I have hated being bourgeois my whole life. But it seemed sort of like hating my race – I didn’t think I could change my social class. Bourgeois people just seemed so unhappy. They tried to keep up with the Joneses, but there was always another Jones. They drank and acted badly, but were convinced they were superior to people who smoked pot, smoked crack, or didn’t drink or take drugs at all. They didn’t believe in any God or values except ambition and materialism. They competed and had insomnia from not being able to stop thinking about competition. They took antidepressants, got divorced, were anorexic, lived alone, went into debt, neglected their old parents, neglected their siblings. They were stressed. They were anxious. They were rushed.  

There are some good things about being bourgeois. Wine is good. Italian food is good. French food is good. Thai food is good. Sushi. Anchorsteam and imported beers. It’s nice to go out to dinner occasionally, to go to bars. Cappuccinos are lovely, with their frothy milk. BMWs are fun to drive. It feels great to have an expensive haircut and highlights. Vacations are important, foreign travel. Going to foreign films and repertory films. Affording live music concerts. I can’t afford these things anymore, except when I pay for them by credit card, but now my credit is running out. It’s not really important why this happened to me, I am not special. It’s happening to a lot of formerly bourgeois people. OH, I forgot: the BEST thing about being bourgeois is not having to work your way through college. Thanks mom and dad!

I’ve been prevented from bourgeois living before – when I was 24 I was broke for a year, when I was 28 I was broke for four months. Both times it terrified me. I was brought up to fear being less than bourgeois. Anything less was dirty, sinful, degenerate. It meant failure. Failure to comply with the expectations of our social class. Not reading the newspaper everyday meant rapid atrophying of the brain. Not having a job with caché meant mediocrity. Not eating three square meals full of expensive vegetables meant imminent ill health. Drinking Budweiser was the end of the world. I guess I thought of myself like one of those Yamaguchi plastic toy pets. I needed these things to live, and if I didn’t have them, I started to die. I didn’t really die, of course, but I believed I was dying — shame was killing me. Shame because I believed I was a failure for not doing bourgeois things, because I subscribed to bourgeois groupthink.

Belief is powerful. I learned in high school that in Papua New Guinea men die of heart attacks if women step over them, just because they convince themselves that it will kill them to be walked over by women. There was a guy from my hometown who threw himself in front of a train after being laid off. But the guy wasn’t actually suffering yet – his family was still alive, still healthy, still eating, children still in college, he was still eating, they still had cars. He was preemptively avoiding the shame that would come when they had to downsize, shame that came from the belief that anything less than bourgeois status is dirty, sinful, degenerate, or something like that.

Shame is not unique to the bourgeoisie, every culture and class has it. In Congo, women feel shame after being raped. Their parents and siblings are ashamed of them for being raped. And men don’t want to marry them. That kind of shame is just as asinine as the kind that made my neighbor jump in front of a train. But we aren’t logical. We care what other people think of us. We are social creatures. And when we are cast out, we self-destruct.  

It’s not an alternative to postulate that everything would be better if we didn’t care what other people think, because for most mortals, that’s impossible. I lived in Alaska and I met very few happy hermits who had isolated themselves out in the woods. For the most part they were miserable and insane, and had to commute from the woods to the same therapist I saw.

But, we can decide to care what different people think. In my case, I can’t be bourgeois because I can’t afford it. And now that I’m free from that bullshit, I’m actually starting to feel relieved. I have put a great deal of thought into whose opinions do matter to me, who I consider to be my tribe, my social class, call it what you will. This is building the creation myth. God knows the bourgeoisie have their own very powerful creation myth. Any sports game can mesmerize a person into bourgeois groupthink, any amenity. Luxury, winning, the admiration of others, these are seriously powerful incentives to be bourgeois! But then just remember the anorexic girl who dies from not eating when she has access to any and all food, or the young man who has moved to a town in a state where he knows no one and has never lived or even visited before just to take a job and move up on the ladder, sitting alone night after night in his almost empty apartment without family around.   

My creation myth is about 90% complete now, and I dig it. It seems to me to be the perfect creation myth for a creative formerly bourgeois person living through a recession. Every recession/depression/warzone has its tales of sacrifice — renting out the spare room, using the car as a cab, working as a nanny, eating bone marrow, moving in with grandma, and so on. They don’t have to be tales of woe. Friends, bourgeois people everywhere, take heart as I have! The myth is based off of the post-war Italy of Fellini films, and also the biographies of actors that were featured in them.  

These people were orphans, prostitutes, single mothers, or fish-mongers. They sold vegetables, or worked as itinerant singers. They lived in large doomsday housing projects on the outskirts of Rome surrounded by vacant lots and tumbleweed and gangs of teenagers. But they had whimsical hearts, and since they had never been taught that they should have amenities like loving parents, lots of food or transistor radios, they weren’t ashamed that they didn’t have them. They sang and they turned tricks, played the accordion and walked to the beach, lived and died, but they weren’t tragic. Here are a few of them:

Alba Ballard Her early years sound like Fellini’s “La Strada.” She was born Alba Spinetto near Venice in 1928, the sixth child of a variety-theater family that sang, danced and clowned as Compagnia Spinetto.Even as a girl she showed an aptitude for training animal acts, including a baby wolf she named Bobi. Surviving years of hardship during World War II and afterward, she met Marvin Ballard, an American engineer, in Vicenza, where they married and had a son, Claudio, in 1958. They moved to the United States in 1963 and settled in Huntington, in the house where her husband and son still live.

Giuliette Masina Born in San Giorgio di Piano in 1921, Giulietta Masina spent part of her teenage years living with a widowed aunt in Rome, where she cultivated a passion for the theatre and studied for a degree in Philosophy. She began her career on the radio with the programme “Terzoglio” (1942), which brought her great success with the adventures of the newlyweds “Cico and Pallina” from scripts written by Federico Fellini. The following year she married Fellini and became the inspirational muse for many of his films.

Anna Magnani was an Italian stage and film actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress, along with four other international awards, for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo. Magnani was born in Rome to an Egyptian father, Francesco Magnani, and an Italian-Jewish mother, Marina Casadei. She was raised by her maternal grandmother in a slum district of Rome. Her formal education lasted only until age 14, when she enrolled in a French convent school in Rome. There, she learned to speak French and play piano, which she later played expertly. She also developed a passion for acting from watching the nuns stage their Christmas play.

She was a “plain, frail child with a forlornness of spirit” which affected her grandparents who pampered her with food and clothes. While growing up she felt more at ease around “more earthly” companions, often befriending the “toughest kid on the block.” This trait carried over into her adult life where she proclaimed, “I hate respectability. Give me the life of the streets, of common people.”