Why the Middle Class Suffers the Most: The Paradox of Choice

How Trying to Optimize Your Life is Part of the Problem

Photo by Samuel Toh on Unsplash

When I was a graduate student studying philosophy, my life was simple. I cut my own hair, didn’t travel, ate the same cheap meals day after day — rarely going out to eat. If you have heard stories of students living off of rice and pasta, that was me. I was also the only grad student I knew who clipped coupons from the Sunday paper. In other words, I ate, slept, and studied — that’s it. I am not going to lie, it was hard work, but in some ways it was easier being a poor student. I had a singular purpose.

Compared to those days, many of you would say that my life today is better. I have a job where I earn a respectable income, have a wife and child, and get to travel on the occasional vacation. I even can afford to eat out a few times a week. Yet, these improvements come with a cost. I am constantly making decisions, worrying about if I made the right choice. Now that I have a fuller, multifaceted life, I have to balance all these aspects. A bit ironically, things got harder when they got better.

Having reflected on this, I feel that many of my current issues stem from not being on the extremes of socio-economic life — I am not poor nor am I rich. By not being poor I have some amount of opportunity and freedom. However, by not being rich there is a limit to those opportunities and freedom. I have just enough freedom to get myself into trouble.

What this reveals is that in many cases stress and anxiety come not from difficulty, but from trying to do everything “right.” Let’s look at this in more detail.

Life at the Extremes

When we live life at the socio-economic extremes, life is simple. I do not mean to say that life is “easy” in some way, just that choice plays only a minor role for those at the bottom and at the top of the economic hierarchy.

Let’s consider the poor first. In terms of financial poverty, life is ruled by necessity and not choice. You do not get to choose your job or where you live when you are poor. You take any job you can get to survive and live where you can afford to live. The poor, like me when I was a graduate student, don’t worry about what to wear, what to eat, or what hairstyle to have. Such choices are decided for them by their limited resources. I eat, wear, and do my hair the way I have to — there is no choice to make.

Oddly enough the same is true at the opposite extreme. The wealthy are not burdened by choice because there is nothing to choose from. However, for them it is not due to a limitation but by a lack of limitation. The rich do not need to worry about what clothes to buy as they simply buy anything they want. Even the decision of what to wear can be removed by hiring a personal stylist to make the decision for them. In other words, the rich can delegate, automate, or simply spend their way around choice. This eliminates much of the stress or worry choice might bring.

Stuck in the Middle Class

When we look at the poor and the rich their lives are marked by a noticeable lack of deliberation. However for those in the middle class, which now includes myself, our lives are marked by almost endless deliberation. We are able to notice what the options are due to having some money or time, but are not able to explore every option due to having limited resources. For example, I could send my daughter to private school. The cost would squeeze my family’s finances, but I could do it. The choice is not a clear yes or no, but a possibility.

The consequence of this is that we take on the responsibility of making a good choice and the stress that accompanies it. This kind of mental overhead, the burden of managing expectations, leads to decision fatigue, lost opportunities, and sleepless nights.

Take vacations as a concrete example. The middle class gets to take a vacation or two every year. This is better than the poor who likely are unable to take a vacation but worse than the rich who can take a vacation whenever they want. Thus, we feel like we need to make the most of the limited vacation that we are given. Anything less would be a waste. This leads to spending hours looking for the best options and discounts, trying to do everything and make everyone happy in a single one week vacation.

Thus, the middle class life is defined by its desire to be financially “responsible,” getting the most value out of your purchase, and maximizing career potential. Just think of all the home gadgets that can do “12 things in 1” targeted at middle class families or the endless apps and services to track, record, or optimize every aspect of your life.

What is important to note here is that this is not necessarily motivated by greed but by survival. The middle class have resources but not unlimited resources. Thus, survival, both in a minimalist sense of staying alive and in the sense of remaining middle class, is dependent on managing those resources well. Failure has real consequences that could dramatically alter their future and those of their children. Talk about a lot of pressure.

It is this that causes mental health issues such as stress or anxiety. The stress is not material, like it might be for the poor, it’s psychological. The middle class asks questions like “Am I wasting money?” “Am I a bad parent?” or “Should I be further along by now?” These are questions about the quality of their life and not the content of it. What’s more there are no definite answers to these questions making it difficult to evaluate a choice once it is made. Is a week vacation in Hawaii better than a week in Florida? It depends.

Aristotle and the Golden Mean

I think that this need to properly manage resources is perhaps at the heart of Aristotle’s views of virtue. Aristotle taught that being a good person (i.e. being virtuous) means being between two extremes — balancing between excess and deficiency. For example, being courageous means knowing which dangers should be faced and which dangers should be avoided. Courage lies between cowardice, which runs for all danger, and rashness, which faces every danger regardless of risk.

While this sounds good in practice, we can also see how the cowards and the reckless lives might be simpler and less stressful than the life of a courageous man. The coward and the reckless do not have to make thousands of decisions about what to do in a dangerous situation. They simply follow their rule — run or fight. The courageous hero has to face the decision each time whether it is a time to run or to fight. (Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics”)

The odd thing is that this pulls us in two different directions. On the one hand, we praise and admire the courageous person’s ability to judge each situation. Their choices are displays of wisdom; knowing how to correctly read the situation. On the other hand we do not envy their burden. We see the toll it takes on them having to worry about walking the tight rope between two simpler options. Would not virtue be in picking the simpler, less stressful life?

For most philosophers the answer is no. There is no virtue or value in the simple or the stress free. It is only when we face challenges that we discover who we really are and our abilities are tested. That knowledge is far more valuable than living a relaxed life. Just think of famous quotes such as “the unexamined life is not worth living” or “ignorance is bliss” both of which do not make out the simpler path to be the better option.

An Imperfect Amount of Perfection

In the middle class, we are urged to optimize every aspect of our life, to stretch every dollar, or else risk failure. This drive, while well-intentioned, can easily become a trap. What starts as sensible planning turns into a cycle of never-ending work and second-guessing while never feeling satisfied. The pursuit of living well becomes the very thing that prevents us from achieving it.

Many of us then tie our self-worth to our ability to walk the middle-class tight rope. We seek to optimize every little detail of our lives by trying to become financial planners, fitness trainers, and craftsmen. We strive for the noble goal of perfection but at the cost of our emotional and mental health.

If we are to keep the Aristotelian sense of virtue, then perhaps we can define virtue in the middle class as lying between the extremes of no optimization and optimization. Perfect efficiency and optimization is a luxury of those with unlimited resources, while disregard for it is the luxury of the poor. In the middle, we must know when a choice or optimization no longer serves us and will only lead to unnecessary suffering. In other words, we must know when good enough is enough.

This should not be seen as giving up on virtue but having a proper understanding of what virtue is for the middle class. Virtue in this regard is knowing which decisions are worth optimizing and which ones are worth releasing. It’s understanding that peace, not perfection, is sometimes the wiser path, at least for the moment. In a world that demands more and more, perhaps true virtue lies in knowing when to do less.