July 2026

How to Talk about the Economy while Erasing Class Tension

“Cost of living” is currently the most salient political issue in the USA and elsewhere, yet there’s something hidden in the phrase itself that dulls any response to the issue. Discourse across the spectrum likes to tackle the economy as something akin to the weather. When the weather is reported, when it rains, rain is happening—rather than being done to someone else. When housing prices triple in 20 years and grocery prices increase 33% (since 2019) it’s often also discussed something that is “happening” rather than being done. Consider the following headlines from 2026:

·      Yahoo: The typical US home now costs a record $440,660 — and many Americans can't keep up

·      ABC: Shoppers rewire grocery routines while digesting the biggest price jump in 50 years

·      CBS: Most U.S. families don't earn nearly enough to afford child care, study finds  

Notice that the Yahoo and CBS headlines specifically cast the blame on consumers and workers. “Americans can’t keep up,” and “families don’t earn nearly enough.” The ABC discuss consumers being “responsible” for taking responsibility for “rewiring their routines,” but this isn’t much better. At best, these headlines discuss the “cost of living” or “affordability crisis” as weather events. Compare:

·      “It typically rains now every weekend, and many Americans can’t stay dry.”

·      “Commuters are rewiring habits while avoiding the greatest rain storms in 50 years.”

·      “Most families cannot keep their kids dry in this rain.”

Again, even the phrases themselves: affordability and cost of living are neutralizing. Of course pundits do speak to causes: Trump’s war in Iran, Putin’s war in Ukraine—they’ll even make oblique references to companies artificially raising prices behind the veil of inflation. These abstract webs of cause-and-effect are fine, but they obfuscate the class tensions that run through all economic activity. When Trump asks for 1.5 trillion for military spending, when he invades a sovereign nation triggering a supply-chain crisis—him and his administration are doing something to taxpayers (not to mention the people of Iran). When Redfin and Zillow broke anti-trust laws by removing Redfin as a competitor, also firing thousands of workers in the process, they did something to renters. When Innovation Homes buys up properties, raises rents, and abandons renters to black widows and raw sewage, they’re doing something to tenants (and the first-time home buyers the push off the property ladder).

When the NYT headline reads “Gazans are dying of starvation” (2025) rather than Israel is starving Gazans, they’re morally neutralizing the actions of one state against a people. When corporate or state entities takes actions that pressure families to skip meals or push renters towards living in their cars—to enrich themselves—and we call it “inflation,” “cost of living” increase or an “affordability crisis,” we do the same thing. We then feel as silly getting mad at them as we would getting mad at the weather. But it’s not weather. It’s the attempt of one social group to gain power, advantage, and resources over another—in this case juicing the working class in the process.

Anger is a potent force. Reframing “affordability” in terms more appropriate to class war will help us

feel the emotions apt for this moment.

Confronting the Other

A study by the CDC from 2024 showed that most Americans are exhausted. The reasons for this are innumerable, such that isolating which factor contributes what percentage would be a feat of its own. A short list would include increased screen time, and stress of living under the oligarchy’s assault on the working class (in the spirit of practicing what I preach from the previous article) — be it via a rental market captured by corporate power or via the military industrial complex’s investment in keeping wars ongoing.

There are obvious ways that technology causes widespread fatigue: the addictive apps and smartphone design that keep people endlessly scrolling and checking, context switching at work and doom scrolling before bed, eyeballs bathed in blue light, cortisol spiked from careening through headlines about war, fentanyl and affordability. Yet, there’s a less obvious way that tech causes fatigue which I want to focus on here.

There’s something particularly exhausting about just being in busy places these days. If you live in a city, 99% of people you encounter are folks you’ve never seen before, will never talk to, and will never see (or recognize) again. This, on its own, is uncanny, something unique to probably less than 1% of our history. It’s sufficient, I think, on its own to keep people on edge—and then crashing, constantly. We strangers are held together by a social contract, by the abstract understanding that “I don’t want to do x to y because I wouldn’t’ want y to do x to me, thus I don’t want to establish this norm, and I don’t want to lose credibility in this tenuous arrangement.” It’s partly that logic, and fear of punishment, that keeps us civil. While I don’t want to exclude the possibility of some underlying, generalized human decency, civility is not achieved specifically through our commitment to each other as known individuals, and I don’t think it’s empathy either. How could it be when most people are strangers to each other? And if we empathized with each person we came across, would this not lead to burnout?

As an aside, I have a pet theory that this is one reason why people love true crime. The sense of living around strangers is basically unnerving, especially in high-stress environments. On one tier, the people we encounter on commutes and in the streets are strangers in the full  sense. On another tier are those we see regularly but remain behind a veil of anonymity: everyone from the drug store clerk to many co-workers or colleagues. Very few people are truly known in late modernity, relative to the numbers of people we encounter. Can we feel deeply safe in this situation? Can we feel relaxed and vulnerable? Can we co-regulate?

This question is almost a joke in a place with the crime and gun violence record of the United States. People are reminded daily just how weak of a restraint the social contract is, especially when we’re seeing elites regularly flaunt the law. The social contract is like religion — you actually have to believe in it for it to work. In the Money Game I talk about the amorality of billionaires in this score: they patently have no need for the social contract, and increasingly seem to not-mind pretending otherwise. Billionaires essentially flout Gyges’ ring (their billions of dollars and political / social influence) while denouncing empathy. They are either right-wing libertarians like Pieter Thiel or embrace a distorted form of affective altruism that excuses atrocities in the present. The culture they conjure is not one that encourages feelings of safety among strangers.

True crime is problematic (to use a word that’s gone out of fashion): it’s voyeuristic, it’s exploitative, it’s insensitive. But it’s popular, I think, in part because it gives a catharsis to an unspoken truth that it is uncomfortable to be around so many humans you don’t know and, because of that, can’t trust. People who can, and as the media loves to celebrate—do sometimes (especially in the USA) commit violence easily.

Yet, this has been the case for decades—living in crowded, alienating cities, that is. Why is fatigue exploding now, to the extent that (I think) it could be determined by this? One reason is obviously that it’s being compounded by other factors. The other might be the way data is now collected differently—I’m not sure. But, here’s one thing that has changed. Even in a world full of strangers there are still the normal social cues we can read from people: eye contact, expression, etc., body language.

What’s the difference now? Given that so many of us are staring at our phones or have earbuds in, we are walking around in bubbles impenetrable to the people around us (this existed before, it was imagination and memory, but now enhanced by technology: noise cancelling headphones and an endless amount of digital content to consume). Everyone is ignoring everyone (and I participate in this absolutely). That added barrier of the phone and headphones makes people inaccessible (masks, notice, are creepy because it disguises people's faces, but the porceline mask of a person whose mind is lost online, or, even in deep daydream, is also unsettling or just, odd and sad). Their absorption into whatever is being consumed closes off the normal cues they’d be given to people around them to be able to read their own internal state. To the perceiving subject who takes their mind off whatever they might be listening to and looks around, what they see is automatons—without access or expression.

And of course, what ensues is a feedback loop. The more alien people become, the most the subject wants to escape into their technology, or, absent this, into old-fashion imagination, because who wants to be surrounded by aliens, and who wants to be constantly confronted by the other?

The point being, here, that this social dynamic must sap more energy out of us on some level. I don’t know what energy is — but being fully unscientific, I’d think that energy, vitality, vivacity — all of this is bolstered by our connection to our surroundings. If we’re alone in the forest, it’s the trees and the birds. If we’re around friends, its other humans. I’d think that energy is drained, expect, either does not arise or spikes and is exhausted, when we’re constantly being confronted by automatons.

I’m an advocate of embracing introversion. But I think even introverts pick up on the fact that something is off, that alienation is out of hand. As Susan Cain discusses, it's nice to be doing your own thing around other people, reading or crocheting or otherwise. But Iphones and laptops are like portals. We leave our bodies and go other places entirely. We go online.