A Crisis of Meaning

In this neoliberal world, even the lucky ones are miserable and desperate. It's time we realize these structures are meaningless and traumatic.

I’ll be honest. I’ve lost my taste for middle-class crisis art.

When I was studying fiction writing and literature, it was everything and everywhere. People can criticize publishing now, but what was produced for decades upon decades was a monolithic account of white men living in white neighborhoods gnashing their teeth over white issues, including “troubling” diversity and the world changing around them. Short stories, novels, and movies were largely accounts of these same white men, most of whom never worried about money or anything particularly real, taking trips abroad or spending their waking moments engaged in affairs with women they didn’t particularly care for and then returning home to families they definitely didn’t care for.

All of it was…tiring.

As a person who grew up in an impoverished home, I wondered what all the stress was about. There were moments of recognizable human concerns, but most of it was general nail-biting and fretting that didn’t really amount to much. Instead, it was an exercise in navel-gazing and narcissistic self-obsession.

Now, in this era, I’m most interested in narratives that attempt to work against those old ideas and focuses and then razor-sharp criticisms of the dangerous wealth-class like Succession that probe just how corrupting wealth actually is at the top of the heap.

And so, I haven’t watched Fleishman Is In Trouble. I’m sure it’s fine, maybe even good. The cast is solid and it sounds like the writing is decent. But I don’t have much in the way of time or energy or anything really left to give to this stuff anymore. But, as is the case with modern content, which is generated specifically to capture certain demographics in order to reflect back realities while selling carefully-curated products and services, it’s the secondary market of “criticism” and culture pieces that capture the attention. It is, after all, an entire industry unto itself and what drives the internet. Original content followed by secondary and third wave content reacting and then reacting to the reacting.

But a piece in The Cut detailing what Caitlin Moscatello calls “The Fleishman Is In Trouble Effect” is worth a closer look. Rather than focusing on the show, Moscatello is discussing a disturbing energy pervading the white collar class in places like New York City, where people out earning the general population and living lives of remarkable luxury and ease are beginning to reach a breaking point. This is an inevitable condition of neoliberalism, which aggressively promotes competition in a zero-sum environment where resources and opportunities are continually dwindling, like a pond stocked with fish that continues to get shallower and shallower by design.

We have seen this before. In the past we heard echoes in the literature of John Updike, in neurotic films where people in sweaters ate expensive food all while asking, “Is this all there is?” Only now, the consideration isn’t an existential dead-end, but a bleak fear that the walls they have relied on for so long are suddenly closing in.