The End of Self-Control → Gen Executor → Engineered Elite

Hey Neighbor. True story. Two women in their early forties sitting in a Seattle coffee shop. “I’m thinking I might be a sunglasses person,” says the first. “Like one of those women with the big glasses.” The second woman protests. “But you’re so pretty!” The first holds up a finger.

“I know. But I don’t want my face to distract from my ass.”

➺ Thanks to “Flannel Jones” (probably a real name)for the anecdote above. If you’ve overheard something memorably Upper Middle please share. It’s all gonna end up in a time capsule.

➺ I’ve been really enjoying Status, a media newsletter that’s really about something else (can you guess?), recently and recommend signing up.

➺ Scatter my ashes in Delta Comfort Plus.

Upper Middle’s Q2, 2025 “A.I Invasion” Survey is our attempt to document how the oat milk elite is preparing (or not) to face the downstream effects of A.I. adoption in the workplace. Data will be shared with survey participants and, as always, with members.

STATUS ❧ Intrusive Thinkers

He believes we have conflated or traded – at least to some degree – self-control for some combination of consumer choice and status. It’s not a particularly fun argument to hear^[1], but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth listening from a thoughtful person.

Upper Middle spoke to Renn at his home in Indianapolis. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the obvious question. What are “bourgeois values” and why do they matter?
Think about Benjamin Franklin's “13 Virtues.” It's a secularized version of the Protestant Ethic focused on temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. It’s all about self-control, hard work, and fairness. These virtues are rooted in the very American idea that you can improve your life through your own efforts, which I think has been under attack in recent decades.

You’ve written that these values persist in America, but seem to be fading, especially among my people, the oat milk elite. But, in my experience, white-collar metroplex professionals live by these values – perhaps to a greater extent than other groups. Am I being too generous to my own people?
Yes and no. The urban upper middle class has virtues. They tend to get divorced less. They tend not to have as many kids out of wedlock. They tend to actually be more traditional than they’re willing to admit. If you open the New York Times, you’ll read a glowing review of Dying for Sex, where a woman dumps her husband to go on sexual escapades, but most urban elites don’t live those kinds of lives or emulate those who do. Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's life is, for example, incredibly traditional. All that said, I would argue that there seems to be a decline in interest in work among members of the urban upper middle class, who seem to be the people most heavily invested in things like remote work and work from home.

You’re not a MAGA guy, but you have argued that Trump voters are better models of bourgeois values even though Trump himself is not. 
I do think many Trump voters represent the remaining bourgeois elements in society. Specifically, you see a lot of those people operating low-leverage, cash flow businesses – The Atlantic has referred to them as “Local Gentry.” I think something they like about Trump is that he hasn’t ever had a job. Whatever you think of the man, he’s run businesses and made decisions. They like that. 

I’ll add that I don’t want to put these people on a pedestal. In my experience they are either the most civic minded people you'll ever meet – sponsoring Little League, looking after their employees – or arrogant and awful to their employees. But whether or not they are good people, they’ve retained a “let’s go to the frontier where the opportunity is” mentality that’s become foreign to much of the professional managerial class.

But we’re not exactly talking about Pilgrim ascetics here. These are consumerists too, right? They just buy F-150s and go to Disneyland instead of Per Se.
The consumer ethos has become central in America. Consumption patterns just vary. The Trump voter with a car dealership has a big boat on Lake of the Ozarks. The Boston professional has a wooden boat on Squam Lake. Trump voters visit Disneyland, but Brooklyn is Disneyland. Consumption amenities are the point. 

I feel very seen with that Squam Lake reference and have to concede on Brooklyn, though I think there’s some deeper community elements there as well. What I’m wondering is this: How did we get here? How did we start from the same first principles and arrive in such markedly different cultural places?
Before industrialization, most Americans were farmers or small business owners. As urbanization ramped up in the 1920s, people moved to cities, became wage laborers, and ceased to produce what they consumed. At the same time, the modern advertising and public relations industries cropped up and began to reshape how people understood success and fulfillment. By the 1950s, we have an economy where very few people work for themselves.

The people who talk about the rise of “managerialism” today tend to be on the right, but the original critiques came from the left – from people who worried that freedom would be curtailed by corporations and by managers’ fealty to corporations. The left abandoned those critiques when it aligned to the professional managerial class and refocused on critiquing white male patriarchy, which is a less prevalent and alienating force in most people's lives. We see the results in our politics. We're seeing socialism on the left and nationalism on the right. Both movements are reactions against the impersonal systems that dominate our lives – and also who benefits from them.

If that’s true – and I think it likely is – it suggests that the cultural elites in corporate roles who have benefited economically from managerialism have also sacrificed self-control and fairness to some degree. Do you think they feel alienation as well?
Yes. It’s important to remember this isn’t just political or cultural. It’s generational. The people who benefited disproportionately were the Boomers, who pulled the ladder up after themselves. Even in the 1990s, corporate managers had started to get squeezed. That has only gotten more intense. It’s not a huge surprise to see all those Gen Z TikToks about hating corporate jobs. The old scripts no longer work, which is understandably driving some young professional people away from the idea that hard work matters.

Now, there’s another big disruption underway. We’re seeing lots of managers lose their jobs as AI comes online. Do you think there’s an upside here given that it might return us to a place where bourgeois virtues matter more than the system and rule-following?
It could be a very positive development. It could create more human-scale institutions. Not everything has to be a unicorn. But it's going to require a lot of adaptation. It's going to require new business models. It's going to require new ways of thinking about work and about value. And it's going to require new ways of organizing our economy and our society. The transition is going to be difficult.

➺ As consumer profiling gets better, the internet is going to become a very different kind of mirror. ➺ Mubi is the new status streamer. ➺ The Wanting Monster is even hungrier than the Very Hungry Caterpillar. ➺ Apparently the millennial mid-life crisis involves getting more tattoos.

TASTE ❧ Drawing Conclusions

Over the past few weeks, new Upper Middle subscribers have been prompted with an onboarding quiz that helps triangulate their position in the American class system—using a mix of financial data, taste markers, and status signals (essentially sorting them by disposition and roasting them along way^[2]). The idea is to prospect for unexpected patterns among our peers. Here’s the first: The sons and daughters of engineers know a lot about art.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus maps” from 1970s France revealed two distinct elites: cultural and financial. In our 2025 American sample, the lines blur. Respondents whose higher-earning parent worked a technical job named more fine artists on average than those from legal, business, or financial backgrounds—second only to those from inherited wealth.

That’s surprising. But educational may explain it. The “Technical” families in our data also have the highest rates of elite college attendance behind “Family Money.” And while elite colleges may be less focused on the humanities today, many still had strict requirements in the 1990s and 2000s. This is how we wound up with an “Engineered Cultural Elite” and, presumably, how artist-as-programmer Sol Lewitt got popular again.

➺ An odd consequence of Hollywood leaving Los Angeles is that you bump into it unexpectedly all the time. ➺ Mountainhead, the new HBO film by Succession auteur Jesse Armstrong, goes out of its way to mock “mountain modern” architecture and… yeah… Park City should do better. ➺ The Devil Wears Prada sequel is coming. Presumably it’s called The Son of Perdition Wears Lululemon's ABC Pants and follows a private equity associate dismantling Runway magazine^[3]. 

MONEY ❧ Tag Sale

Last Saturday, the garage door of the elevated shotgun at Port and Chartres in the Marigny was propped open. Inside, a man in his early fifties and a dusty hoodie told visitors to take books, pottery, and old Mardi Gras posters – a gut reno was scheduled – and talking about the home’s previous owner, his uncle, who stopped paying taxes in protest after Katrina and left behind a financial debris field along with all the cracked stoneware.

In 1971, the American political philosopher John Rawls^[4] put forward the “Just Savings Principle,” which stated – mas o menos – that we are obligated to preserve society for the next generation because we are not responsible for the timing of our births. “The present generation cannot do as it pleases,” he wrote — disorder, to Rawls, was just selfishness in disguise.

It’s a strange thing to inherit money and a mess. It’s particularly strange in America where, as Barbara Ehrenreich put it, family money seems “not just lucky but vaguely immoral.” It’s better than nothing, but also proof of carelessness – which is presumably why the new owner of the home at Port and Chartres looked like he’d gotten a bad oyster. But he didn’t complain. How could he without sounding entitled?

Honestly, I’m not sure, but the deficit is $1.9 trillion and the next tax bill won’t help.

➺ You can buy David Lynch’s espresso grinder for $3,000. ➺ What a deal. The student debt crisis is going to affect everyone. ➺ “If your managers and superiors are OK with continuing to compensate you during your and your colleagues’ more quiet moments, why should you argue?”

[2] I don’t know if I’m pulling it off, but I really want to help people laugh about where they come from and the biases that they bring around with them. Letting individualism slip just a bit feels good, like standing naked in a hotel window.

[3] Recently rewatched the original. What a strange moment in fashion history. Everyone except Tucci looks kinda bad, but it’s a crazy accurate depiction of that era.

[4] If this sounds a bit like the “veil of ignorance” argument sometimes used to discuss how fair systems can be engineered that’s because it’s from the same book. Rawls treats generation as an identity in a way we maybe all maybe should more often. After all, what defines us more than when we live?