Welcome to Life Inside the Bubble

A new newsletter about the people who refuse to say they're rich.

Welcome to the first edition of Life Inside the Bubble, a newsletter about privilege, class, and wealth. If you like it, please tell one person you know about it.

When I graduated from art school in the middle of what’s now quaintly called the Great Recession, I had no place to live and no idea how to make money. I’d been laid off from my part-time barista gig at Starbucks, and lacked experience doing anything but getting high and sitting through creative writing workshops. So my prospects were not good. Listings on Craigslist, which in those days was an important hub of commerce, promised jobs paying $300/DAY NO EXPERIENCE NECE$$ARY but usually there was a catch. One time I arrived at a job that turned out to be hawking comedy show tickets on the streets of Midtown. The other desperate job-seekers and I were instructed to ask passersby, “Do you like comedy?” as an opener; supposedly the trick was to get them to stop walking and interact with you. You got some percentage of your ticket sales, but if you didn’t sell tickets you didn’t make any money. I’m sure it was possible to do this, but if you can convince strangers to drop twenty bucks plus a two-drink minimum to see some mid-tier-at-best standups, you can probably put those powers of persuasion to better use, like founding a religion. I sucked at selling tickets, not that I tried for longer than a few hours before I walked off the “job.”  

The Craigslist gig I eventually stuck with was at a call center that specialized in hectoring small shareholders so they would vote on proposals submitted by their corporate boards. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means, I didn’t either. The important thing was that it paid $12 an hour and mostly you had to read words off a computer screen and not mind if people were rude to you. It allowed me to stop couchsurfing and move into a room in an apartment that stank of roaches but cost only $460 a month. Every morning I’d take the crowded bus from Bed Stuy to Atlantic Center, then a train down to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, then put a headset on for several hours, then train and bus back to my crappy apartment where I would write blog posts about whatever was on my mind, get drunk on Ballantine Ale, play online poker, and look for internships at magazines. It was an extremely 2009 way to live.

One day I showed up at the call center and found nothing but empty chairs. All of the stockholder meeting votes were done with, there was no more work, but they’d pay us for the day. As I left, it was explained to me by some of my former coworkers that this was a good thing, because we could all go on unemployment. Sweet. I used the money as a stake and started to play a lot more online poker. I also signed up to become a search engine evaluator, I wrote blurbs for a real estate website that never launched, and through all this cobbled enough money to afford my meager rent. Around this time I got an internship at Vice, which at the time was an artsy and rude magazine read mostly by people who did cocaine. This internship was unpaid, which sucked and should have been illegal, but I also scored a gig working for the 2010 Census, at the kingly rate of $15 an hour.

Here’s where I lucked out: Right around the time my internship was wrapping up, Vice had an opening for an editorial assistant who could also blog about music for a shoe brand I think I might still be contractually prohibited from revealing. I didn’t know much about music and wasn’t sure what an editorial assistant did, but none of that mattered: I now had a media job. The catch was it paid $22,000 a year, which even back then was not a particularly livable wage in New York, but I was still paying less than $500 a month in rent and so could continue to scrape by. By this time, I had learned that cooking an egg in your ramen noodle water along with some frozen vegetables was a pretty good approximation of an actual meal, and cost only about a dollar.

I figured out what an editorial assistant did and got a promotion and a raise to $25,000, then later a raise to $40,000, for which I thanked them effusively, if you can believe it. I wrote and edited more stories, rose up the ranks as Vice magazine became a bunch of websites and a YouTube channel and then a TV network, blah blah blah, and by the time I got laid off a couple years ago I was making nearly 90 grand, a respectable middle-class salary even by absurd NYC standards.

Now, one way to tell this story is to brag about how I “made it,” at least to a degree, in a tough creative industry. It’s the kind of story you tell when you want to demonstrate some salt-of-the-earth credentials, or when you want to reassure yourself that it was your talent and drive, not dumb luck, that brought you success. And it’s true I started out in New York with no real connections and worked my way up. I scrabbled, I saved, I sacrificed, I once had to go around and buy several fake penises for Bob Odenkirk. 

But this version of the story leaves so much out that it’s basically a lie. I didn’t just work hard and get lucky, I had something better than luck—I had the bubble. 

The bubble is a term I’m inventing, right now, today, to describe a certain economic class. The definition of the bubble is simple: If you are protected from the material impacts of poverty, you’re in the bubble. If you lost your job, you have savings to fall back on, or if you lose your home you could move back in with your parents or another family member to recover. You could come up with money to cover emergency medical expenses or buy a plane ticket if you really needed to get somewhere. It’s possible that you could become homeless, or find yourself unable to feed yourself or your children thanks to a compounding set of tragedies, but really unlikely. The further inside the bubble you are, the less likely that you’ll be in those circumstances, even if you get unlucky, or even if you fuck your life up in multiple ways—you’ll be able to borrow money from people to keep a roof over your head, or your parents will pay to send you to swanky rehab when you bottom out. When you get sick, you have health insurance, and when you need to pay for expensive medical treatments it doesn’t bankrupt you. You’re likely fluent in the language of privilege, you can get jobs that are more about meetings and emails than work work, or if you’re in the upper echelons of the bubble you don’t really work at all. Life just has a way of mostly working out for you. And when it doesn’t, things don’t get that bad. 

So when I say I was in the bubble, specifically I mean that my parents were able to pay to send me to a private university (with the help of a scholarship but also the help of a trust fund) without taking out onerous loans. I could afford to take unpaid internships during and after school because I didn’t need to pay for college by myself and didn’t need to send money back home. If I had failed to figure out life in New York, I could have moved back in with my parents, who I’m sure would have paid for a plane ticket. 

The bubble is vast, and contains multitudes. It’s multinational¹ and multiethnic, though in the U.S. (and many other Western countries) it’s populated by mostly white people, who have long been given advantages thanks to longstanding racist social and economic systems. Billionaires are in the bubble; so too are white-collar professionals and business owners who have mortgages and bills and incomes in the mere six figures. And then there are their kids, who may be struggling financially on paper but have family resources to draw upon should things get really dire. Children of the bubble often follow similar paths, spending some time quote-unquote “finding themselves” before they settle down into the same middle-class-plus lives of their parents. They can literally afford to fuck around in their early twenties (or even into their thirties, if they’re particularly deep inside the bubble). That’s the category I was in after I graduated college—it wasn’t that being in the bubble made me “rich,” or that I didn’t work hard, but my bubble status allowed me the freedom to pursue my dreams.

The realization that you’re in the bubble often comes with a wave of shame and guilt. You did nothing to deserve your special status, you did not ask for these advantages and privileges, yet here you are. You’ll never honestly be able to tell yourself or others that you are self-made. You’ll be going through life on easy mode. Sure, you will suffer the normal human quota of heartbreak and pain and loss, but you’re safe from the daily misery that billions of people in the developing world have to go through, and insulated from the grinding effects of American poverty. You have privilege, and as the Berenstain Bears taught us, with privilege comes responsibility—who wants that? 

People don’t want to admit that they’re in the bubble. Accuse someone of being rich and they’ll protest, always a little too much, often by pointing to someone with even more money. “This condo is shit. It’s actually a pain to own. I wish I didn’t have it. The actual rich people live on the top floor. They have the view.” Everyone aspires to be middle-class. Everyone wants to have humble roots they rose up from, a claim to some kind of oppression they overcame. 

The silence that results from these attitudes allows a lot of people to pretend that they don’t have power or influence. But they do. Bubblers have an outsized say in culture, politics, and media. These are the people who donate to political campaigns, who have disposable income to spend on travel and luxuries, who are desirable targets for advertisers, who subscribe to premium news outlets and independent Substacks. (Hi everyone!) They can work in glamorous but low-paying industries because they often don’t really need the money, and often have the connections to land important, influential jobs without having the commensurate experience. 

This will be a newsletter about the bubble. It’s going to be about who is inside it, what life looks like from its confines, and what people in the bubble think. Some of it will be essays, some of it will be reporting, some of it will be commentary on current events through the lens of privilege and wealth. It’ll probably be about politics, and media, and culture, and whatever else I feel like. It will come out weekly, though no promises. It will be free for the foreseeable future unless I ramp it up or get more subscribers. 

I’m writing this because as a lifetime resident of the bubble I know that these things aren’t discussed nearly enough. For instance, a lot of rich white people will happily admit to their white privilege and yet be curiously hesitant to own up to the privilege that comes from having a lot of money. Bubblers will dodge and obfuscate about the power that they wield as a class while meanwhile using that power to maintain their status at all costs. Increasingly, they’ll use the language of progressive politics to justify their actions. The bubble is real, but it’s entirely transparent to the point of being invisible to the naked eye. It’s only when you get up to the edge and really look for it, reach out to touch it, that you realize that there is a barrier there stronger than steel keeping you cocooned—and keeping everything else outside of it. So let’s talk about it.

I hope you subscribe, and share, and keep reading.  

Top photo via Flickr user TonyParkin67  

1. Bubble people from different countries often get along better with each other than they do with the non-bubblers in their own countries.