Why are middle-class kids so miserable?
Watch this video for the explanation...
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Why are middle-class kids so miserable?
Watch this video for the explanation…..
This week, social media was awash with a viral video of Daniel Markovitz, the brilliant Yale professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap, whose compelling speech at the Oxford Union three years ago resonated deeply online. Markovitz offers perhaps the clearest dissection yet of how meritocracy, far from opening doors, has evolved into an elite system, creating exclusivity based largely on inherited wealth. But there’s another facet he highlights here, one that rarely gets serious attention: how wealthy middle-class children, supposedly the victors of this system, are also its victims.
Markovitz lays bare a paradox at the heart of modern economic privilege: "You will be wealthy, but you will not be well." The spontaneous applause from his Oxford audience on show here (many of whom have lived this exhausting journey) underscores the recognition behind his words. These students, elite yet weary, grew up relentlessly "poked, prodded," and burdened with tutors, exams, and an escalating sense of pressure from a strikingly young age - with little time for play or downtime. It's telling that in Britain today, exam anxiety has overtaken body image as the primary source of stress among teenagers. Yet how much do we dwell on the pressures of social media? And how little do we focus on our overwhelming exam system?
It may seem counter-intuitive to focus on the challenges of being privileged, but if this is you, your kids or if you work in a professional workplace, you will no doubt recognise these symptoms and causes.
‘You will be wealthy, but you will not be well.’
How did we get here? Richard Reeves, author of Dream Hoarders, describes how in the last twenty years parenting has shifted profoundly from a noun into a verb. It's not enough to simply "be" a parent; now, one must actively "parent." As wealth inequality deepened, and social mobility slowed to a crawl, anxious middle-class parents doubled down on investing in their children’s futures - from the earliest years of childhood and well beyond the age of 18. Success became not just desirable but essential, a protection against the threat of downward mobility in an economy with increasingly closing doors. And as with any investment—stocks, property, or in this case, children—expectations within families soared.
This hyper-investment mindset didn’t discriminate between the privately educated and those in state schools. Private school fees quadrupled over two decades, pushing this option firmly out of reach for all but the wealthiest families. In response, state education became a proxy battleground. There has been a running joke in the Department of Education for years that it has been hostage to the wills and wants of middle-class parents.
But it wasn’t just in schools where this was being felt but also in housing, with areas with outstanding schools inflating dramatically. By 2017, a quarter of British parents moved homes solely to secure better school places and tutoring—once a luxury—became routine. Families used to move for better jobs; now they move for better schools. But school was just the start. Extracurricular activities, camps and tutoring also became the norm. In 2005, just 18% of children received private tuition; today, it’s a staggering one-third, creating a £2 billion industry that mocks the very idea of equal opportunity in state education.
All this parental investment was entirely understandable but more to the point increasingly normalised and widespread. But it has had consequences. US clinical psychologist Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege, exposes how middle-class parenting in America has inadvertently cultivated a generation plagued by anxiety and depression at three times the rate of their less affluent peers. These children grew up disconnected, locked into an endless cycle of competitive exams, extracurricular overload, and limited exposure to the realities of life beyond school gates. The same happened in the UK. Significantly, the number of teenagers holding part-time jobs dropped from 42% in 1997 to just 18% in 2014, underscoring their increasing isolation from the practical world - the rise of homework has been as important as the rise of social media in facilitating this.
I'm aware I'm making broad generalisations here, and I'm certainly not looking to denounce education entirely, criticize parents, or trivialize mental health struggles. But we must acknowledge how dramatically childhood changed with the economy and how parental pressure evolved with it. By the time these young adults reach 21 and enter the workplace, many are already emotionally exhausted. They have had their entire childhood shaped by relentless competition, measuring their worth through achievement rather than experience. The harsh reality is this: many middle-class young people today enter adulthood equipped for success and achievement yet ill-prepared for life and the realities of work. And these are the people that are coming through your corporate doors; because they’ve had access to the path that enables them to walk in - the rest haven’t.
It’s important to stress that there’s often a different mode of pressure in first or second-generation immigrant families. The tendency of immigrant communities to view education and the stable professions as attractive routes can stem as much from a desire to reverse the initial downward mobility that frequently happens with migration but can also be an understandable commitment to betterment and stability for the next generation. There’s also a less tangible factor at play: the idea of conforming to the ‘good immigrant’ stereotype and the ‘model minority’ myth. As one of my interviewees for Inheritocracy stated when talking about her own journey into a high-pressured legal career: ‘As children of immigrants, there’s an undercurrent pressure to “prove” our value to society and being highly educated and in respected professions is a short-cut and sure-fire way of doing that.’ In her late twenties, she found herself questioning this societal expectation and left the profession entirely to pursue her own creative project.
So, if you find yourself exasperated by young Gen Z colleagues at work who seem simultaneously privileged yet unhappy or perplexed by their seeming reluctance to overwork maybe like you did, then this is part of the explanation. If those benefiting from the "Bank of Mum and Dad" resist recognizing their inherent advantages, it’s often because the narrative they've absorbed is one of relentless expectation, not ease.
Ultimately, our meritocratic society, or better termed "inheritocracy," is failing even its supposed winners. We've raised a generation pressured to achieve at the expense of genuine well-being, producing wealth without wellness, success without joy. The middle-class misery of today’s youth isn’t just an individual problem; it’s symptomatic of a broken social promise in which we all lose.
The Reading Room
In recent weeks we have heard much about the growing cultural divide between the US and Europe, a gap frequently underscored by misunderstandings about what America is actually like. European political commentators, raised on The West Wing, fixate on Washington politics in a way they rarely do with those in Paris, Berlin or Beijing, and often create an incomplete picture of American life to boot.
My recommendation? Watch Love is Blind, for a deep insight into contemporary American culture. The contrast with the UK series couldn’t be more apparent. In the US version of the match-making show, its religion, politics and family expectations (especially parental pressure) are at the forefront of discussions and the reason for the union or its eventual collapse. Notably, there's a striking contrast between the progressive views of the women and the conservative attitudes of the male participants, especially around expectations of feminine purity—views that I imagine just wouldn’t be uttered in the UK. Nonetheless, Love is Blind may offer a more authentic cultural snapshot of America today than many political commentators.
If Love is Blind doesn’t float your boat, and are looking for a fresh angle to understand what's driving the current mood in America, look no further than Garbage Day's recent edition, "UFC and the Beating Heart of Trumpism." Ryan Broderick offers a razor-sharp analysis of how UFC President Dana White and popular YouTubers like the Nelk Boys have reshaped modern American masculinity, merging it with conservative politics. It's worth reading for this quote alone:
And now he and every other weird muscle man that comes to UFC fights are all aligned in their hatred of women and deep desire to feel masculine and powerful. A sea of, usually, very bald men in tight shirts that want to hurt the world and be celebrated for it. But if you drill further down into their ideology you’ll also find the same thing every time. Someone who is trying to get rich, has failed every thing they’ve tried, and realized that manipulating sad internet men was the easiest way to do it.
Thanks for reading,
Eliza
Brilliant as ever Eliza, thank you. I’m approaching putting my PhD proposal together which is looking more and more like a study on class in the music industry. Would it be possible to email you about it?