As a psychiatrist, you can often step out of the bubble you find yourself in. I worked for many years in rural areas and spent a significant number of hours discussing the emotional lives of male and female blue-collar workers. That was when I learned most of our patients don’t have psychological problems — they have life problems. And how they felt about their professions and their work was an ineradicable pathogen, causing something like a blister that is never allowed to heal.
In my current bubble, an affluent leftist environment, almost everyone belongs to “the laptop class.” They are the ones who can work from anywhere, negotiate comfortable flexible office/home-office structures where they only interact with fellow white-collars. They think climate change is the worst threat to us and release a suffering sigh at the barista when they don’t serve oat milk. According to Marc Andreessen, they are best described as “Western upper-middle-class professionals who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs.”
The other day I was arguing against affirmative action and equality measures with laptop class friends. In my attempt to explain to them how blue-collar workers are affected by, for instance, the taxation policies needed to provide the things they were calling for, I tried inspiring empathy for those workers. I described the hardships my patients experienced and their desire for another life. How they grinned and bore work conditions that would never
