[cs137]

The good news is that some of this is publication bias, not a devolution of public mental health. Before about 1960, the lower classes had almost no chance of getting their words into the written record. Did 7th-century serfs see themselves as oppressed and miserable, or did they love their masters? We don't know; we have no record of what they actually thought.

Therefore, we aren't necessarily in uncharted territory when it comes to lousy public mental health; it's possible that we were worse off in the 1930s and '40s and wouldn't know it by the data, because the most put-upon and miserable people weren't writing at all.

This doesn't explain the uptick since 1980. Moreover, since then, publishing (at least, traditional publishing) has reversed the changes of the midcentury and returned to being elite and exclusionary (albeit, in a different way) and yet we haven't seen this sort of censorship effect (and, to be honest, I'm glad we haven't, simply because I'm no fan of censorship). This establishes with high confidence that public mental health has worsened at least in the past 40 years (which, let's be honest, we didn't need a study to prove) and that--perhaps unusually, by historical standards--the middle and upper-middle classes are as miserable as everyone else, a fact that to me makes a strong argument for the Marxist framework in which only two social classes--the owning bourgeoisie, and the working proletariat--actually matter (since Marx did not deny a middle class's existence; he merely chose not to focus on it, believing--correctly, present conditions suggest--it to be an innately unstable status).

Misery isn't new. Oppression isn't new. War and poverty certainly aren't new. What is happening on an unprecedented scale is the re-proletarianization of people (the West's former middle class, no longer needed in such number due to the end of the Cold War) who thought themselves to be part of the bourgeoisie--who believed their educational credentials and professional networks (paper armor, it turns out) were "as good as" actually having capital. Wrong, it turns out. Such people can be making $200k/year one day and forced to do Scrum the next; and we're all one medical emergency away from ruin. The collapse of a middle class isn't nearly as bad a calamity as what nature and history have thrown at the poor, but it is the kind of disaster one hears about.

[fallingknife]

In my experience no one is more miserable than the upper middle class. For some reason most aren't able to figure out they actually are rich.

[cs137]

Because they're not. One bad professional turn, health problem, or lawsuit and they are thrown out like garbage.

They're detested by both sides. The regular poor proletarians see them as kapos (and, quite often, it's the case) who have sold them down the river in order to get themselves temporarily pampered. The upper class, of course, has no respect for them. They've rejected their own tribe (the proletariat, the 99.9%) in the hopes of ascending into a new tribe that will almost certainly never actually accept them.