92 | What "Making It" Doesn't Fix

So I'm not going to say it all started with, but something came to a head when I opened my inbox a few days ago.

I want to say it might have been just while I was in the midst of my trip back home.

Let me actually check because I want to be accurate about the timing of like where I was in this setting.

Yeah, I opened up my inbox on a Tuesday morning.

I am back in my hometown, small Midwestern town in Southern Illinois, reliving my youth, honestly, through all these different touch points, being in my household, my parents' household, excuse me, I'm growing up in my own household, but being in their house under their roof.

And I'm opening up this email because the subject line reads, the death of the middle.

So this is one of a handful of sub stacks that I follow.

I'm not heavy into sub stack, but I've got like a small number of heavy hitters that I tune into.

And because I'm, you know, we got to be thoughtful about what's coming into our inbox.

But this is, this is one of them.

The author of this piece is Eugene Healy.

And he is someone who is a, I guess I call him like a scholar of culture and specifically how brands and consumerism and all that stuff sort of plays into or reflects what's happening in the broader culture, which obviously all that connects to like the economy and politics and everything.

Just what we're going through, mostly from, I'll call it a North American perspective, because I believe he's Canadian, but a lot of the brands he speaks about in his work are American, or I should say from the US.

And so I opened this email because the subject line just caught me, the death of the middle.

And it's because I didn't know what he was speaking about necessarily.

I had some early thoughts about it, but I myself have been feeling, I think, a lot of... angst and just like a lot of my own questions around what it means to be in the middle of In the middle as a brand, in the middle in terms of socioeconomic status, being middle class, and the disappearance of said class.

And just, yeah, just in the middle.

And so I was like, well, let me read this and see what he's talking about.

So it's a really wonderful piece.

If you're on Substack, you should check him out and you can read it for yourself.

It goes quite in depth about...

And it's, again, through the lens of like brands and what is shifting.

But the title in of itself is enough.

It was enough to trigger me really around just the notion of how this middle is disappearing.

And I think the number that it is playing on me, and I think also to some extent, not explicitly something that I've been discussing with my clients, but it's in the atmosphere.