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HKYNC News & Views January 18, 2026 – Executive Summary
Hickory Hound News and Views Archive
📤This Week:
(Tuesday): Hickory 102: 3rd Verse - When Stability Is the Mirage - A city can only move forward once it is honest about where it truly stands; that clarity is what gives planning, branding, and optimism real meaning.
(Thursday): Middle Class Traction #2 : Income → Stability
- Full-time work remains widespread, and understanding why it no longer builds stability is the first step toward restoring progress and financial security.
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📤Next Week:
(Tuesday): Hickory 102: When Activity Masks Direction - How constant activity can hide a lack of direction—and how to learn to tell real progress from motion in systems that stay busy without moving forward.
🧠Opening Reflection:
What We Remember Shapes What We Notice
Communities don’t lose their way all at once. They drift. Little changes stack up. Familiar things start feeling off, but not wrong enough to stop the day. Folks keep going to work, paying bills, making adjustments, telling themselves this is just how things are now. And by the time you realize something’s shifted, it’s already been there a while.
That’s what happens when memory fades.
Not nostalgia. Memory. The kind that remembers how things used to work, why certain rules existed, and who they were meant to protect. When that memory slips, people stop asking how they got here. They start assuming the pressure is personal. That if things feel tighter, it must be something they’re doing wrong.
That’s a dangerous place for a community to land.
This platform has always been about keeping that memory alive. Not to romanticize the past, but to keep our bearings. Because when you forget your own story, you make decisions like nothing came before—and you repeat mistakes without realizing you’re repeating them.
Lately, something’s been surfacing across the board. Different people, different backgrounds, same feeling. Working harder without gaining ground. Saving money that doesn’t feel like savings. Doing what you were told was responsible and still feeling exposed. There hasn’t been a crash. No announcement. Just a steady squeeze that’s gotten hard to ignore.
On paper, everything looks fine. Jobs exist. Credit flows. Markets hit record highs. But lived reality tells another story. Risk keeps sliding downhill. Margins keep thinning. Households keep absorbing shocks that used to be spread out. And because the system still “works,” people hesitate to call it what it is.
That’s where memory matters again.
Because we’ve seen this structure before. Not with the same labels, not with the same tools—but the same pattern. When pressure builds, systems don’t usually break. They adapt. They protect themselves. And they quietly ask regular people to adjust. Over time, that adjustment starts to feel normal. Expected. Even deserved.
The old fights over money used to be loud. You could see them. You could argue about them in public. Today, those same tensions show up in different language—rent, groceries, insurance, energy, wages. The debate didn’t go away. It just moved underground.
The Feature this week pulls that thread. It doesn’t chase headlines or blame individuals. It looks at structure. At how pressure gets redistributed without ever being announced. At how erosion happens slowly enough that people doubt their own instincts.
And what follows after that is personal, but not private. It’s about what it feels like to live inside these shifts over time. To adjust without realizing you’re adjusting. To wake up one day and recognize the ground isn’t where you thought it was.
This isn’t about panic. And it’s not about resignation. It’s about orientation. Because when a community remembers how systems actually behave under strain, it regains something essential—the ability to tell the difference between responsibility and burden, between effort and absorption.
That’s where this week’s conversation starts.
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⭐ Feature Story ⭐
The Quiet Squeeze: Why Middle-Class Life Is Narrowing in America
It’s a strange feeling when the future feels confined. I didn’t get to grow up normal, but I think about the generation before mine. The older Boomers got to experience pretty good lives with expanded opportunity and possibilities. There were a lot of steady jobs with pensions and benefits available, starter homes were purchased before age 30, and there was optimism that each year would be better than the last.
Today, for many Americans in their 20s, 30s, even 40s, that promise of stable middle-class prosperity is slipping away. It was sold that hard work and a college degree were supposed to guarantee a comfortable life. Instead, an increasing number of middle-income families find themselves one emergency away from financial ruin, or one pay raise behind the cost of living. The American Dream hasn’t died outright, but it’s certainly a lot harder to catch. Here's the thing, no one has ever been guaranteed anything in this country. The Boomers experienced unprecedented prosperity that no other generation was afforded. The Boomer's parent were the Greatest generation who experienced the Great Depression and World War 2. They were the generation that built the United States into the Super Power it is today.
The Boomer leaders squandered what they inherited through greedy deals that created International Trade Agreements, Importing Cheap Immigrant Labor, The Financialization of the economy through Wall Street and the megabanks, and the Cheap Helicoptry monetary policy of this century.
Squeezed by Economic Pressures
The economic pressures on the middle class have been intensifying for years. By 2023, about one-third of American middle-class households could no longer afford basic necessities like housing, food, and child care—even though they fell in the “middle 60%” of income earners[1]. In one of the richest countries on Earth, this is a jarring reality: Middle-class families who play by the rules still struggle to make ends meet. A Brookings analysis bluntly concludes that “one-third of the American middle class cannot afford the cost of basic necessities”[1]. In other words, millions who officially count as middle income are living paycheck to paycheck, stretched to their limits.
Housing offers a stark example of narrowing options. Home ownership—long a cornerstone of middle-class stability—is increasingly out of reach. Soaring home prices and higher interest rates have eroded affordability to the point that, by 2021, the typical family earning a median income could no longer afford the median-priced home in America[2]. The Atlanta Fed’s Home Ownership Affordability Index dropped below 100 for the first time since 2019, indicating that the median household was priced out of the median home[2]. Put simply, the classic one-income family buying a house in their 20s is now more fairy tale than reality in many regions.
It’s not just housing. Everyday costs from groceries to healthcare have been rising faster than incomes for years. Essential pillars of a middle-class life—housing, medical care, education—have seen price increases far above wage growth[3]. Over the past few decades, prices for housing, healthcare, and college have climbed much more than middle-class incomes, even as other costs like electronics have gotten cheaper[3]. This imbalance means each paycheck buys a little less security than it used to. Even during recent economic growth, inflation has eaten away at gains. In 2022, for example, wages actually fell by 0.5% after accounting for inflation, and far more households saw their expenses rise than saw their incomes rise[4]. The result? Families must make “tough tradeoffs and defer purchases in order to meet their financial obligations”[5]—whether that means cutting back on groceries, cancelling a vacation, or postponing a needed car repair.
Debt and lack of savings add to the squeeze. Middle-class Americans have been relying more on credit to bridge the gap between stagnant paychecks and rising costs. Credit card balances are at record highs, and interest rates have jumped, which further eats into disposable income. Many families also have minimal emergency savings. The Federal Reserve found that nearly 4 in 10 Americans would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense from savings[6]. This kind of financial fragility is new for a lot of middle-class households. A single surprise bill – a car breakdown, a medical copay – can send a family into debt. It’s a quiet stress that weighs on millions of people daily.
To cope, the structure of middle-class family life has fundamentally changed. It’s now standard for both spouses in a household to work, something that became the norm only in recent decades. In the 1960s, fewer than half of married couples were dual earners; today roughly two-thirds of married couples depend on both partners’ incomes to sustain the household[7]. That change brought more income in, but also new vulnerabilities. A dual-income family often has no one “home free” to pick up slack in a crisis. If one breadwinner loses a job or falls ill, the family may have no cushion left because the second earner was already a full participant in keeping the budget afloat. As one report noted, having a second income is less of a safety net today – when the husband’s earnings drop, the wife’s earnings often drop at the same time, rather than offsetting the loss[8]. Families are running “two engines” just to stay in place; if either fails, the whole train can derail.
It’s a paradox: by many macro-economic measures, things look solid. Unemployment is low and the stock market is high. Yet the subjective experience of the middle class is one of being squeezed. Over half of middle-income Americans say their incomes can’t keep up with the cost of living[9]. Barely 31% of non-retirees now feel their retirement planning is on track – a sharp drop in confidence from just a year prior[10]. And for the first time in generations, a majority of Americans believe their kids will be worse off, not better off, in the future[11]. These pressures form the backdrop of middle-class life in 2026: even when you’re doing “all the right things,” it’s harder than ever to get ahead, or even hold steady.
Shifting Risks onto Families
In previous decades, American middle-class life had its challenges, but certain risks were buffered by institutions – employers, government, community. Today those buffers are thinner, and families are shouldering heavier burdens of risk on their own. This “downward risk shift” means that a misstep or misfortune can have more devastating, non-recoverable consequences for a middle-class household than in the past.
One major shift has been in retirement security. A generation ago, many workers could count on defined-benefit pensions – reliable monthly checks in retirement, guaranteed by the employer. Now, pensions have largely been replaced by 401(k)s and IRAs, which are essentially DIY retirement plans subject to the whims of the stock market. This transfer of responsibility was intentional: companies moved away from pensions “to avoid the risks associated with providing guaranteed benefits”[12]. But “the flight from [pensions] to 401(k)s and IRAs did not make financial risks disappear; instead, it transferred the risks to individual workers”[13]. Workers are now expected to be their own pension fund managers. For those without sophisticated financial knowledge (i.e. most people), that means their retirement is much less secure. A market downturn just before you retire can wreck decades of savings – a risk that used to be absorbed by companies or pooled broadly is now squarely on each person’s shoulders.
The same pattern has played out in healthcare and education. Consider health insurance: employers and insurers have increasingly pushed high-deductible health plans coupled with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). The pitch was that giving consumers more “skin in the game” would encourage smarter healthcare spending[14]. In practice, it means families must pay thousands out-of-pocket before insurance truly kicks in. Deductibles have more than tripled in the past decade, rising from a few hundred dollars to well over $1,000 on average (over $2,500 for many workers)[15]. This shift has indeed given Americans skin in the game – sometimes at the cost of their skin. A Los Angeles Times analysis found that soaring deductibles have “pushed millions of families into medical bills they can’t afford, fueling anger and resentment”[16]. People are delaying care or rationing medicines because the upfront costs are too high. Middle-class workers with supposedly decent insurance now routinely face five-figure medical bills for events like a minor surgery or a complicated birth. Once again, the risk (and cost) has been shifted onto the individual. If you get seriously sick, you’d better have substantial savings or be prepared to take on debt – your insurance won’t save you until you’ve already paid a painful amount.
Even losing a job has become a riskier proposition. The gig economy and the decline of long-term employment mean fewer workers have stable employer benefits or strong unemployment protections. About one-third of U.S. workers are now engaged in some form of gig or freelance work, a share that could reach half the workforce within a few years[17]. Gig workers typically lack paid leave, health benefits, or consistent income. If they can’t work, there’s no safety net. Traditional employees aren’t immune either: layoffs can come swiftly in an era of “lean” staffing and automation, and finding a comparable new job often takes longer than it used to, leaving families in limbo. The days when you could work for one company your whole life (and count on them to take care of you in return) are largely over.
The cumulative effect of these changes is that middle-class life now has far less margin for error. In the 1970s, fewer than 4% of working-age Americans saw their year-to-year income drop by half or more; by the early 2000s, nearly 10% experienced such a precipitous one-year income collapse[18]. That means roughly one in ten families each year encounter a financial shock so large it cuts their income in half – an injury, a layoff, a divorce, something that in an earlier era might have been mitigated by union contracts, extended family support, or social insurance. Today, those safety nets are thinner. As political scientist Jacob Hacker famously put it, we’ve undergone a “Great Risk Shift,” where economic risks that used to be spread across society have been loaded onto individuals and families.
For middle-class households, this manifests as constant anxiety beneath the surface. The knowledge that one bad stroke of luck could derail years of effort changes how people live. It’s a quiet force narrowing their choices: you stick with a job you hate because the health benefits are keeping your family afloat; you decide not to start a business because you can’t afford to lose steady income; you hesitate to move for a better opportunity because what if it falls through? When every decision carries higher stakes, people understandably become more risk-averse. The irony is that this individual risk aversion can collectively lead to a more stagnant economy – but it’s hard to blame anyone for clinging to what little security they have, given the alternative.
An Economy of Extraction
Why have things become so rough for the middle tier? One fundamental reason is that we’ve drifted into what you might call an “extraction economy.” The fruits of economic growth are increasingly harvested by those at the very top, often at the direct expense of the middle and working classes. Wealth isn’t so much created and broadly shared as it is siphoned upward. The result is extreme concentration of income and wealth, and a middle class that is effectively hollowed out – losing its financial security and its voice.
The statistics on inequality are stark. The share of national income going to the richest 1% of Americans has doubled since 1980, while the share going to the bottom 50% has fallen by a third[19]. Put another way, the top 1% now take home about as much as the entire bottom half of the country combined. Wealth is even more skewed: as of 2024, the wealthiest 1% of Americans own nearly 50% of all stocks and financial assets, whereas the bottom 50% of Americans own just 1% of those assets[20]. This isn’t a temporary blip; it’s the culmination of decades of policy choices and economic changes that favored capital over labor, the investor class over the wage-earners. In the post-World War II era, productivity and wages rose together and the middle class expanded. But since the late 20th century, productivity kept rising while wages stagnated – the gains went into corporate profits, dividends, and CEO pay rather than workers’ paychecks.
Middle-class Americans increasingly find themselves paying into systems that don’t pay them back. They pay high rent or mortgages, which enrich landlords and banks. They pay insurance premiums and deductibles that bolster insurance company balance sheets even as coverage shrinks. They pay interest on student loans and credit cards that pads the finance industry’s bottom line. They buy essentials from quasi-monopolies – think cable companies or pharmaceutical firms – that can hike prices freely. In short, everyday life has become a series of extractions: wealth flowing upward in the form of interest, rent, fees, and profits, even as the typical family’s own net worth barely grows.
Homeownership, historically the great middle-class wealth builder, is a case study in extraction pressures. Housing prices have surged far faster than incomes, especially in thriving metro areas. Part of this is due to supply and demand, but there’s also a new player: big investors. Wall Street-backed firms have spent the past decade buying up single-family homes (especially during downturns when prices dipped), turning them into rental properties for profit. By 2022, investors were buying almost one-quarter of all single-family houses sold in the U.S.[21], a dramatic increase from years prior. This trend is pricing out many aspiring homeowners – young families often find themselves bidding not against another young family, but against an investment fund that can pay cash. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich quipped, “the rent checks Americans send to corporate landlords each month don’t stay in the local community; they go to Wall Street”. The Reuters news agency recently noted that since 2016, U.S. home prices have climbed about 75%, more than double the overall inflation rate in that period[22]. That means the dream of homeownership is stretching beyond reach, or trapping people into devoting a huge chunk of their income to mortgage payments – effectively transferring a lifetime of interest to financial institutions.
Meanwhile, corporate America is thriving by many measures. U.S. corporate profits after taxes hit an all-time high in recent years[23][24], and profit margins for S&P 500 companies have been at levels not seen in decades[25]. During the pandemic recovery, there was debate about “greedflation” – the idea that companies seized the moment of inflation to jack up prices more than their costs increased, thus widening profit margins. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that corporate profit-taking did contribute noticeably to the inflation spike of 2021[26]. While that specific effect eased in 2022, the broader picture remains: companies have found ways to keep productivity gains and pricing power for themselves, rather than passing them along to employees or consumers. In an extraction economy, any slack or surplus in the system is captured at the top.
All of this has deep social implications. When people feel the game is rigged or the ladder upwards is gone, it breeds frustration, cynicism, and political upheaval. Populist movements on both the left and right draw energy from this sense of economic betrayal. Elizabeth Warren summed it up by observing that after WWII, “we built an economy where workers shared in the bounty they helped create. Then we changed course. The result is an economy that works great for those at the very top and leaves everyone else hanging on by their fingernails.”[27] Her imagery of hanging on by their fingernails rings true for the current middle class: they are still clinging to the cliff, but the climb is getting harder and the fall is getting steeper.
Shorter Horizons and Deferred Dreams
One of the subtler effects of the middle-class squeeze is a compression of time horizons. Simply put, when the present is this precarious, it’s tough to plan for the future. People start focusing on the immediate challenges – this month’s bills, this year’s rent hike – rather than long-term goals like retirement, homeownership, or starting a business. The result is a generation (in fact, multiple generations now) that is often forced to live in the short term. Big life milestones are delayed, and some traditional aspirations shrink or disappear.
Consider the major life decisions that mark a stable middle-class trajectory: getting married, having children, buying a home. All are happening later in life now, and economic insecurity is a huge reason why. Millennials and Gen Z are marrying and starting families significantly later than their parents did, if at all. The oldest millennials turned 40 without buying homes or having kids at the rates previous generations did by that age[28][29]. As Fortune reported, “the costs of housing, health care, childcare, and education have all exploded, while wages haven’t kept pace,” which has “pushed back the average age at which millennials got married, started having kids, and bought homes”[28]. It’s not that young people don’t value those things; it’s that they feel they can’t afford them. Starting a family seems daunting when day care costs like a second rent payment. Buying a home feels unrealistic when you’ve spent years paying down student loans and rents keep climbing. Many are stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for a stability that never quite arrives.
Even when younger generations do reach those milestones, they do so with less confidence about the future. A Pew Research Center global survey found that in the United States, roughly 75% of adults believe today’s children will be financially worse off than their parents[11]. That pessimism is a sea change from the post-war American ethos of automatic progress. It suggests that, emotionally, people have adjusted their expectations downward. For the first time in modern memory, parents aren’t sure if their kids will achieve the same standard of living they did, let alone exceed it. And indeed, data on wealth accumulation bear out some of these worries: by their mid-30s, the average millennial has about 30% less wealth than the average Boomer had at the same age[29]. Younger generations are falling behind on building assets, in part because they got a later start (due to the Great Recession, student debt burdens, etc.) and in part because the costs of entry (home prices, etc.) have risen so high.
This dynamic creates a kind of truncated outlook. If you’re a 35-year-old who feels stuck renting with no hope of buying, you might think, why save aggressively? why not at least enjoy life now since the future is uncertain? Indeed, we’ve seen trends like the “YOLO economy” (you only live once) where some young adults, despairing of ever affording the classic milestones, decide to spend on travel or experiences in the present. Others go the opposite direction, hunkering down and giving up on pleasures to scrounge together any savings they can. Neither approach is exactly the confident long-term planning that economists or financial advisors would recommend. But it’s an understandable human reaction to an environment where the long term feels almost hypothetical. When stable careers are rare and prices unpredictable, making a 30-year plan seems futile or even naïve.
This shortening of time horizon also affects community and politics. People not settled in their own lives are less likely to invest in local institutions or plan far ahead for their community’s future. Why volunteer for the PTA if you’re not sure you’ll afford to stay in the school district next year? Why commit to a 30-year mortgage or bond issue for infrastructure when you have doubts about your own 30-year prospects? Sociologists worry that as more Americans live in a kind of provisional mode, social cohesion and civic engagement suffer. The focus shifts to “how do I get through this year?” rather than “where should our town or country be heading this decade?”
For the economy at large, time horizon compression can be toxic. Lower risk-taking and deferred investments (by both individuals and businesses wary of fickle demand) lead to slower growth. If young adults aren’t buying homes, that’s less construction and furnishings and local spending. If they aren’t having kids, that portends demographic challenges (a smaller future workforce supporting more retirees). We are already seeing historically low birth rates and slower household formation. These are personal choices, but they’re being made in context: high costs and uncertainty discourage people from taking on long-term commitments.
Ironically, older generations—who largely did enjoy more stability in their prime—are now witnessing their children navigate a much more volatile world. And that has psychological effects on them too: it’s not uncommon to hear Baby Boomer parents quietly helping adult children with expenses or housing, essentially extending the intergenerational support system further than in the past. Grandparents are picking up daycare duties to save their kids money, or co-signing loans. The social contract, where each generation confidently launches the next, is fraying. Instead we have something more like a patchwork safety net made of family ties and improvised solutions.
The New Generational Reality
These intertwined pressures—economic, social, temporal—have given rise to a new generational tone in America. It’s a tone colored by resilience and creativity on one hand, but also by frustration, anger, and loss of trust on the other. Millennials and Gen Z (and even younger Gen Xers) do not have the same baseline assumptions about life that the Boomers did. The narrative that if you work hard, you’ll be secure and maybe even affluent sounds to many like a bill of goods. Instead, younger generations often talk about systemic problems, about unfairness, about a need to fundamentally change course. The middle class collapse, in their eyes, isn’t a temporary glitch – it’s evidence of a broken system.
One defining feature of the generational tone is incredulity at inequality. Young people have come of age in the era of $100 billion tech moguls, of rampant inequality that’s impossible to ignore. They see headlines that the top 0.1% of U.S. households gained tens of millions in wealth per person over 30 years while the bottom 20% gained almost nothing[30][19]. They see that 40% of Americans – including nearly half of all children – are living in or near poverty[20] despite the nation being richer than ever. This breeds a sense of injustice. It’s not envy; it’s a feeling of betrayal. The promise that each generation would do better than the last has been broken, and the culprit, in many young people’s minds, is an economic system that rewards the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Polls reflect this: majorities of young Americans have favorable views of concepts like unionization, higher taxes on the rich, even “socialism” in the abstract, because they are searching for alternatives to a status quo that they’ve found wanting.
Another aspect of the generational mood is exhaustion and mental health strain. Chronic economic stress – juggling gig jobs, dealing with debt, lacking affordable healthcare – takes a psychological toll. Surveys find that Millennials and Gen Z report higher levels of anxiety and depression than older groups did at the same age, and financial stress is a big contributor. The term “burnout” has been popularized to describe young adults who feel they’ve been running a race with no finish line. When you graduate into a recession (as many Millennials did around 2008) or into a pandemic-disrupted economy (as Gen Z did), and then face hurdle after hurdle (student loans, housing bubbles, wage stagnation), it’s hard not to become cynical. The old advice like “just work harder” or “cut back on avocado toast” has become a bitter joke—young people know their plight is not due to lattes, but larger structural forces.
Crucially, not all hope is lost. Younger generations are also adapting in inspiring ways. They are delaying traditional milestones, yes, but sometimes to pursue education, experiences, or entrepreneurial ventures that might pay off later. They are vocal about issues previous generations tiptoed around—calling for affordable college, climate action, healthcare reform, racial and gender equity—precisely because they feel the old normal didn’t work for them. In workplaces, Gen Z is pushing for better work-life balance and flexibility, challenging the “live to work” ethos. In politics, record numbers of young people have been turning out to vote, organize, and even run for office, driven by the urgency of problems like student debt and climate change. It’s a generation forged by adversity, and that can produce determination as much as despair.
Still, the dominant tone is urgency. The stakes feel high because they are high. There’s a sense that if we don’t change course soon, the American middle class – that engine of a healthy democracy and economy – could be a relic. And indeed, older Americans are increasingly recognizing this too. Three-quarters of Americans, across age groups, agree that the next generation is in for a tougher time[11]. That shared concern could itself be a basis for collective action, if harnessed. After all, the fortunes of generations are intertwined: millennials and Gen Z will be the ones supporting the retiring Boomers via the economy and taxes; if they’re not thriving, everyone’s future is dimmer.
In some ways, the generational divide is also a myth – it’s more of a class divide that spans ages. The Fortune analysis of wealth by generation noted that while the average young adult has much less wealth than in the past, “the richest 10% of millennials have 20% more wealth than the richest boomers did at the same age.”[29] In other words, affluent millennials are doing just fine – it’s their less affluent peers who are drowning. This mirrors the country at large: a relatively small slice is doing better than ever, while the majority are struggling to tread water. The generational story is important, but it overlaps with the broader story of inequality.
What’s clear is that the tone of public discourse is shifting. The era of unquestioned optimism and deference to “the market” has given way to pointed questions: What happened to the middle class? Is the American Dream still real? Those questions are now at the center of our politics and culture. And the way we answer them – the policies and narratives we choose – will define the character of America for decades to come.
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My Own Time Ω
In my lifetime, I’ve stood my ground and watched the world change around me gradually to the point where it is feeling unrecognizable. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own house and that can be an uncomfortable recognition. It has been a gradual change that isn't noticeable from day to day, but there are times where you feel the ground shifting beneath you feet.
In my world, I believe that this place belongs to the creator -- a force greater than all of us. It doesn't belong to any of us, even if some people try to make it happen. That force is silent, but it demands recognition and the force hates being ignored. My role here is to talk about issues that demand recognition.
One reality is that you own your presence here and you need to take responsibility for that. My platforms are the communication of my personal presence. They are a force majeure. These communications are larger than any physical body presence I can provide to the community ecosystem, because these communiques are rooted in history, deep research, and physical memory. I am doing my part to be an agent of change through words and philosophy that we find a way to shift into action. I have been writing about this community memory that deserves to be acknowledged. I talked about community memory in the Factions of Self Preservation, Structural Schisms, and Hickory 101 and 102 series. It is our obligation to always remember our past and to preserve the community's DNA.
Many of us were raised to believe in a certain arc of life: get an education, work hard, buy a house, raise a family, retire comfortably. Our nation built economies based on those dynamics and now the Economic Titans of this age are so greedy that they are pricing us out of this architecture.
It was never supposed to be easy, but it was supposed to be possible for anyone willing to put in the effort. Now I look around and see friends and neighbors doing what they are supposed to and things not working out.
The overarching theme of what we’re exploring here is one of narrowing opportunities and heightened risks. The path to a stable life has become steep and littered with traps – a medical bill, a layoff, a rent hike, a wrong turn – each carrying the potential for an irreversible setback. In an imperfect world we have to allow people to make mistakes that allow them a morgin of error that doesn't ruin them.
We have seen the tunnel that used to lead to the American Dream growing dimmer and tighter, and now it is almost as if people are having to try to escape the other side before the tunnel completely collapses and they are buried alive with no chance to escape. That is the claustrophobic feeling of anxiety the present economy is creating.
People want to be positive and believe in the system, but the Economic Titans at the top aren't looking out for our interests and it's almost as if they look at us as adversaries. They're playing Monopoly and we're the pices on the board.
Why does this matter so much right now? Because we’re at a breaking point. For a while, people can absorb hardship quietly, tightening the belt another notch, convincing themselves it’s just them who need to work harder. But when the majority starts to feel the squeeze, the pressure doesn’t dissipate – it builds. We see it in the collective anger at how things are. We see it in political turbulence, with folks gravitating to leaders (on the left and right) who at least acknowledge their pain. We here and acknowledge friends and colleagues complaints. This isn't public acrimony. For the most part it is under the radar, but there’s a growing realization that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. That realization can fuel positive change – or destructive behavior – but it isn’t going to go away on its own without acknowledgement.
On a personal level, I think about resilience. My grandparents lived through the Depression and World War II; they emerged with a resilience and contributed to an era of broad prosperity. My generation’s trials are different – slower, perhaps less visible day to day, but corrosive: the constant stress of economic insecurity, the feeling of running in place. Are we developing resilience, or are we burning out? Honestly, I see signs of both. I see young people innovating, finding new ways to thrive in the cracks of a broken system. I also see good people exhausted and demoralized, giving up on dreams.
When I talk to high school and college students today, they have less focus on the big individual issues of life and more of a collective focus that can become scattered and much harder to affect on any personal level. Many of them are tapping out on the things people of my generation always felt we could control. They are still going to school and looking to better themselves, but the educational focus seems a lot less practical and more abstract. I think a lot of that has to do with the lack of a solid job market on the other side to focus on as a goal.
These Gen Z's and Alpha's have an outlook on life that is markedly more sober than mine was at their age. They are realists in a harsher reality. Of course, I didn't have to deal with going to school during a pandemic where everyone was practically caged in isolation. Most of these younger folks don't even understand the world that shaped their socioeconomic reality, like 9/11 or the 2008 Economic Collapse and subsequent "Great Recession."
I still have hope because I am a builder. History has shown that America’s middle class is not a naturally occurring phenomenon – it was built by deliberate choices, from the GI Bill to labor laws to investments in education and infrastructure. In my lifetime, we’ve made other deliberate choices (or drifted without choosing) that have eroded that middle class. We have seen a lot of stagnation, erosion, and destruction and we need to shift back to a nation that chooses to focus on rebuilding.
As I finish writing this, I keep coming back to a simple truth: a healthy society needs a healthy middle class. It’s not just about money; it’s about dignity, stability, and hope. The middle class is where different parts of America meet – white collar and blue collar, urban and suburban and rural. It’s the glue that holds the American project together. If we let that glue dry out and crack, the whole structure is at risk: our economy, our society, our sense of common purpose.
So here we are in 2026, at the crossroads of middle-class collapse and generational transformation. The story is not finished. In my own time, I’ve seen enough to be sobered by how bad it can get – but also encouraged by glimmers of renewal. The stakes are clear now. The quiet squeeze has become loud enough that we can’t ignore it. The task ahead is daunting: to widen the path forward so that those conceptual anchors we discussed – the ability to build a stable life, to take risks without ruin, to share in prosperity, to plan for tomorrow, and to believe in the future – are restored for the many, not just the few.
I’ll admit, there are nights I lie awake worrying about where we’re headed. But then morning comes, and we get up and carry on – and in that daily persistence, I see the foundation of something better. It’s the same stubborn resilience my grandparents had, repurposed for a new era. Our job now is to match that Depression Era —resilience with reforms and imagination. If we can do that, the middle class might not just survive, but find its own time again – a time of renewed possibility, where the American Dream isn’t a nostalgic memory but a living reality being built anew, one family and one generation at a time.
Sources: Consolidated Numbered References
