Sometime following the sugar crash of book publication in late June, I slammed into a wall of fatigue. One Sunday afternoon when I was trying (and failing) to write that week’s piece, my frustration spit me out onto the sidewalk surrounding my building, which I paced for the next hour, panicking about the many remaining green cells and few remaining ideas with which to fill them. Moments like those—when empty, slender rectangles glared blankly from the screen—tempted me to abandon my self-imposed publishing goals, always dangling some material regurgitation plan (and related justification) for coasting through the end of the year with less effort. 

The barrier to such an approach was that the idea of producing something just for the sake of producing it felt more unbearable than fatigue; worse than pointless. By the time I was crossing the threshold of my apartment again that Sunday night, I had decided that clumsily forging ahead was the only option that would allow me to write this end-of-year letter with a sense of accomplishment. Late into that evening, I wrote “That Funny Feeling.” 

I find myself wanting to thank you, like this is some sort of goodbye speech. Of course it isn’t; after I regain ownership of Money with Katie on January 1, you will continue to receive this newsletter as usual on the first Wednesday of 2026 (although it will no longer come from a Morning Brew email address, and will probably look a little different). Regardless, this remains, in so many ways, the end of an era that changed my life. 

Four Decembers ago—when I was approximately two years into self-publishing impassioned screeds about tax planning on my Squarespace website—I made a choice that felt both obvious and risky. Obvious, in that I knew selling my business to a successful media company for a guaranteed income and healthcare was the golden goose I should cage before it wised up and flew south for the winter, but risky in that it would be a dismissal of the altogether different career in UX writing I had just spent the last several years carefully stitching together. My reality at that moment was that there’d be no going back, and it was the sound of doors to other paths clicking shut around me that scored my quiet moments of doubt. (I was right about the “no going back” part, though not in the way I thought.) 

On some level, I always suspected building my home within someone else’s mansion was always going to be a long and critical—but ultimately temporary—development strategy. Working on Diabolical Lies (my other podcast, owned by Mouthy Media, which I cofounded in mid-2024) was an undeniable reminder of how addictive it is to build something from scratch with full autonomy. It’s the same compulsion that made the first 20 months of Money with Katie so all-consuming and romantic. This year I finally accepted that the border collie tail-chasing in my mind is a permanent resident, who, without anything to chew on, is liable to start gnawing the furniture. With the big change looming closer, I’ve had a hard time sleeping the last few weeks. 

Consciously, I feel hyperengaged and overprepared, like the first day of school is around the corner and mom already sprung for the jumbo pack of G-2 pens. Subconsciously, however, the photonegative of this thrill is deep uncertainty. My body began rebelling in weird ways this summer, shortly after that Sunday afternoon spent wearing the sidewalks thin. My digestive system forgot how to process food. A week-long migraine left me feeling so disoriented that I eventually shuttled myself to the emergency room, where I had a bad reaction to an antipsychotic drug that induced an agonizing restlessness and left me feeling trapped inside my body for hours. (Afterward, I learned this reaction is called akathisia, which can happen with dopamine blockers. My sister-in-law, an emergency room doctor, took one look at my discharge paperwork and said, “I always know when this is happening because the patient rips out their IVs and elopes from the ER.”) 

The experience introduced a fear of my own mind that emerged relentlessly over the following months. This past September, I remember sitting in a hotel room in New York City and staring out the window at the cramped skyscrapers across the street as an invisible tsunami of panic began descending. Outwardly, I researched hormonal shifts and began getting acupuncture. Privately, I started to wonder if the last five years were catching up with me, like I had mortgaged my ability and my body was finally calling in the loan.

The decision to stop producing The Money with Katie Show was, in that respect, an obvious one, which announced itself peacefully one afternoon while I did research for an interview. (I don’t remember the topic.) After four years and hundreds of episodes, I think most people would reach a point where they feel they’ve said what they wanted to say; asked the questions worth asking. The show’s numbers have never been better, and it feels gratifying to choose to leave a party while it’s still raging.

At some point around Thanksgiving when I took off three continuous days for the first time since March, the resultant empty cells of my schedule allowed me to notice a pattern in the way I was thinking about and discussing The Future. The Future was a galaxy far, far away where I would commence living my Real Life, while this—this life right now—was like an infinite night before vacation, full of anticipation and projection. It was easy to postpone big decisions, because those were the sort of thing you did in that special occasion of The Future, not in the liminal space of the now. Mostly, I wanted to avoid committing to anything that couldn’t be easily reversed, to prevent any doors from clicking shut. But for what occasion was I waiting? Once I noticed this was how I had been unconsciously orienting, I was horrified. When would this so-called Real Life begin? What if this destination, The Future, did not exist, and instead I was landlocked inside the only life in the solar system, the one I was already living? What then?

This way of relating to reality is not altogether different from the methodology and logic of financial independence (or, if you prefer, boilerplate retirement planning). Your working life is just the diligent dress rehearsal, week after week spent with that favored, amnesiac refrain of adulthood: “After this week, things will calm down.” I will enjoy my life later. I will live how I want to then. For all of 2025, I said, “After this year, things will calm down.” This is another way of saying, Later, when my real life begins, things will feel good.

The prospect of having a more open schedule promises both relief and unease. Relief because I really do want things to calm down; unease because what if, after they do, things do not “feel good?” For me, this is less about feeling good and more about craft. All along, my thesis has been this: With more time, the caliber of my work will improve. It will be better. I will be better. The fear, then, is downstream of finally confronting the outcome of that closely held hypothesis. In some ways, it’s easier not to run the experiment at all: to keep the mastery or contentment or fulfillment preserved in the amber of “someday” means never needing to find out if your theory is nothing more than a comforting mirage. The unrealized promise held at arm’s length is Schrödinger’s life change, representing another lever you could pull, a ready-made explanation for why you are not yet the person you hoped to be. The potential of an untested hypothesis is preferable by far to a negative result.

I can recall only one other time when I felt this same apprehension: four Decembers ago, when my previously cherished hypothesis—if I were doing this full-time and not as a side hustle, it would work—was about to be put to the test. If it failed, I’d be something worse than a failure: a fool in search of a new theory. But because of you, dedicated readers who lend me your attention week after week, gratitude is in order. Your generosity is the reason why I’ve become courageous enough to run the experiment anew. Thank you.

The post End-of-Year Letter from Katie appeared first on Money with Katie.

My excitement surprised me. Six months earlier, I had resigned myself to the idea that a smaller space meant cleaning professionals were no longer necessary (yet another cost-efficient benefit of downsizing), the way you might resign yourself to getting up early for the gym or eating leftovers. But lately, slowly and methodically cleaning the apartment has become something of a weekend ritual; a dedicated morning hour for gliding from one physical task to the next, each producing its own satisfying, visible progress in the form of unrumpled clean sheets or a sink free of dried toothpaste.

In most other areas of my life, my effort and conscious attention exist in abstract spaces no more real than the Town Center of Club Penguin—the cells of a spreadsheet where my resources are carefully transcribed and monitored, the orchestra of 0s and 1s inside my phone composing a song for my engagement patterns, the cacophony between my ears that I translate into colorful blocks like hard candies in a Google Calendar. The truer this becomes, the more I gravitate to the fleshly thrill of tasks that generate immediate tangible evidence of their completion. 

Just another day in the office.

Sometimes when the idea of cleaning presents itself as an unlikely respite, I think about something I learned a few years ago about the fundamental human desire to “act upon the world.” This begins in infancy, when the new human learns that their actions create physical feedback: When I kick my foot, this toy moves, or, When I cry, my caregiver reacts to me. In that respect, our sense of agency is learned and sustained through our bodies, not abstract reasoning. And bodies, as most of us have learned the hard way, have a way of not just experiencing physical reality, but enforcing it. 

Spending too much time in the ether of the abstract sometimes has the unintended effect of fooling the agent into believing that the physical is as easily controllable as the digital. It’s interesting to observe the mind try to bridge this gap. Late last week, my mom told me that my 95-year-old great uncle had been struggling with some strange symptoms and, within a matter of days, had been moved into hospice. When the health of someone in their nineties begins failing, it feels wrong to describe this deterioration as “sudden,” as failing is what all bodies do eventually, particularly those fortunate enough to approach their centennial. Still, when I finally saw the text preview appear in my messages that he had passed away, I left the text unread for hours, the information theoretically suspended beside a bright blue dot. Maybe if I didn’t open this message, the reasoning went, I could delay the physical reality of its contents, holding it instead in this liminal space where data, unlike bodies, can live forever. 

Another example: Scrolling Instagram the other day, I caught a Story update from a woman who was a close friend in college. We sported nearly the same name—Katie G.—and our relationship was the site for some of my more responsible choices, like drinking enough water and exercising every morning. Where my other friends applied the storied “work hard, play hard” mentality (the former to their medical or law school applications, the latter to their alcohol consumption), Other Katie G. clocked a 10 PM bedtime on Friday nights and spoke often about her desire to have a family of her own. 

The update was that she was beginning the first of 12 rounds of chemotherapy on her daughter’s first birthday. I stared at the word “chemo,” finding it totally illegible next to the news of her child turning one, a glitch. How, I wondered, could Other Katie G. have cancer? Her profile offered no other evidence of her diagnosis—which, bizarrely, comforted me, as if this made it less real—just pictures of the doughy biscuit of a baby she wanted so badly.

It was Other Katie G. I thought about when I read this weekend’s viral New Yorker essay written by Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s daughter and JFK’s granddaughter, about being diagnosed with terminal leukemia at 34 in the days following the birth of her second child. Much like I just did with emphasizing Other Katie’s healthy choices—as if to say, This is all some horrible mistake; she completed all her to-do lists and responded to all her emails; you don’t understand, she woke up early on weekends and cleaned her apartment—Schlossberg likewise emphasizes her apparent health in the months leading up to her diagnosis, how she could run and swim and ski for miles. The article gave me the intense desire to close the tab, to remove this possibility from my own body by way of removing it from my screen, to not allow myself to imagine even for a moment how such a revelation would, instantly, transform my priorities and stressors to dust, and what that might say about my priorities and stressors. 

As someone on the Millennial–Gen Z cusp, I read a lot about my cohort in the news—that we, in a break from thousands of generations that preceded us, want special and unique things like flexible work and houses and socialism and—who can forget this one—“experiences.” But the millennials I read about online bear very little resemblance to the young people I meet in the physical realm, who all seem to want more or less the same thing: to act upon the world, and preferably in a way that matters. Recently, Gen Z economics wunderkind Kyla Scanlon visited nine cities as part of an In This Economy? road show and pointed out in her post-game analysis that a surprising number of AI-related conversations with experts revolved less around reskilling or upskilling than purpose and meaning and, I assume, how to find those things in a world with—hypothetically, eventually, theoretically—very little abstract knowledge work. “The students were amazing,” Scanlon writes of her visit to a Florida college. “Their questions were practical: How do we afford housing? How do we navigate AI? How do we find meaning in work that might not exist in 10 years?”

My generation is particularly susceptible to the siren song of “affordability politics,” this news coverage notes, because they feel they cannot afford the lives they imagined for themselves, which is another way of saying they cannot access the things they need to act on the world in the ways they want to. The Wall Street Journal, for example, published a piece about Trump and Mamdani’s unexpectedly warm Oval Office meeting, pointing out the obvious: Both of these very different, very popular politicians campaigned on the cost of living, this thing that the proles won’t stop whining about. The article declares that the so-called affordability crisis is, among other things, not real, and even if it were real, it would not be a problem that’s solvable. (Beside the story, another piece asked a question which was, evidently, deemed solvable: “Is $200 Million the New $100 Million in Luxury Real Estate?”)

This is why you don’t let billionaires run media companies. 

Young people, like all people, seek meaning in different ways (starting or not starting a family, pursuing one career or vocation over another, developing an arsenal of hobbies) and many even seem to face similar challenges (an absence of time that someone else has not already bought and paid for, resource scarcity, self-esteem battered by the beauty or masculinity industrial complexes), but I am always struck by the uniformity in the texture of their desires. An “affordability crisis” is merely the name we’ve given to the phenomenon where people feel blocked, through some economic force real or perceived, from pursuing that which gives their lives meaning. (The opposite phenomenon, an extreme nihilism that’s certain everything is meaningless and looks to violently enforce that view on others, received a lot of attention earlier this fall when “groypers” were caught in the discourse’s high beams, squinting and unprepared.) 

The sensory experience of the affordability crisis is the frustration of action stifled before it has a chance to produce its desired consequence—when studying and graduating means loans but no disposable income, when a job means a paycheck but no career advancement, when saving means sacrifice but no promise of reward, when the decision to grow a family means not just profound responsibility but unrelenting financial pressure. An economy where you kick your leg but the toy does not move or you cry and the caregiver does not react. The affordability crisis is better understood as an agency crisis, and that’s as real as you or me. The moments, then, when something responds (the sink shines, the baby cries for the first time, the job offer comes through, the body heals) can feel like life itself is answering back—however briefly—that yes, you’re still here.

The post Proof of Work appeared first on Money with Katie.

In her own words: “I’ve done very well for myself professionally. I think it takes a very confident and secure man to be with a woman like me. It’s going to be interesting to navigate, are they just after me for money or is it me for who I am?” As Gwen Stefani’s “Rich Girl” plays in the background, Megan confides in her first confessional that she’s still single because some men are put off by “how I live, my level of success, the car I drive, the house I live in.” The camera leers at her various accessories in heavy-handed tight shots on her sparkly shoes, a thin diamond bracelet on one wrist, and a stack of gold jewelry on the other, each punctuated by a “cha-ching” sound. We are a mere 16 minutes and 47 seconds into episode one, and the editing has already illustrated Megan with all the nuance of a bedazzled LinkedIn manifesto.

This sets up the viewer for contradiction-induced vertigo when, moments later during one of her first dates, a real estate investor named Mike asks if his leaving a bunch of dirty dishes on the counter would make her mad. (Has this man never had roommates?) She hesitates. After eking out a high-pitched ummmmm, she sidesteps this trapdoor by widening her scope to abstraction. “It would annoy me, for sure, but I’m also…I kind of believe in more traditional gender roles.” His barely concealed excitement at this disclosure, accompanied by eyebrows raised in pleasant surprise and a jaunty hand-on-hip, is the okayyyy! heard ‘round the pods. 

“That’s why I’m kind of an anomaly,” she hurriedly explains, “because, yes, I’ve had an amazing career, but I also value, you know, the woman being that nurturer, and I definitely want my man to be kind of ‘the provider’…like, the security and the safety. I think there’s something to be said about a man who’s like, ‘Yeah, I want to take care of my woman.’” 

Mike, who moves like a man always on the precipice of soft-pitching a startup, would appear at first blush to fit this bill (but at what cost?). In a later date, he careens through an explanation of his own financial position in “this larger…we call it a tribe, but it’s a national thing. A bunch of guys that are wealthy are a part of it.” (In real bullet-dodging fashion, Megan ends up choosing a guy named Jordan, who lists the reasons he likes her in his own confessional—“confident,” “independent,” “strong”—though she registers early concerns about their “lifestyles meshing,” presumably referencing her success relative to his.)

Money has always been a phantom contestant on Love Is Blind, a series that debuted a genuinely novel dating show premise in 2020. Still, season nine seemed to be making a point. Having barely just recovered from Megan and Mike’s asset management summit date, we are confronted again by its presence minutes later when another contestant named Anton plucks a similar chord in one of his first dates with a healthcare professional named Ali. “I’ve built my business. I’ve bought my first house when I was really young. I’ve done well for myself, and I’m the provider. I’m very, like, old-school, traditional, in terms of how I treat women.” There are those words again: provider; traditional. (In a later episode, Ali and Anton—having chosen to get engaged—playfully debate how much he should’ve spent on her ring. He says $5,000, she doubles his money and goes for $10,000. The gag is that production buys the rings; the contestants pay nothing.)

These interactions present a real hammer–nail conundrum for a viewer in my line of work, which requires being painfully aware of the gendered labor statistics economists have been firing off for the last two decades like unheeded distress flares, a sad fireworks display of futile awareness. Heterosexual couples in which the woman is the primary earner are the only “type” in time-use research where the primary earner also spends more time on “home production” tasks. A 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found that “[i]n every other couple type—heterosexual couples with male breadwinners, lesbian couples, and gay couples—the breadwinner spends less time on home production than the non-breadwinner,” taking care to point out that “this is driven not by childcare” (which could ostensibly carry some genuine biological limitations early on) but rather “chores like food preparation and cleaning.” 

By the time Kalybriah asks Edmond if he’s looking for a “traditional or non-traditional marriage,” I braced for impact—all but certain this was an intentional theme of the episode—but Edmond’s answer (“definitely non-traditional”) takes the conversation to new and welcome territory. Kalybriah agrees. “I’m okay if I’m the breadwinner; I’m okay if my husband’s the breadwinner. I’m okay if I cook; I’m okay if my husband cooks.” At this, Edmond and I both engaged in private celebration. 

One fair read of all this posturing is that when educated, high-income women say “provider,” what they really mean is contributor—someone who isn’t a net-drag on their resources. Another is that it’s serving a different purpose altogether: subtly setting expectations about physical appearance.

Allow me to explain: The meet-your-soulmate-through-a-wall format has given way to a few predictable tropes. One of my favorite reviews of the show named the bombastic flirting style—“Hot Person vibes”—of the contestants who “spend lots of money (on clothes, on cosmetic procedures) and time (at the gym, at the club) with the express goal of being seen,” which is often subconsciously perceptible to the person on the other side of the wall. “A Hot Person doesn’t have to sell themself; they’re operating under an assumption that they are desired,” Emily Palmer Heller writes, even when they cannot be seen. This observation, I thought, was brilliant. The paths of inquiry this reality has given us—like all the creative ways the men try to assess whether a woman is thin (“Could I put you on my shoulders at a concert?”)—reveal many techniques for deducing whether someone is your “type” that don’t immediately scan as overtly about looks.

But it was only in watching season nine, episode one, that I finally recognized a new line of questioning (and calculated self-revelation) that seemed to hint at the same: asserting an approval of so-called “traditional” gender dynamics, a choreography so committed to our cultural muscle memory that it’s easy to forget it’s less about dollars than desirability. Broadcasting your embrace of this arrangement is really about signaling femininity—and femininity, to bastardize the Miranda July line, is really just beauty. 

Since the beginning of the women’s rights movement, the political avatar for a woman who challenges gender roles has been The Feminist, or a person who believes in—and I suppose this is my working definition—liberation from a biological narrowing of your humanity. Since the 19th century, feminists have been portrayed as unattractive, masculine “hags,” fighting for something “unnatural” (equal rights under the law). 

The right to vote, pay equity, and egalitarian partnerships are things that hot chicks don’t want, you see, because their beauty allows them to access something far superior to all that noise: a doting husband with money. This is the implicit trade. The savvy leaders of the suffrage movement knew this, and as such, embraced “feminine” presentation in public and in propaganda to defuse the politically noxious bomb that women who wanted equality were, either as a result or inciting factor, ugly—the worst thing a woman can be. 

In a recent episode of Diabolical Lies that analyzed how modern misunderstandings of “tradition” inform reactionary beliefs about gender, I played a six-month-old clip for my cohost in which the late Charlie Kirk and his wife Erika discuss the proper roles for men and women in marriage. “How much did you guys discuss religion, finances, politics, how to raise children, before getting engaged?” a listener asked. Charlie zeroes in on finances, then addresses his male listeners directly: “Men, you should be completely in charge of finances.” Somewhat bewilderingly given her role as the founder and ostensible owner of two companies, Erika emphatically agrees. Charlie continues: “Your wife should have nothing to do with it. I mean, they can have input, but you should release that burden from your wife and just take care of all the money.” 

A couple of minutes later, buoyed by her support, Charlie doubles down, this time addressing his female listeners: “If you are marrying a man that is not capable of completely and totally handing the finances, then you should not marry that man.” At this, she lightly pushes back, but he insists that a marriage in which women financially participate by earning or managing money is unnatural; a fiscal manifestation of “confused gender roles” which spells disaster for the fragile arrangement of heterosexual monogamy, its stability forever hanging in the balance of invisible, highly specific rules about whether it’s gay to do your own laundry. The woman’s proper role in all of this, they agree, is what they call (but, it’s worth noting, struggle to coherently define) “submission.” Tellingly, part of what submission entails, Erika explains, is “…you need to take care of yourself in order to…you can’t be looking like Adam Sandler and expect that you’re going to…” We never find out what we shouldn’t expect if we indulge the slapstick aesthetic of basketball shorts and Hawaiian shirts, because here, Charlie interrupts to tell the men that, for them, success in love comes down to “just figur[ing] out ways to make more money.” 

After reviewing a few more examples from similar programming, my cohost, novelist Caro Claire Burke, clocked the bottom line of this rhetorical maneuvering. “They use terms like soft and feminine and submissive,” antonyms for the masculine, traditional provider archetype, “but what they’re really talking about is pretty. You have to be pretty.” In that sense, a female Love Is Blind candidate who’s comfortable demanding that her partner offer masculine power and provision is, in a roundabout way, hinting at her own adherence to a woman’s role in this quid pro quo: beauty. 

To be sure, I don’t believe these contestants are doing this purposely or deceptively—on the contrary, we’re all so fluent in this cultural script (feminists ugly, submissive young brides pretty) that it usually evades conscious recognition altogether. When Anton says he believes a man should be a provider and casts himself as such, he is not just stating a preference for how household finances are handled (though he will later express hesitation about Ali having her own bank account)—he is issuing a tacit expectation that he is met in this transaction by a woman who understands her role to “not look like Adam Sandler,” as Erika put it. Fortunately for him, Ali is a smokeshow with a job; it remains to be seen whether Anton makes a commensurate amount of money.

More instructively, this interpretation translates Megan’s seemingly incongruous statements about her lifestyle and belief system into something more legible. She does not actually wish to become a stay-at-home wife with an allowance. She just wants Mike to know she’s hot. (“I’m just very drawn to Mike,” she says privately, stating the obvious. “I want to build an empire with someone, and I think he would be a great person to do it with”—not exactly the language of a gal hoping to hang up the old Slack account.) In a dating environment where the power of one’s looks are totally neutralized, it’s no wonder this sort of antiquated shorthand becomes a crutch for communicating something as clumsy as desire. 

These desires are, of course, shaped by what’s happening outside the pods. This includes the broader economic reality of the 2020s, which might clarify the urgency of the contestants’ task to get married to someone they met a month ago. In her 2006 essay “American Nightmare,” political theorist Wendy Brown sketches the relationship between neoliberal economic principles (read: what the kids call “late-stage capitalism”) and social conservatism (read: Charlie Kirk telling young men not to get married unless they earn enough money to support a family). In modern life, the mythic “male provider–female nurturer” dynamic is positioned like a comforting antidote to the very real challenges of an unforgiving society that constructs “governance according to market criteria.” The genius of Brown’s essay and the book it later appeared to inspire, Melinda Cooper’s 2017 Family Values, is that they expose how these two powerful forces are not countervailing, but conspiring. 

In other words, it’s difficult to discern where a romantic imperative blurs into an economic one: A 2023 paper from the Federal Reserve of Dallas found that a version of the US where marriage did not exist would see prime-age male work hours decline by 7%. Is this because, without the prospect of marriage (“just figuring out ways to make more money” to get a girlfriend), men wouldn’t work as much? Or because once they’re married (per the time-use data), they have more time or incentive for work? The direction of the correlation is not conclusive, but the data suggests the economic powers that be would have a reasonable vested interest in Anton saying “yes” at the altar. 

In episode eight, after touring a $2 million home with his new fiancée Sparkle Megan, a visibly uncomfortable Jordan equivocates: “I don’t think she’ll ever feel like I’m mooching,” he explains, “but I feel like a mooch, you know? The fact that she’s just talking about buying a house for us, and she’s like, ‘I’ll take care of it, don’t worry about it.’ I think that’d be hard for any blue-collar guy to absorb, because I’ve always been the provider, and now someone’s stepping in.” It’s satisfying to watch these two people process the friction of transgressing their “roles” in real time, particularly because we know if the situation were reversed, asymmetric financial success would be nothing more than a happy ending. “But I don’t want her to be stepping down, and like, maybe not living the life she wants as a compromise to be with me,” he continues, before appearing to reclaim the word that’s been so freighted up until that point: “So I want to make her feel at home, and be a provider for her, too.”

The post The Provider Aesthetic of Love Is Blind appeared first on Money with Katie.

This quieting effect was its main appeal: the stripping away of street noise and the electromagnetic hum of a home office and all the neuroses that I’ve developed and stowed in my 1,200 square feet of Denver, where I have felt more than ever this year like I’m looping the same day, week, month, over and over again, each revolution faster than the last. I hoped this getaway would stop the spinning, like ejecting a hand from bed after one too many drinks to grope around for the ground and steady yourself. In this case, the hand was the whole self. When the usual suspects (sleep, walks, baths) stopped having the desired effect on my mood for longer than a couple of hours, two days off the grid was the hard reset that felt up to the task of restoring me for the final work sprint of the year. (This was before I realized that sleeping at an elevation of 11,000 feet implied mild hypoxia for the duration of our stay, but that’s showbiz, baby.)

Nobody enjoyed this more than Sam Cat.

That the Wi-Fi stopped working the first night felt like a cosmic joke. You said you wanted to disconnect, I chided myself, panic rising in my throat as I uselessly refreshed a Chrome tab that stubbornly bore the same “No internet” message below a pixelated dinosaur. But wasn’t that the entire point? To avoid, as Jia Tolentino characterized it earlier this year, the “device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now?”

Burnout’s spin cycle in an age when one could theoretically be sustained by a nonstop parade of front-door deliveries of (truly) any conceivable desire is—how do I put this?—humiliating. I imagine some ancestor freshly arrived at Ellis Island, knee-deep in a slurry of animal remains inside a rancid meatpacking plant for 18 hours each day, being confronted with a discomfiting vision: It’s their distant progeny (me!) pacing around a climate-controlled apartment in sweatpants, mumbling about something called a podcast and bemoaning an endless barrage of electronic mail and voter registration and parking tickets and doctors who don’t know why you sporadically wake in the middle of the night to vomit, but it sounds like chronic stress. Would they get back on the boat, assessing that it wasn’t worth it after all to guarantee the future of such a weak-willed dilettante? 

Regardless of the cause, becoming a little unmoored has by now taken a recognizable shape. I become hyperfixated on some virtually useless commodity that symbolizes The Treat That Will Change Everything. Last week, an ASMR YouTube video was recommended to me which pledged 1 hour and 15 minutes of “Cozy Fall Pampering” with Trader Joe’s pumpkin-scented ephemera. I immediately began rationalizing why autumnal-themed foodstuffs were—obviously—my mental health’s missing link. How had I not seen it sooner? The answer was right in front of me! (Or, more accurately, across town at Trader Joe’s.) Eventually, I settled on a Thoreauvian compromise: the cabin. 

On the second night (after the internet was restored), we watched the 2024 erotic thriller Babygirl, a genre of film I generally refer to as a “sick f***” movie. (Used in a sentence: “That’s a movie for sick f***s!”) As far as kink plots go, it was actually fairly vanilla—an exploration of the popular fantasy that powerful, rich women secretly wish to be powerless and subjugated. The movie was ostensibly about consent, desire, and shame, but all I could focus on was what Nicole Kidman’s character, CEO Romy Mathis, was wearing. (Sexist!) For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reluctantly drawn to characters like hers, mistaking cautionary tales about caricatured strivers (and their color-coordinated schedules) for tutorials. You can put a woman in the woods, but you can’t make her stop fetishizing business formalwear.

The proto-Boss Babe, Ashley Olsen’s Jane Ryan. The moment she pulled back the double doors to reveal her closet in New York Minute (2004) was one of many Olsen-twin-facilitated formative memories. That daybook? Her note cards? Transcendent. 

Pinning hopes for success on hypercompetent navigation of a modern economy is typical of the so-called professional-managerial class, a term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 (or, in political theory, the “petite bourgeoisie,” a phrase which for some reason always makes me think of dainty finger sandwiches). It’s “the fantasy that financial anxiety and stress are temporary states of being that can be overcome through hard work, competition and education,” as Catherine Liu writes. 

If Barbara were still alive, she might observe that the economic extremes plaguing the 2020s are merely the continuation of a process that began many years ago, when deindustrialization broadsided America’s working class. The rising sea levels of neoliberal policymaking have finally begun to meaningfully dampen the prospects of the professional-managerial class, who (maybe subconsciously) believed themselves to be more or less exempted from its worst offenses. Of course, she would probably tell us, that was never true. Because they, too, had to sell their labor, they were always “subject to the same pressures as other workers: deskilling, the weakening of their collective economic power, the degradation of the meaning of their work.” There is an implied lesson in this analysis that would suggest a change of course: The respites of self-help, hustle, and merit once assumed to reliably produce autonomy and fulfillment were a sleight of hand all along, which served only to “reproduc[e]… capitalist culture and class relations” and undermine any real chance at transformative solidarity. 

Naturally, most financial media prefers to avoid class analysis, instead framing this ennui in terms of generation or gender. This provides narrative cover for dismissing structural strain by assigning it to the unique psychology of young people (or men, or women), rather than a legitimate force that exists outside TikTok. 

Gen Z is, allegedly, rife with “financial nihilism” about the future. “Zoomers grew up with smartphones, the internet, and social media during difficult times like the 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession, and the subsequent Occupy Wall Street protest movement,” Fast Company offered last week in one unconvincing explanation. In this telling, it was not these crises themselves, but the crust of digital connectivity specific to Gen Z that shaped their preferences and disenchantments. “They’re disillusioned with traditional ways of doing things, which extends to how they invest and conduct their own finances,” the article explained. Back in January, Bloomberg warned that a “feminine” form of financial nihilism (read: find rich man) was ascendant. Over the summer, CNBC sympathized with “young speculators” so eager to “break out of the American caste system” that they had “embraced financial nihilism.”

The story has been exercised to the point of exhaustion by now. When there’s little hope that the traditional path will pan out as promised (student loans, unaffordable homes, wage stagnation, etc.), the metaphoric lottery ticket looks like a reasonable alternative. The scant proof of said nihilism is a stated interest in riskier investment behavior, like options trading or cryptocurrency or sports betting. (All products, it should be noted, with multibillion-dollar markets and marketing behind them.) Young women have given up on money and careers of their own in favor of mating up, the story goes; young men have given up altogether and turned to the slot machines of memecoins and DraftKings. The resultant impression is one of generational hopelessness and fatalism, a group so up to their eyeballs in trauma and trigger warnings that they’ve stopped trying en masse. But is it true?

An NBC poll conducted in August with Americans aged 18–29 found that young women and men had identical “top three” priorities in response to a question about personal definitions of success: Number one for both was “having a job or career you find fulfilling,” number two was “having enough money to do the things you want to do,” and in third place, “achieving financial independence,” ranking all three above things like spiritual fulfillment, community involvement, and family formation. Tellingly, this trend held true for presumably conservative young women, those who voted for Trump. These are not the priorities of people who have given up on their hopes of upward mobility, but those who are instead singularly focused on it.

Once back in Denver and on the hunt for something I couldn’t buy in the woods (overpriced caffeine), I walked past a pilates studio with a sandwich board propped up at its entrance that commanded passersby to GET OBSESSED. The ad featured a striking woman (SNL’s Ego Nwodim, it turns out), all glowy sinew and smolder, perched cherry-like atop a pilates reformer. Implausibly, she was wearing a sleek white blazer and matching stilettos. I paused in front of the sign, sustaining eye contact, waiting to feel something like cynicism or annoyance with the dated Sexy Corporate Empowerment trope. It felt like a relic of (pre-election) 2016, when peak modern womanhood was mostly tantamount to group exercise and Revolve suits.

Shipwrecked on the sidewalk, it was not cynicism I felt, but a confusing, wistful longing. It wasn’t that I missed the pre-pandemic years, per se—when I would take an hour-long fitness class at six in the morning, five days a week, before spending 10 hours in heels and hard pants—so much as I missed when such things sounded not only like reasonable ways to spend one’s time, but fun. Back then, ambition still felt clean and moral; its challenges seemed to be accruing to something meaningful.

My mind immediately flashed again to Kidman’s character in Babygirl, all low chignons and high-neck blouses (“Another serve,” my husband joked approvingly when she appeared on screen in ‘fit after impeccable ‘fit), and how competent and controlled she seemed before her proclivities—and all that lactose—derailed her to the point of taking tousled weekday couch naps next to open jars of peanut butter on the floor, the universal distress signal for Not Thriving. (When she appeared again behind her desk at the end of the film reassembled in dignified workwear, I was embarrassed to feel palpable relief.)

The presence of these women in my weekend—the fictional Romy Mathis, the real Ego Nwodin—seemed significant, somehow, like an inadvertent girlboss revivalism. They appeared to inhabit a different world entirely, one in which constant self-discipline and hypercompetence was not only still possible, but glamorous and effective. 

Such aspirational displays must be understood not as drivers of a culture that’s been subsumed and defined by its economic system, but as responses to it. Nostalgia is a potent force both individually and nationally; some imagined, simpler past with cheaper homes and Chainsmokers songs and fewer breaking news push notifications. Normally, the era most effectively wielded in American politics to prescribe cultural shifts is the 1950s. But what does it mean to privately indulge in nostalgia for the 2010s, a time that felt comparatively hopeful? What to make of the fact that, regardless of the lofty class analysis, I still feel better when I’m trying? 

For the professional-managerial aspirants, the 2010s were all about startups, self-help, and striving—a path that, by the following decade, was widely understood and mocked as an individualist dead end; the Ehrenreichs’ 1977 prediction seemingly coming true. But for all the talk of nihilism and hopelessness, the pilates class I could see through the windows was full.

The post Babygirl, Girlbosses, and Economic Nostalgia appeared first on Money with Katie.

“You know how people who come into money suddenly look better?” I texted my friend the other day as I breached the threshold of the grocery store’s automatic doors. “How does that happen? How do I hire someone to give me a glow-up?” The question had occurred to me on the silent car ride to the store after I caught an unflattering glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. I considered it further as I plucked a bunch of green onions from a wall of vegetables and plunged a damp handful into a produce bag. Her response blooped into our open chat, face up in the cart, almost immediately. “What do you mean?” Then another: “Do you have a certain celebrity in mind?”

I scanned my mental Rolodex for an emblematic case study as I pushed my way down the cereal aisle, then pulled over next to the granola. “I guess Taylor Frankie Paul?” I responded. The triple name in question, a troll-y momfluencer who became popular on TikTok for the sort of provocative yet vanilla dance videos that launched the entertainment careers of many a white woman since 2020, perfectly embodied the subtle metamorphosis in question. 

Paul was swept into mainstream fame last year thanks to the bewildering popularity of the Hulu reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. (I have, of course, seen every episode.) Her physical transformation since then has not been dramatic—to be a TikTok It Girl, your starting point must be conventionally attractive—but it is noticeable, especially if you’re attuned to the way wealth slowly, visibly announces itself. Paul is a fan-favorite “character” in the Mormon Wives universe because she’s the only cast member whose personality doesn’t seem buried beneath layers of posturing and self-conscious image curation. (The series opens with police body-cam footage of an intoxicated Paul being arrested for fighting with her boyfriend.) She’s a flawed person, and she knows it, which makes for excellent television. It was just announced that she’ll be ABC’s next Bachelorette, the first time the leading lady has been sourced from outside the franchise.

The glow-up pattern typically goes something like this: Normal traits like dull skin, a bad fake tan, blocky eyebrows, and often long, harshly highlighted hair—what I can only describe as the suburban mall aesthetic of my adolescence, like Victoria’s Secret PINK sweatpants tucked into worn, chocolate brown Uggs—are refined into a glossy, glowy, and windswept look that telegraphs access to a vast and accommodating glam squad. Paul appeared earlier this week on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy to discuss her casting as the Bachelorette; Cooper herself might be an even more illustrative case of “Regular Midwest Suburban Hot Turned Upper-Class Hot” after she clinched a multiyear, $60 million podcasting deal with Spotify in 2021. 

Most rich women in the public eye tend to adhere to this visual code: luscious, tastefully colored hair; a frozen forehead; eyes that, through cosmetic intervention or actual rest, always appear as though they’ve freshly awoken from a nap in a cryo chamber. (In last week’s newsletter, I included a subway ad for the editing app Facetune that instructed, menacingly, “Look like you had 8 hours of sleep.”) When taken to extremes, the look in question can appear surrealist—embalmed, even—but there’s a sweet spot before the fillers start to migrate that suggests life is as frictionless as one’s glassy skin. Despite my commitment to proselytizing the Gospel of the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel (that beauty labor is not only time- and money-intensive, but also a waste of both for most normal people), it was notable when these two women, almost exactly my age, gradually Animorphed on my screen as they became wealthier.

The Kardashians are towering totems on Glow-Up Easter Island, from which the “You’re not ugly, you’re just poor” meme originated. Even rich men reliably undergo a similar physical transformation, as many have noted about Jeff Bezos (Mr. Clean cosplay), Mark Zuckerberg (“hit with the Dominican ray”), and Elon Musk (hair plugs). 

By the time I found myself wheeling down the dairy aisle, I was pretty sure there was an underground, invitation-only industry of LooksMaxxing professionals activated via Bat-Signal once one accumulates enough money and prominence to score their recognition. My friend had a different theory. “I think these people slowly accumulate teams,” she hypothesized, “but it probably starts with a stylist, who then recommends a colorist, who might offer an aesthetician referral, and so on.” This sounded more complicated and slipshod than my Centralized Cabal theory, but the slow burn is probably more realistic. 

Still, the mechanics of this now-predictable transformation continue to interest me: How does this begin, technically speaking? Is the newly flush-with-cash person assigned a Glow-Up Director by the Deep State to execute tactics from a fine-tuned, well-coiffed playbook? Are they consciously seeking out this particular aesthetic, or is the process less intentional? Could you walk into a salon in West Hollywood and ask for the Recently Viral Special? And maybe most importantly, what does it mean that wealth tends to physically manifest in such a uniform way; that “1%” is a distinct and differentiating aesthetic category as much as it is an income bracket?

That rich people look different than the rest of us is mostly accepted wisdom at this point. (One Reddit thread I found theorized the simple fact of never worrying about rent would make somebody look less haggard.) Even those who are wealthy outside the public eye tend to dress and carry themselves differently, a fascination inflamed by HBO’s Succession, which created a cottage industry of fashion freelancers producing an endless barrage of “old” vs. “new” money style write-ups in 2023. The popularity of brands like Loro Piana and The Row, synonymous with an understated expression of asset accumulation, crescendoed. 

As I shopped for the rest of my dinner, I continued to meditate on the shiny hair and glowing skin that wealth has unlocked for my contemporaries. Beauty has long been associated with goodness—and, as I wrote in Rich Girl Nation, capital. A straightforward example comes from the Tinder-simple moralizing in Disney movies: The evil witches are ugly; the pure princesses are beautiful. Despite my constant “class consciousness” rallying, the focus of my curiosity was not an academic inquiry into how such a transformation served to visually separate the rich from the hoi polloi or soften our perceptions of them, but where I could score some glow-up juice for myself. (I am but a simple, shallow observer who’s closer to her southern sorority girl roots than I like to let on most days.)

The finer points of the behavior, aesthetics, and proclivities of the rich have fascinated American writers for as long as the stratospheric class has existed. F. Scott Fitzgerald obsessed over the visual particulars of the wealthy in exquisite, literary detail at the height of their frivolity and excess during the 1920s. His scenes unfolded in the aftermath of the Great War (later rendered “the first” by its catastrophic sequel a couple decades later), a time which set the wheels of our favored American pastimes—economic dominance, consumerism, inequality—more decidedly into motion. Thanks to Prohibition, swaths of libertines were becoming wealthy, and quickly. Like the modern TikTok star-cum-celebrity, there was a grain of truth to the American dream of striking it rich.

Fitzgerald himself was, at least for a time, close to his subject. By 1925, when he published The Great Gatsby (the book celebrated its centennial in April), he reportedly earned an average of $24,000 per year, an income which catapulted him into the top 1 percent. (While the consumer price index was brand new then, having been developed in response to post-war inflation, one estimate said this would be equivalent to about $500,000 today—and with a far lower tax burden.) Back then, such an income could purchase a soccer team of servants. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda had a “butler, chauffeur, yard man, cook, parlor maid and chamber maid,” plus “a laundress.” (The original glam squad?) He was infamously bad at managing money—at the time of his death in 1940, his estate was only worth around $35,000, or less than $1 million in today’s dollars.

Gatsby, for all its superficial glitz and glamor, also captured the era’s underlying moral rot, and carried with it an ominous warning of impending doom. Of Fitzgerald’s mindset while writing Gatsby, one history buff observed that he seemed to “have already foreseen the lasting consequences of America’s heady romance with capitalism and materialism.” His warning went unheeded. Just four years after the book was published, the Great Depression began. 

It’s hard not to feel as though we’re approaching a precipice of similar historic magnitude. The parallels are eerie and numerous, beginning with the 2020 global pandemic which mirrored the deadly 1918 global influenza, moving swiftly into the “Roaring Twenties”-style crypto bubble of the early 2020s. The racist moral panic du jour in the 1920s surrounded the influx of Italian immigrants, who were considered non-white and believed to have an ethnic predisposition to Doing Crimes. (Catholics were also viewed with suspicion and disdain, which means I would’ve been in double jeopardy.) In 1928, a year before the crash, the top 1% of households received 23.9% of all pretax income; the bottom 90% received 50.7%. As of 2022, we were approaching similarly barbaric levels of inequality: The top 1% received 20.7%; the bottom 90%, 53.2%. The polarization of the early twentieth century is typically characterized as “urban” vs. “rural”; today, that fight goes by a different name: “left” vs. “right.” Then, as now, the true distinction was capital vs. everyone else.

My politics are primarily concerned with economic justice, built on the foundation that people’s behavior and beliefs are inherently malleable and shaped to a large degree by their material circumstances—not unlike the bleached, mall-going Every Girl transformed by new media money into a millionaire with honeyed hair and tasteful cosmetic work, or the low-income worker turned virulent bigot in the face of decades of offshoring and wage stagnation. It’s easier to dismiss fanatical claims about the devious immigrants and trans people stealing your jobs and houses when you already have both jobs and houses. (This theory’s most obvious logical gaps are wealthy Baby Boomer conservatives, who own the majority of our country’s wealth and houses, and low-income progressives, who own virtually none of it.) The relationship between one’s circumstances and political beliefs is far from perfectly linear or rational, but one thing is for sure: The ultra-rich, unlike the rest of us, have outstanding class solidarity, which regularly transcends the left-right political spectrum altogether. 

The 1920s-esque inequality we face now is anathema to social cohesion. It is a fundamentally unstable molecule posing a constant risk of nuclear meltdown, because humans are less homo economicus than homo socialis. Our interpretation of our socioeconomic standing is comparative and relative, not absolute. That’s why data purporting to show the median American is better off in real terms than they were 30 years ago is less supportive evidence of economic contentment than one might assume. What counts to homo socialis is how much further away the richest have floated on the upthrust of everyone else’s work. 

There are academic explanations for why severe inequality is toxic to the body economic—inefficient concentration of power over labor, the law of diminishing marginal returns to consumption, increasingly speculative investment behavior, breakdown of basic public services—but that omits what is perhaps the most damaging element, which is the poison that oxidizes in one’s gut when watching another individual spend $50 million on a Venetian wedding while workers in his warehouses file lawsuits over human rights abuses. That, it goes without saying, should be viscerally offensive to the basic morality of any person whose operating system has not been irredeemably corrupted by a steady stream of Grant Cardone videos. What would Fitzgerald have to say about how reality TV, billionaires, and President Reality TV Billionaire have accelerated this social breakdown? 

Historically, nations in a position this precarious swing right, and swing hard. Italians and Germans embraced fascism in the 1920s and 1930s after the war left them in various states of economic instability, social fragmentation, and wealth inequality, their disillusioned citizens grasping at nationalism for answers. But the US, protected by its geographic isolation and a lack of humiliating post-war reparations, avoided this fate, responding to its own crisis by shifting leftward. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal invested heavily in prosocial programs like Social Security, reformed the financial sector, and established labor rights with the Wagner Act. 

This isn’t because Americans were immune from flirting with fascism, but because American institutions responded differently. They (accurately) assigned blame for the country’s economic troubles to banks, monopolies, and wealth concentration, where charismatic leaders in Italy and Germany blamed Jews, Communists, and other minorities. In each case, solutions were devised according to these narratives about who bore responsibility. Where others crumbled under the toxic weight of hypernationalism, state repression, and militarization, the US embraced a racially stratified spate of social programs and public works. (It’s important not to overstate things: FDR’s democratic populism was still designed to rescue and preserve the basic structure of capitalism, making it, one could argue, an inherently conservative project.) Still, the last time a proto-class consciousness meaningfully took hold in the US, the country navigated away from a profound crisis that could’ve otherwise taken a much more violent and destructive turn. 

Fitzgerald published his cautionary tale on the eve of a national collapse. We are, again, at the edge. Inequality’s radioactive sludge has seeped into every part of our culture, from Hulu’s Daisy Buchanans to the acid bath of our politics. Our choice now isn’t between inequality and justice; it’s between justice and collapse. We can’t afford to choose wrong.

The post A Political Economy Theory of the Glow-Up appeared first on Money with Katie.

Still, every time I disappear into a herd of people shuffling up the concrete switchbacks to the 300 section, I am 19 again in Bryant-Denny Stadium. The salty, oily smell of concessions and the echoing roar of a crowd are reliable transportation mechanisms, igniting flares of adrenaline in my stomach that feel a little like nausea and a lot like recognition that you’re living through a period that will be both brief and rare.

On Sunday, we went to Coors Field to see the Rockies play the Cubs. Before we left for the ballpark, I was scrambling to outrun a creeping deadline. Most of Monday afternoon would be absorbed by a rally at the Capitol, where I’d meet other people who wanted to spend their Labor Day carrying signs through downtown. As a result, each hour between the game and Tuesday morning represented precious calendar real estate. I had already calculated what time I could be back home to clock a few more solid hours before bed, assuming ample Lime bike availability and no extra innings. 

When we walked into the stadium—up the ramps, through the concessions, into our section of sun-baked seats—I felt the familiar stirring in my gut, like a phantom limb erroneously insisting I’d had too many whiskey Cokes at the tailgate, my wedges were impractical for standing on the bleachers of the student section, and some flavor-of-the-week fraternity crush was probably nearby, wildly thrashing a red-and-white shaker to Dixieland Delight. For one flickering moment, I forgot that I would not be returning to my off-campus house to debrief with roommates and plot our night out. Instead, much to my 19-year-old self’s horror, I would re-embody a sober, 30-year-old woman wearing sensible shoes, scheming only a caffeinated return to the holy Google Doc. 

Still, I privately indulged the fantasy for a little longer, luxuriating in the reverie of caring so little about anything other than enjoying myself, a vestigial memory of a time before headlines like CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS became commonplace enough to stop warranting alarm, when it still felt like history was trundling along on a predetermined track. It already wasn’t, of course; I just didn’t know any better back then, or, if I’m honest, particularly care. 

After the game(Rockies won in a walkoff), the rest of my party processed to a bar down the block to celebrate. I located the nearest rattletrap of a rentable e-bike and rode home. As I navigated the bike lanes, periodically cross-referencing my memory of the route with Google Maps, an unanticipated heaviness descended. I knew it was the right decision to spend the evening reading and resting (hours of bar hopping are less enjoyable when you don’t drink anyway), but the ghostly 19-year-old body double of SEC Saturdays past was sorority-squatting in the bike basket, double-fisting Bud Lights, staring me down. She wanted to go out. 

I rarely regret the way I’ve structured my adult life—the commitments, priorities, and accordant tradeoffs—but every once in a while, a situation blows the dust off a parallel path. The glimpse of the carefree, no-stakes pleasure of a life primarily oriented around having fun and evading as much responsibility as possible felt like an exit ramp to an alternate universe. 

Three years ago today, I had my last drink. It’s probably unfair to say “drink,” singular, since I’m not actually sure how many—enough to wake up the next morning marinating in clammy shame. I didn’t mean to swear off alcohol indefinitely; that part happened by accident when it was no longer possible to deny how good I felt without it. As my twenties—and, more to the point, the 2020s—wore on, nights out would leave a psychic and physical residue that began resembling a permanent stain more than a light funk to be expunged by a long walk around the quad and a stop at Raising Cane’s. When I encounter people able to cup the oil and water of hedonism and ambition in their hands simultaneously, I’m overcome with envious longing, only capable of holding onto one at a time. 

People cope with uncertainty in different ways, and my preferred method of fending off anxiety was to remain as clear-eyed an observer of reality as possible. Part of this was purely selfish—the head-stuffed-with-cotton sensation I felt after drinking even a little was simply incompatible with my work schedule. But the other part felt driven by something animal, an irrational survival instinct to stay vigilant, consistent with my inability to fall asleep on planes (because I am, of course, keeping it in the air with my mind, etc.). Sometimes I wonder what would make me want to break my streak, though each passing day makes it seem less and less likely a time will come when I feel enough peace about the state of the world to purposely seek out disorientation. 

When I woke up Monday morning for a weight-lifting class, the regret had already transmuted into something approximating relief, which solidified later when I noticed I had the energy and interest to go collect signatures for SBWU at the rally. (Standing in direct sunlight for hours to foist a clipboard on strangers is not a task I would’ve voluntarily sought out at all in my early twenties, least of all on a holiday.)

At the rally, I bought the Denver Voice from a man named David who told me the newspaper’s vendor program was designed to offer low-barrier work to people who needed it. “I didn’t know the Voice was still publishing,” another man called from across the lawn when he spotted me tucking it under my arm. As I walked toward him, I noticed he was pushing a walker with a speckled dog perched on its narrow bench. “I used to sell papers for them when I was homeless,” he said. He told me his name was Brian, and that he lived on the streets of Denver for 33 years after losing his wife and son. “After that, I just gave up,” he said, waving away the memory with his hand. “The Voice reports on homelessness issues,” he explained, “like how people treat us and stuff.” 

Moving through the booths on Denver’s Capitol lawn was a reminder that disorganization and discord are unavoidable features of any truly democratic system, even within groups that mostly agree with one another. I overheard two women, holding nearly identical protest signs, arguing loudly and explicitly about whether Bill Clinton was a sex pest. There were at least four different tables for anti-establishment political organizations promoting essentially the same goals, and I felt itchy with the Deloitte-pilled urge to consolidate these kindred factions into one streamlined LLC for revolution. 

Caring about the future is messy and awkward and frustrating. The most surprising thing I’ve noticed about protests, rallies, and the unglamorous work of organizing people is that a sense of futility is often just as constant a presence as the sense of community. The temptation to disengage entirely can be powerful. Still, on my Lime bike ride home Monday afternoon, I felt something that was altogether absent from my early twenties: purpose.

The post Past Lives appeared first on Money with Katie.

Something devastating is happening to airport lounges, and those paid to catalog subtle economic and cultural shifts are taking note.

The food? “Sad.” The walls? “Beige.” The seating? “Overcrowded.” Wealth management professional, author, and now two-time The Money with Katie Show guest Nick Maggiulli recently analyzed wealth data he believes underlies this phenomenon: “The upper middle class is getting too big,” and as a result, much like David Mack titled his weekend op-ed for the Times, “When Everybody Has Airport Lounge Access, Nobody Does.” This is because wealth and access are, at bottom, about a sense of exclusivity and hierarchy—so if everybody’s rich, no one is.

Nerdwallet

The post Panic! At the Airport Lounge appeared first on Money with Katie.

Over the long weekend, I was toying with a creative prompt: “What are you afraid to write?” Reflecting on the last dozen interviews I’d done for Rich Girl Nation, the answer took the form of a complicated love letter to the self-help genre that raised me.

The post To Personal Finance, My First True Love appeared first on Money with Katie.

For a recent story published by The Cut, Bindu Bansinath surveyed 102 of the publication’s readers about the most “frivolous thing” they’d taken on debt to buy. Most of the submissions tracked with what you might expect from readers of New York magazine’s fashion-forward women’s vertical—Chanel shoes, plastic surgery, Ozempic—but a few curious inclusions stood out: DoorDash deliveries and Lyft rides, sore thumbs on a hand that otherwise counted more obvious luxuries. DoorDash and Lyft, two companies so saturated with venture capital that each transaction should come with a complimentary Patagonia vest, have each raised several billion dollars. After more than a decade straight of losing money, both companies eked out profitable quarters for the first time ever late last year. 

Once considered reasonably priced ways to summon a gig worker during their 2010s-era, VC-subsidized growth phases, at some point these services ceased being cheaper than those they aimed to displace. In the early months of the pandemic, food delivery spending on apps like DoorDash tripled (and remained high), our collective habit expanding, then crystallizing. Today, it’s hard to tell who the real winners are—though it’s almost certainly not the gig workers, who reported falling earnings as ridesharing and delivery apps confronted the reality that even massive scale couldn’t rescue bad unit economics. Squeezed by higher interest rates over the last few years, the VC funds that once enabled these companies and others like them are currently sitting on levels of cash (“dry powder”) not seen since 2008, signaling that the fever dream of the last 15 years might finally be over.

This March announcement of “buy now, pay later” for DoorDash orders can only be understood as an admission that the plot has been lost.

I pulled this collage by a UX designer at Volvo from their LinkedIn article about the DTC “sea of sameness.” From top left to bottom right, I can see Hims, Away, Warby Parker, Outdoor Voices, Allbirds, Casper, and Harry’s.

The post The Venture Capitalization of Culture appeared first on Money with Katie.

This essay contains copious White Lotus season 3 spoilers. If you’re not caught up, please stop whatever else you’re doing and go spend the next eight hours in front of your TV, which is the only screen we’re celebrating today.

While I’ve never tried my hand at money laundering (and I’d never deign to put the word “only” ahead of “$10 million”), there was something uncomfortably familiar about Tim’s preoccupied state on vacation. Every time he deflected inquiries from his family about why he seemed so stressed and absent, stalking off with his sweaty palm wrapped around his phone, I winced with recognition. It had echoes (minus the federal investigation) of the half-dozen or so times I’d taken a whole week off work, only to catch a glimpse of a push notification that violently grounded my mental faculties in the deadlines, open requests, or—worst of all—negative feedback inherent to a job conducted in a digital office that can reach you wherever there’s cell service. This feeling intensified in lockstep with my earnings over the years; more than a day or two of time away felt not just risky, but wrong , when availability was technically possible and the obligations of real life continuously accrued behind a red badge app icon within arm’s reach.

In my experience, even if an intrusion didn’t require immediate tending, it still left a psychic residue that persisted for hours. My body may have been sitting in a beach chair facing the ocean, but my mind was buzzing around my inbox, crafting responses to disgruntled messages and playing calendar Jenga with time-sensitive appointments that had managed to pierce the veil of my autoresponder from halfway across the world. There I’d be, on some trip that was meticulously planned, saved for, and in some cases, required days of travel, only to find myself itching to sneak away to good WiFi so I could do the very thing from which I was supposedly taking a break.

This can have the unfortunate effect of making one paradoxically agitated with the break itself. There’s perhaps nobody to whom Tim vents more flashes of frustration than the hotel employee who keeps suggesting he surrender his phone to her tech gulag, a locked tote bag—it’s clear she’s seen his type before.

After he begins availing himself of his wife Victoria’s generously supplied Lorazepam stash to cope with the debilitating panic of his imminent arrest, he becomes even more withdrawn and vacant. The fact that not a single family member seems to clock this shift for days (or draw the obvious conclusion from her missing pills and his inability to open his mouth long enough to form multisyllabic sentences) is revealing in its own way. A totally distracted breadwinner on what is surely a six-figure family vacation is more or less standard for this family. In a conversation between Tim and his oldest son (and hopeful protégé) Saxon about why Saxon, too, cannot bear to sacrifice his laptop to the tech bag, the nature of these characters’ pursuit of money and success is revealed in sharper contrast. Saxon, who always looks like he just walked off the pages of a 2012 Vineyard Vines catalog, declares with a timing and tone impossible to convey in plain text, “I know I tell you this all the time, dad, but…I love working.” Despite his proximity to excessive wealth and the unreal experiences it can buy, Saxon is still early in his career and “unimportant” in the way he perceives his father to be. To him, being constantly connected is both a path to and symbol of success and legitimacy. (An especially funny juxtaposition given who, exactly, keeps trying to contact Tim, now that we know where his insatiable drive for power landed him.)

Saxon’s attitude, while a little sad, is understandable—and can even be practically useful. Even jobs that offer paid time off, a privilege in the US where one in four workers have none, often don’t reduce expectations of output accordingly. You may be lucky enough to score three weeks of vacation time per year, but there’s still 52 weeks’ worth of work expected. In response to this reality, 46% of Americans who are offered paid vacation time don’t use it all, with half of them citing the fear of “falling behind at work.” In that sense, the ability to luxuriate fully and fearlessly in unstructured time away is an elusive freedom; one that money struggles to buy.

In March, we ended up mushing two trips back to back: the first a family affair that lined up with our nieces’ spring break, the second to a place easily accessible from the West coast—Hawai’i—before we migrate closer to the center of the country again. I had never taken off two weeks in a row before, so I prepared by spending the month leading up to our indulgent travel binge working much longer hours than usual. As our departure date crept closer, I became fixated on how I was using my time: managing it, optimizing it, preparing myself to enjoy it. Because of how much work (and money) was going into making these adventures possible, the break became freighted with the expectation that I’d make the most of my time away; chiefly, by staying offline.

Time—or a lack thereof—is intimately connected to all manner of socioeconomic issues we don’t traditionally think of as bound by the strictures of the clock. The “Make America Healthy Again” preoccupation with food dyes and genetically modified organisms, for example, often misses that it is not the presence of cheap microwaveable meals, but the absence of time to prepare fresh food three times daily, that leaves many people eating things that aren’t as nutritious as they’d probably prefer. Another example comes in the form of the seemingly intractable gender wage gap, often attributed to a lopsided distribution of unpaid domestic labor, which data from other countries suggests has been softened and shrunk by the introduction of things like four-day work weeks or shortened working hours—allowing all workers more time to tend to their homes and the people in them.

When we welcomed a bounty of technologically enabled access into our lives, I don’t think many of us realized it meant not just access for us, but to us. (My mom was a rare holdout, refusing a smartphone until the 2020s: “I don’t want to be that easy to reach,” she’d often say.) The sense of having too little time can be another way of expressing the feeling of having too much of something else. For me, that “something else” often feels like a buzzing static of fragmented half-thoughts introduced by the portal of obligations and breaking news alerts most of us carry around all day, digital serfs paying cloud rent to the cyber kingdoms of tech billionaires in the currencies that matter most online: our time, our attention, our peace. A cottage industry—from the entire back catalog of writers like Cal Newport to apps like the appropriately named Freedom to wellness resorts that make you lock your phone in a sack—has developed to offer solutions for the human inability to resist this frenzied alienation and regain a sense of presence that’s been hijacked.

One morning while hiking on our trip, I caught wind that an error in some recently published material had started a skirmish that required me to remedy the mistake before it escalated further. I may have been “offline,” but my digital body double (and everything she’s ever said) was still accessible in another realm 24 hours per day. Cheeks suddenly warm and pulse thudding in my ears from the sense of overexposure (my standard physiological response to being publicly accused of stupidity, unfortunately), I rushed back to the car to focus on my tiny screen in silence. I thought of Tim, sneaking away from dinner to check his notifications in the bushes.

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