The Road to Middle Middle Class

The Story of How I Became Wealthy Enough to Buy Literally Anything at Costco

Picture me in my mid-twenties, walking to my entry level job at a call center. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a home. I have virtually no money in my checking account. I have no girlfriend and no real friends. There are holes in the bottom of my shoes, but I won’t notice for several weeks until someone points it out to me at the gym.¹

A few years previous, I dropped out of college without earning a degree to pursue writing.

Writing kept almost working out, which is another way of saying that it didn’t work out.

You could say I had everything I wanted in the world. It’s just that I didn’t want very much.

If you live a lot of your life up in your head, your material surroundings matter a lot less than your access to a library. I took care of my little brother and sister every day and the library was only a few blocks down the road. I had all the books I could read and people who needed me. I worked the night shift at the call center where I was literally paid to read for most of my working hours. All my money went to supporting my brother and sister. This was everything I could imagine as important.

As was bound to happen, the passage of time caused my little brother and sister to grow up. I had no idea what to do with myself in a world where no one needed me.

We won’t focus too much on my identity crisis in this tale, except insofar as it relates to my financial betterment. Suffice it to say, I suddenly had no real reason to give my mother all of my money. But like a lion raised in a zoo, it took me a moment to realize the door to my cage had been left open.

Outside that guilt and sense of false obligation I had to plan a whole life and figure out how to pay for it.

Step 1. Getting My Emotional Shit Together

You can read other pieces on the specifics of this, but I stopped laughing off weird behaviors as being “just the way I am.” It became very obvious to me that I was much more damaged by my upbringing than I had ever let myself realize and that I was the only person who was responsible for fixing it. I stopped giving myself excuses like that I was eccentric or had a difficult childhood. The fact that I hadn’t faced a lot of those problems head on was entirely my own fault.

I had to start being accountable if someone was going to take a chance on me.

I started going to therapy every week.

I started going to group therapy for survivor’s of childhood sexual abuse every week.

I did every painful, terrifying thing my therapist told me to do.

I read books about self-help. Only if they were practical or had good explanatory advice in them. Books about not being consumed by darkness. Books about mundane success. If something seemed like it was bullshit, I stopped reading it immediately.

It probably took reading all of those books to help me get into the right headspace to have an epiphany from a different genre. The most helpful thing I read in that time, the passage of text that most helped me realize where I’d gone wrong, was from Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he’d been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn’t seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn’t even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.

In Shaftoe’s post-high-school experience he had found that guns had much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched the slow progress of the Vickers’ bullet-stream across the roadblock. Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the base of a fire. Then he picked out a few bits of the roadblock that he suspected people might be standing behind and concentrated on them for a while, boring tunnels through the wreckage of the vehicles until he could see what was on the other side, sawing through their frames and breaking them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside trees behind which he suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.

I am sure when Neal Stephenson was writing all of these things down about machines he wasn’t thinking that a weirdly old virgin in a call center was going to strongly empathize with a bandsaw and a machine gun, but I did. I have a very mechanical mind. Somehow stories of actual people going through similar or even more dire circumstances than my own just didn’t hit me in the same way as thinking about the practical necessity of infrastructure to support powerful and complex machinery.

This hit me like one of those weird late night commercial that makes you think of your most cherished dead relative for no particular reason. I saw myself as that bandsaw, trying to cut through a knotty piece of timber without any water in my cooling tank. Or that Vickers machine gun, with my radiator fallen off so that my barrel had started to melt. It was all mechanical and obvious from that perspective. You couldn’t have one thing without the other. They were all connected. Part of one great big ecosystem.

Of course! No wonder I was so screwed up! I was trying to operate in the world without any of the supporting infrastructure!

I realized that people need each other. We fall apart without each other. Not because we are weak or flawed but because that is the kind of thing that we are and how we are built. This completely freed me to think about myself in an entirely different way. I had a very stupid notion of self-reliance, wherein I wasn’t allowed to rely on anyone else at all. In fact, I thought it should be the case that other people should only ever have to rely on me and never the other way around.

This is going to sound dumb because it is dumb.

This made me realize it was okay to do things like hire a realtor to buy a house instead of reading a bunch of legal books on how to do a real estate contract myself.

That was the level of self-reliance I was imposing on myself previously, which meant I didn’t do a lot of things.

For the sake of humor, we can go ahead and say this allowed me to break up with my mom, which eventually caused her to lose her home. Though, again, her own fault.

Thankfully, I had a therapist to remind me that my mother wasn’t entitled to my entire paycheck for the rest of her life.

If you’re broke, get your head right first. You’ll never be able to hold onto money if you don’t. I couldn’t, at least. Everyone else needed it more than me. No matter what those needs, they were always somehow more important than me making sure I didn’t have holes in the bottom of my shoes.