There was a meme that was popular when I was in college 15 years ago that went like this: “Social life, enough sleep, good grades: Pick two.”
This was the self-pitying, self-aggrandizing battle cry of the striver class, in which I grew up. I’m from upper Manhattan, and I went to an uber-elite private school attended by the children of banking CEOs, Trumps, Schumers; it was unthinkable that I or any of my classmates would find ourselves among the 62 percent of Americans without a college degree.
To be part of this class is to have absorbed the idea that—while there was a time when the highest rung on the social ladder was the “idle rich”—today it is high status to be either extremely busy or, at least, giving the impression of it; in college, friends I visited at Columbia and Yale would talk about how much time they’d spent at the library. These days, a lot of my former classmates are elite members of the “laptop class”: They write politicians’ speeches, they move millions around on Wall Street, they work as lawyers honing major corporate deals. Since school, our values haven’t changed: we still humblebrag about how we’re too busy to sleep, or see friends, except now we’re trying to get promotions, not good grades. We boast about staying up until 3 a.m. working, but on a brief or an account, not an essay. Signaling membership in the striver class means discussing life as a just barely solvable logistics problem.