. That’s cultural elites are so fascinating to so many people.[4] It’s kinda the whole thing.
On a pod with Seth Rogen last week, Belloni said he was himself flattered to make his acting debut in The Studio. He shouldn’t have been. The suits wouldn’t have let him on set if they truly feared him. They don’t. Why? Their process is defensible. It’s the product that isn’t.

➺ Renoir finally gets a Wes Anderson cameo. ➺ Speaking of which, The Phoenician Scheme is oddly light on Tyrian purple, the color made from crushed snails Phoenician merchants made a proto-Tiffany blue. ➺ “In the age of language models, the medium is the message — is the machine.” ➺ How to give feedback on documents. ➺ A really mean poem to send someone you hate.

![]() [1] One of the things that Emerson didn’t know was that his beloved son would die and that he would never recover from the loss. Sedgewick is, unlike (let’s be honest) a lot of cultural historians, an eloquent writer and this made me cry. Yep, I’ve got a son. | ![]() |
[2] We’ll circle back on this with our status symbols report later this week, but the domestic management dynamic seems to have resulted in women being much more aware of consumer peacocking.
[3] Yes, asshole. Even yours.
[4] It’s kind of odd that Belloni is popular with execs because he doesn’t mythologize their work, not because he does. No one wants to be Robert Evans anymore and it’s a big bummer.