He was becoming increasingly alarmed at the material achievements of his friends. What was also alarming and unsettling about this was that he once believed he was above such pettiness, such base feelings of jealously. Even though the middle-class was supposed to be dead, houses were being bought and Facebook postings were conveying a seemingly neat, linear, and rationally-planned ascendancy through what appeared to be the accepted stages of middle-class respectability. People were not getting divorced. They were not seeking exotic hardships in Third World post-colonies. They had stopped wearing backpacks after their undergraduate years and were succeeding at everything. He would console himself with the thought that, in fact, most of them had stopped at their undergraduate degrees, period, and, without any sense of regret or irony, started working, building families, settling down. They had stopped acting like life was summer. How boring that must all be.
So, with each major acquisition by distant online affiliations came complex feelings of immediate, real-time regret tangled with jealously, rage at himself for not having settled down sooner, anger at his parents for not having instilled in him the discipline required to buckle down and take responsibility for a respectable career, a definable career, at a much earlier stage in life. Anger at their inability to provide any sort of guidance through the more sophisticated twilight phases of capitalism because when they were coming of age there was no need for guidance, or an instruction manual. Everything just took care of itself through the passage of time. The white dream of the middle class was attained despite major screw-ups, stupid decisions, too much alcohol, accidents, guns, diseases, smoking, extramarital affairs. Such was the power of the Great Society, that it could hold people up despite their own irrational acts rooted in psychological weakness. They still achieved the house, the two cars in the driveway, the lawn, the dog, kids going to college. Repeat, repeat, repeat for decades. No one had prepared him for the need to be innovative, creative, cunning, clever, ruthless, driven. The real American Dream was that people could be middling and still maintain a secure position in what was once called the middle class. If one didn’t want to work so hard at being exceptional there was always the option of simply following the rules, or so the mythology went. Now the rules were unclear and to get ahead one has to make heroic strides, or at least maintain the appearance of this. Architecture had proven to be the perfect venue for this, so much of it being about appearances…not buildings.
