Social Class On TV Shows
What The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, and other TV shows reveal about social class in America
At first, I thought class was about money.
I started off in what most people think of as the American lower class. I was given up for adoption when I was three by my birth mother, who was addicted to drugs; I spent the next five years in seven different foster homes in Los Angeles. My mother was from Seoul. I never met my father and had no information about him until I took a 23andMe test last year, which revealed that he was Hispanic, with ancestry from Mexico and Spain. When I was seven, I was adopted by a working-class family and subsequently settled in Red Bluff, California (pop: 13,147; median household income: $27,029). Red Bluff is consistently ranked as the third or fourth most dangerous city in California, just behind Oakland. Eighteen months later, my adoptive parents got divorced, after which my adoptive father severed ties with me.
When I was 15, I got my first job as a dishwasher at a pizza joint, and on breaks, all my conversations with coworkers eventually turned to the topic of money. Or the lack of it. We would fantasize about what we would do if we suddenly struck it rich: vacations, cars, a house by the beach (several coworkers played the lottery). In high school, students would spread rumors that so-and-so was wealthy, because their parents had a second house or a boat. We all thought that how much you made was what defined social class. If you had money, you were rich—which for us was indistinguishable from “elite.” If you didn’t, you were broke.
But I had a feeling that money wasn’t the whole story. This was because I read a lot. But I also watched a lot of TV.
In the foster homes I grew up in, the television was constantly playing. My foster siblings and I fought constantly over which shows to watch. Early on, we’d argue over whether to watch “Power Rangers” or “Rugrats.” Then later, “Family Matters” or “Full House.” Usually, the biggest kid won out. Later, after my adoptive parents got divorced, my mom was working full time. The duplex we lived in was often empty. I’d turn the TV on first thing in the morning and again as soon as I got home from school. Certain shows were staples that I watched with rapt attention. But I’d have other shows playing in the background whenever my mom wasn’t around telling me to turn them off.
It’s possible I watched more TV from birth to age 17 than most upper-class Americans watch in their entire lives. One of my favorite shows growing up was “Fresh Prince,” in which a teenager growing up in West Philadelphia named Will Smith gets into a fight. Concerned for his safety, his mom arranges for him to move in with relatives. Will whistles for a cab, and when it comes near, he moves in with his Aunt Vivian and Uncle Phil in ritzy Bel-Air.
Will attends “Bel-Air Academy” along with his cousin, Carleton Banks. Will lacks the manners and decorum of Carleton and his classmates; in a poignant moment in season 3 with Uncle Phil, Will describes the difficulties he’d experienced trying keeping pace with the other Bel-Air Academy students. “It was like everyone had two [roller skates], and I was trying to keep up with one,” he says.
It’s in the third season that college becomes a major plot point. For Carleton, the question was not whether he would attend college, but whether he would follow in the footsteps of his father and go to Princeton. But he doesn’t get in. Will, less concerned about college than Carleton, still outscores him on the PSAT and is later offered admission to Princeton.
The same themes came up in “The O.C.,” one of the biggest shows of the mid-00s. In “The O.C.” — what a friend once called “Fresh Prince with white people” — a teenager from a rough neighborhood named Ryan Atwood gets into a fight, and then moves in with a rich family, the Cohens. At first, Ryan is seen as a troublemaker; later, he’s revealed to be a talented student. The Cohens live on a beachfront property in Newport; Ryan feels out of place among his peers at his private high school. In the third season, college becomes a crucial plot point. Seth wants to attend Brown, but he doesn’t get in. He goes on to attend a different college. Ryan, less concerned with academics, had still scored in the 98th percentile on the SAT, and goes on to attend Berkeley.
Both Will Smith (the character) and Ryan Atwood are labeled as “troubled” in their respective TV shows. Both were abandoned by their fathers and left to be raised by single moms. Essentially, adults neglected their responsibilities to their children, and then other adults gave them this label. I was given this label, too. Which is why it’s the title for my book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.
Anyway, it sounds absurd now, but this obsession with college genuinely puzzled me at the time. I would later realize that these shows were my first glimpse into a world that wasn’t mine, but they wouldn’t be the last.
Today, I have degrees from Yale and Cambridge and earn a comfortable upper-middle-class living beyond the wildest dreams of my teenage self. To get here has been a long journey through a variety of social milieus: an impoverished slum apartment in Los Angeles with my birth mother, the LA County foster care system, my adoptive blue-collar hometown in Northern California, then the military, then college. What I’ve come to realize along the way is the complicated relationship between pop culture — specifically, in my case, television — and social class in America. Watching television, I learned the ingredients for social mobility. But I also discovered the limits of pop culture as a vehicle for learning about class in America.
What does it mean to be a member of the “elite,” and why is the idea of “eliteness” so thorny to define? Part of the difficulty is that there is no airtight definition—the word means different things to different people. Surely, it has something to do with social class. But how to understand social class? The personal interactions I’d had in childhood led me to believe that class was defined by money. Then, watching television, I observed that the characters were not that interested in money; they were more interested in college — because class markers it turns out, mean different things to different people too.
Later, I discovered that my observations roughly aligned with those of the cultural historian, Paul Fussell. In his classic work, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Fussell stresses that the criteria we use to define the tiers of the social hierarchy is in fact indicative of our own social class.
For people near the bottom, Fussell says, social class is indeed defined by money — in this regard, I was right in line with my peers when I was growing up. The middle class, though, believes it’s not just about money; equally important is education. “In the absence of hereditary ranks and titles,” Fussell writes, “Americans have had to depend for their mechanism of snobbery...on their college and university hierarchy.”
Still, Fussell notes, money and education aren’t enough to climb all the way up the ladder. That is because the highest tiers of society assign great importance to taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior — what the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as habitus. As I explain in my forthcoming book, my updated term is "luxury beliefs."
These ephemeral qualities are harder to obtain or quantify than a large bank account or a college diploma. This, according to Bourdieu, is why the upper class uses habitus as a filtering mechanism. It’s a method to know who was born and raised as a member of the elite and who was not.
Even though Bourdieu did most of his work in the 1960s— before Netflix and the Golden Age of Television—his observations still hold true. Viewing fictional depictions of those in higher social classes, I gained some understanding of this different world. Some of the habitus of the elite eluded me, no matter how much TV I watched.
By my senior year of high school, thanks to TV, I’d figured out that college was important. (By way of comparison, while the characters from my favorite shows were offered admission to Princeton and Berkeley, the smartest kid in my high school class — the one everyone knew was going to college — went to California State University, Fullerton). But for me, college wasn’t important enough — not yet anyway. After graduating high school, I didn’t go away to college. My early life had been a mess, and I’d been a terrible student. After graduating with a 2.2 GPA in the bottom third of my class, I decided to enlist in the military.
Which has a different social class milieu than many affluent people think. There is a widespread belief that enlisted military members are especially likely to come from the lower rungs of American society—people like me. But in fact, enlisted members of the military are disproportionately drawn from the middle class. Throughout my enlistment, I learned from actual rather than fictional people about the importance of education. Service members who had college credits or a degree were typically promoted faster, and supervisors often urged subordinates to go to take night classes. The military offered veterans the GI Bill to cover tuition; I finally started making college plans.
One year before my enlistment was over, but before I knew where I’d be headed next, I attended the Warrior-Scholar Project, an organization that hosts “academic boot camps” to teach military veterans how to succeed in college. There, I learned a lot about how to be a good college student: How to write a college-level essay, what a thesis is, tips for studying.
Equally useful, though, were the insights I gleaned from the unstructured time throughout the program. The tutors at this program were either students or graduates of top universities like Yale, Dartmouth, and Amherst. Some were veterans, and others were typical college students working as tutors for the summer. Between lessons and writing workshops, me and the other students would hang out with the tutors and have informal conversations. And sometimes I’d overhear them speak with one another.
I became close with one, a recent Yale graduate. One evening, I saw him watching something on his MacBook. He told me it was “The West Wing.” I’d never seen this show, nor did anyone I know watch it. My military friends watched “Two and a Half Men” (I didn’t enjoy it), “Game of Thrones” (unsuccessfully tried twice to get into it), and “Family Guy” (was one of my favorite shows). But when another tutor overheard him recommend the show to me, she nodded vigorously, saying I had to watch it. I took the recommendation seriously — I watched “The West Wing.” It was, after all, the first show that two Ivy League graduates had ever recommended to me. In my mind, if two Ivy League graduates watched a show, this meant that everyone who attends such schools watches it (If two different veterans told you that you had watch a certain show, you might think all veterans were fans of it). Thus, if I did decide to attend college, this was an important cultural touchstone to understand. What if someone made a comment referencing the show and I didn’t understand? It was an attempt to learn more about the distinctive culture of a highly influential segment of society.
But as I worked my way through the first season, I had a realization: “The West Wing” is not very good.
Granted, part of this may be because of the gap between era it was produced in and when I was watching it, and the fact that it was on network television. I suspect if a similar show were made today for Netflix or HBO, it would be better. Still, I kept watching — because I was intrigued by what it told me about the people who’d recommended it.
In fact, “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin has explained in an interview with David Brooks that the pilot episode didn’t test well. But, according to Sorkin, it tested “extremely well” with certain audience segments: Households that earned more than $75,000 a year, households where there was someone with a college degree, and households that subscribed to the New York Times. I was not a part of any of these groups, which was why the show didn’t “test well” on me. And if you look closely, you’ll notice he is in fact describing the 3 ingredients of social class: money, education, and habitus.
The people on “The West Wing” were constantly engaged in debates about contentious social and political issues. One plotline I found particularly interesting was when President Bartlet watches his deputy communications director, Sam Seaborn, lose a debate against a Republican woman named Ainsley Hayes. To her surprise (and mine), the President offers her a job in his administration, citing her “sense of civic duty.” In fact, the more I watched, the more the characters reminded me of the Warrior-Scholar Project tutors. Characters like Josh Lyman and C.J. Cregg were educated at elite universities and, despite their flaws, tried to live up to their moral principles. They engaged in fierce debate with political foes, but respected them too. The characters who staffed the Bartlet Administration were highly educated, extremely witty, and idealistic. It made me wonder: was this show so popular among elite college graduates because they saw aspirational versions of themselves in it?
Early on, I thought of television as a window into another world. I would watch it to escape the one I was in, and to learn more about others. Later, though, it became more like a mirror. The more I saw, the more I learned what I wanted; the shows I chose to watch, in turn, reflected my desire to build a better life for myself, and I took my cues from them on how to construct it. Either stay like this, I thought, as I gazed at the TV, or try to live like that. This was what happened with “The West Wing.”
At first, I watched to learn why the tutors recommended it to me. I continued to watch because it showed me what I wanted. I watched two full seasons before stopping, but scenes from the series have stayed with me. Josh Lyman boasted about how he’d attended Harvard and Yale. C.J. Cregg asked President Bartlet why he’d attended Notre Dame when he’d gotten into Harvard, Yale and Williams. For me, the show confirmed that education was indeed a necessary ingredient for a better life — and that not all educations were created equal.
On my first deployment in 2011, I watched the entire series of “The Sopranos” (thanks, Bittorrent). When you’re not on duty, there are only two things to do on deployment: Work out and watch movies/TV. Early in the show, Carmela Soprano issues a thinly veiled threat to their neighbor, Jeannie Cusamano. Her aim was to pressure Jeannie into getting her sister, a Georgetown alumna, to write a letter of recommendation for Carmela’s daughter for Georgetown admissions.
Tony and Carmela beam when one of their friends compliments them upon learning that their daughter was accepted to Columbia University. Even for this crime family, it was crucial that their daughter get into an elite university. The Soprano parents, especially Carmela, understood that attending such a school will go a long way to establishing Meadow within the American status system.
Tony, the protagonist, wanted desperately to fit in with the affluent doctors and lawyers in his neighborhood. But they treated him as a curiosity, cracking jokes and asking Tony about John Gotti during golfing outings.
Apparently, there is a trope about TV snobs. The trope is that HBO’s “The Wire” is the best show on television. A few years ago, "Family Guy" even had a scene making fun of this. That "Family Guy" scene also pokes fun at the snobs who love “Breaking Bad” (more on this show soon). Both of these shows are good. I loved “The Wire.”
One of the main characters in season one, a narcotics trafficker named D’Angelo Barksdale, gives his perspective on Fitzgerald’s message in The Great Gatsby:
“He's saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that shit matters. It's like, you can change up. You can say you somebody new. You can give yourself a whole new story. But what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened. It doesn't matter that some fool say he different, because the only thing that make you different is what you really do, or what you really go through. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and because he wasn't ready to get real with the story, that shit caught up to him.”
You can try to join a different social class, but you will never be fully comfortable within it.
This is a recurring theme for people who were born into one class but find themselves in another. In his 2013 song “So Far...” the rapper Eminem comments on this:
“I think this poor white trash from the trailer/Jed Clampett, Fred Sanford, and welfare/Mentality helps to keep me grounded/That's why I never take full advantage of wealth/I managed to dwell within these parameters/Still crammin' the shelves full of Hamburger Helper/I can't even help it, this is the hand I was dealt.”
Another of my favorite scenes from The Wire is when D’Angelo takes his girlfriend to a nice restaurant in Baltimore. You can watch it here:
Right away, D’Angelo is uncomfortable when the maitre d' asks if they have reservations.
He’s not at ease.
After dinner, he asks his girlfriend if the other patrons know that he’s different from them. She replies that there are other black people in the restaurant. But D’Angelo wasn’t talking about race, he was talking about class.
He tries to explain. “Come on, you know, it’s like we get all dressed up, right? Fancy place like this. After we finished, we going to go down to the harbor, walk around a little bit, you know? Acting like we belong here.”
D’Angelo feels like he and Donnette stand out, that others can sense this. Even though the other patrons are absorbed in their own worlds.
Donette replies, “So? Your money good, right?” And she is right. When D’Angelo talks about “belonging,” he seems to sense that there is a club.
For Donette, the only requirement for entry into the club is money. She echoes Gatsby’s vision of the American Dream when she says “Boy, don’t nobody give a damn about you or your story. You got money, you get to be whatever you say you are. That’s the way it is.”
But D’Angelo can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t true.
It didn’t dawn on me that I was learning about social class through pop culture until I started watching “Mad Men.” In this series, the rags-to-riches protagonist Don Draper watched movies and television to help blend into the world of New York’s upper class. At one point, Peggy Olson, a lead character in the show, expresses surprise that Don had not seen a new advertisement: “But you see everything,” she observed. Now, I don’t see everything—there’s far more content today than there was in 1965—but I see a lot.
It was an accident that I even discovered “Mad Men.” The show was notorious for having a small viewership even as it garnered outsized attention and cultural cachet from critics. At its peak, “Mad Men” had slightly more than 3 million viewers.
I started watching because it came on right after an episode of “Breaking Bad” —a far more popular show, with a peak audience of over 10 million. Few of my friends in the military watched “Mad Men,” but many of them watched “Breaking Bad.” When the finale was scheduled to air in 2013, my military buddies and I would break into arguments about what would become of Walt and Jesse.
Early in the first season of “Breaking Bad,” Walter’s 2004 Pontiac Aztek is shown with a faded factory paint job and is missing the hubcap on the wheel on the driver’s rear corner. My military friend was with me when we saw Walter’s car on screen. He said, “Damn, this show is real.” He explained that oftentimes, supposedly “middle class” or “working class” people on TV are depicted as better off than their real-life counterparts. Roseanne Conner’s house is one example of this. I also noticed the fact that Roseanne and Dan were married and never divorced was a sharp contrast with the working class families I’d grown up around. Anyway, I’d watch “Breaking Bad” with my friends.
By contrast, I watched “Mad Men” mostly in solitude. The final season of the series aired in 2015. By then, I’d been accepted to Yale, and this was the summer right before my first semester. Ever since “The West Wing,” I’d started paying closer attention to the shows I watched, and suddenly social class cues were everywhere — especially in “Mad Men,” where part of the plot revolves around Don’s attempts to conceal his true origins. In one episode, Roger Sterling, Don’s boss, invites himself over to the Draper’s house for dinner. After a few drinks, Roger says to Don, “From the way you drop your G's every once in a while, I always thought you were raised on a farm.” Don, visibly uncomfortable, changes the subject. Then, in the final season, Don travels to Oklahoma. A young motel employee named Andy tries to figure out how Don got rich.
“You make commercials on TV?” Andy asks.
“Lots of them,” Don replies.
“So many you don’t have to work no more?”
“Anymore,” Don corrects him. (Don is saying he got rich through creating ads. Implicitly, though, Don is communicating that he got rich by changing the way he speaks.)
I remember pausing during an episode in the third season, when Don’s secrets are coming out, and he’s afraid of losing everything. “I know you were ashamed of being poor,” his wife, Betty. “I see how you are with money, I know you don't understand it.” This was mystifying. Don was the creative director of a top advertising agency and widely respected for his talent. He was rich. At another point in the series, Betty admonishes Don for giving a hotel bellhop too large a tip. "Two dollars?" She asks, “That’s what he makes in a week.”
Later, in season six, Don is pitching an ad for Hershey. The pitch is about how the chocolate wrapper “looked like what was inside.” The show uses this idea as a clever piece of symbolism. The Don people see on the outside is not who Don really is on the inside. During the pitch with the clients, Don break down and reveals his true impoverished origins.
By this point in my relationship with pop culture, I had unearthed a hitherto unknown media landscape centered on the interpretation of television. It was strange and fascinating to me that so much time was spent analyzing something I’d consumed so passively. As I clicked through various prestige media outlets I’d only recently learned about — The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair— I came upon “episode recaps” and “analyses.” I distinctly recall one person writing that Don misunderstands money because he believes it solves everything, and only someone who grew up without money would have this mindset. This is an error that one can’t unlearn simply through watching movies.
At first, I read critics to understand shows I was watching. Later, I read critics to get recommendations. I had questions about what members of the upper class watched, and why they watched it.
In 2014, I read a column in the The New Yorker in which Emily Nussbaum observed that the characters in the Showtime series “The Affair” are the kind of people who would watch “The Affair.” Upon reading this, I knew I had to watch.
The show was unlike anything I’d seen before. Other shows like “Fresh Prince,” “The O.C.,” and “Mad Men” provided viewers with audience surrogates who were strangers in a new elite world. Will Smith and Don Draper provided an outsider’s perspective for viewers. By contrast, none of the characters on “The Affair” provided the perspective of an outsider to an elite world. And similar to “Mad Men,” “The Affair” was beloved by critics. Also like “Mad Men,” it was first set on the East Coast, and later expanded to include Los Angeles in later seasons (“Curb Your Enthusiasm” is one of the rare shows that does the opposite — Larry moves from Los Angeles to the East Coast). But “The Affair” was even more niche—at its peak, the audience was just shy of a million viewers. Two of the main characters attended Williams College — a buried social signal: if this show had been intended for a mainstream audience, they would have been alumni of Princeton or Harvard.
That the show was meant for a niche viewership of people very different from me was what I found so appealing about “The Affair.” I wasn’t supposed to be watching it, but I was. I can’t say I liked the characters very much (though they are mostly redeemed in the final season); still, I was surprised to find myself sympathizing with characters who had every advantage, yet had tragic and recognizably human experiences and flaws. “The Affair” was the peak of my experience using television to learn about social class; it is also the most “elite” of all the television shows I watched. It did not have a rags-to-riches character with which an audience could identify. In other words, “The Affair” took for granted that its characters were well-off, and producers felt no need to help the audience understand this world because they assumed viewers were a part of it.
As my first day as a student at Yale approached, I figured that by now I had acclimated enough via television and other forms of media to where I wouldn’t stand out too much.
I gave myself away almost instantly. Though I didn’t speak in double-negatives or drop my G’s like Don Draper, I soon discovered how much I had to learn to fit in, despite all that elite television. People on campus were fluent in a language I still could not speak. I remember being bewildered the first time I heard another student describe a joke I’d made as “gendered,” for instance — I’d never heard that word before.
But going to Yale also meant I no longer needed television to learn how to fit in among elites — I was among them. I muddled through, learning their language and adopting some of their beliefs. My practice of using pop culture to learn about class receded, and I became less deliberate about what shows I watched. Today, I can speak a language today that would have been Greek to me seven years ago (though I still make errors).
I can’t help but pick up on social class cues on television now. I was recently re-watching “The Office” and realized that it is tailored for the middle class. The temp, Ryan Howard, is given special treatment by the boss, Michael Scott, because he is a college graduate and attended night classes for his MBA (Michael himself did not go to college). Later in the series, Ryan is promoted above Michael. When Ryan is interviewed by David Wallace for the position, Wallace says to him “It’ll be great to have another MBA around here.”
Throughout the show, there are episodes centered on money and education (Andy Bernard never forgets to mention what college he attended). But there is little attention paid to what Paul Fussell called the “indispensable criteria” of upper-class status—taste, habits, vocabulary.
Recently, I was at an academic program in Washington, D.C. There, for the first time in my life, a stranger mistook me for having come from a wealthy background. “I’m not rich,” I said. “I just watch a lot of TV.” I said it as a joke, but it wasn’t. My “binging to belong” approach wasn’t foolproof, but it helped. TV helped me to understand people who were worlds away from how I grew up. It gave me an understanding of the ingredients of social mobility. What I can’t quite disentangle is whether it taught me how to get what I had always wanted or taught me what to want.
You can read much more about social class, television shows, and the disorienting experiences of upward mobility in my forthcoming book. It’s out next week (Feb 20), but as an author, pre-orders can make or break a book. Preorders are how the booksellers, reviewers, and publishers judge interest in a title. If you’re sure you want to get it, please don’t wait! Thank you.
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
This post (a reader-favorite) was originally published in 2022.
I can completely relate to this. My family came to America from Soviet Kiev, when I was 10. I was a latch key kid, my father traveled as much as possible to get away from my mother; my mother resented me for tying her to a man. She also didn’t want to emigrate and saw the whole thing as my fault. Television was my way into America. It was a primer of both - how to be an American and what a family is supposed to be. I aped as much of what I saw, as I could. I understood very little, could relate to almost none of it - yet I intuitively knew, if there was a way out, it was through that screen.
Okay this article got me off the fence and I subscribed. I bought your book last night too.
We have remarkably similar upbringings. I also grew up poor, was part of a broken family, lived in rural America and ended up in Red Bluff High School, where I graduated. I lived in Proberta, a little wide spot in the road near highway 99.
I have a brother, a sister, six step-siblings, and a half brother and sister from my father's third marriage to a woman my age. He was middle aged at the time. There are many stories of addiction, abuse, mental illness and runs with the law in those stories.
Unlike you, I was a good student and was constantly reading science fiction instead of watching television. I am also a generation older than you, so TV wasn't as good. While my siblings were watching Brady Bunch, I was reading Asimov's Foundation Series.
In my graduating class in the early 80s, we had one person who got into Stanford, one to Berkeley, one to Caltech (me!), one to Occidental and one to USC. It's sad to see how far Red Bluff High has fallen. Our teachers did all say that our class was "weird" and by weird I think they meant that we had a clique where studying and being smart and playing D&D and doing theatre was considered a good thing. All my step-brothers smoked and chewed tobacco and hung out by the bleachers. None of them graduated high school and all are ex-cons now. All my sisters had kids by the time they were 21.
After failing out of Caltech - partially due to being in a totally different universe class wise - I ended up homeless and then in the military. In the military, I finally learned how to "act like a grown up" which is something my parents never taught me. Since I was one of few of my family of 10 to not get into any trouble with the law or at school, I basically got ignored by my parents. I would stay home from school about one day a week and my mom would write me a note. High school was too easy, so I always did my homework at the last minute. I always worked summers (unique amongst my siblings) but never saved money. My parents were from rural and poor backgrounds themselves. At least my mother encourage my reading.
In the military I had to learn how to shower, put on clean clothes, brush my teach, and get up and go to work every day. I had to learn how to save money and not borrow from payday lenders, not bounce checks, and put aside enough for my college fund (we did not have the GI Bill). I jumped up a social class from being dirt poor and acting it to being a responsible working class person in The Army. I wouldn't really say that the military was full of middle class kids, more working class, but perhaps that distinction doesn't really matter. It also might depend on which branch of service.
I always wanted to learn, that part wasn't hard. I was a good medic. I still kept reading sci-fi. I learned to care about sports, because I needed to have something to be able to talk to the troops about. They did not care about science or science fiction, but everyone cared about the pennant race. Part of being a good medic is bonding with your platoon. I had to ditch my androgynous mannerisms though I never really passed as straight very well.
When I left the military, my Caltech advisor said that I had gone in a boy and come out a man. This is true. I also went in poor and came out middle class.
After that I finished up my transfer credits at community college and finished up at Berkeley. I ended up in a career in tech where I made more money that I could have ever imagined growing up.
I still have some class anxiety, though unlike you, I don't hide it but wear my upbringing on my sleeve. I am also a leftist, which you are not. I hope my kids go to Berkeley as I and my wife did, and there is a good chance my oldest will, though I not-so-secretly hope that she goes to Vassar or Wellesley instead. What's the point of making all the money if you can't raise your children's social standing! They are already a mile apart from where I was when I was young though. Upper middle class in every way and with many of the luxury beliefs you talk about. They are in a performing arts program at a public school in San Francisco, so you can imagine.
At some point you should consider writing about trying to date as an upwardly mobile person. It's been an interesting experience for me.
Unfortunately, my story is so unique that this narrative doxxes me. If you read this and know who I am, please do not do so. I want to feel like I can say what I like on substack. Too many of my ideas might get me into trouble in my career other places in my life.