Well, as you say good sir, this here blog is about honesty and heightening the conversation, so if some of this pisses you off, well, it probably should. I don’t mean it to offend, just to point out a few things.

Mr. Josh, you and I have gone rounds about this before and you may or may not believe it, but based on previous conversations and the post above you have no freaking clue what the lower class even is. Your current economic leap might be termed as being from lower-middle to upper-middle, at the highest delta y (thats the up-down one, right?). I don’t mean this to belittle your current social situation shock – which is still completely valid.

Beyond that, you answer your own ‘fears’ right in the post:

Luckily for me, over the years I’ve met some really awesome people who also happen to be in that tippy-top income bracket, and it’s helped me transcend most of my initial negativity towards wealth. I tend to expect more from these people,

I personally don’t expect ‘more’ from anyone, but if you do, how can you do less than hold yourself to those same criteria you expect from your affluent friends. You talk the talk, so now start walking the walk.

Of course, more than a little of this is my opinion of the starving-artist bohemian ideal. You were starving by choice, many other people are just starving. It is implicitly an impossibility to claim membership in an economic class that you are voluntarily a part of – it can’t be done, both on the subject-object level and on an economic level. Rather, in my opinion, you were part of a non-economic social sub-class that identified itself by its lifestyle choices. In everyone choosing to be there, no one was really oppressed by anyone.

I knew you freshman year and you were already flexing these computer muscles, but chose the bohemian lifestyle. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with that, but don’t pose like you were poor-by-oppression, you just weren’t. Even without knowing your background I know this, because nobody looks back on that with potential regret or fear of losing something, at most nostalgia, and sadness they couldn’t bring more people with them. I was right with you too – dirt broke working electrician calls, and crappy downtown theater but I had choices, ergo I don’t claim to identify with the millions who really are lower class.

Now, I like to think that you make that distinction of poor-by-oppresion, vs poor-by-choice and assume your readership understands this, but its just not clear in what I’m reading above. You are dead on in discussing it as an -ism, it has bothered me for years that it is a taboo topic, which you chimed in on once http://treslervania.com/node/90.

I truly hope this post was a issue of semantics, and that I misunderstood, in which case I’ll apologize for nearly every word of this post. Otherwise, its offensive and reeks of the same -ism it references. You say in the opening paragragh – “people less fortunate hate to hear me bitch about” – Why is it just the less fortunate who can hate to hear you bitch about this?

xoxo – Sam
P.S. sorry if this makes the anxiety worse, an underlying point to it is that you have nothing to be anxious about, you’re like someone who gets nervous when they leave stores without buying something, for fear people will think him a shoplifter. Trust yourself and it matters not what you make.