This article puts into words a conglomoration of experiences and thoughts I've had over and over, but never really considered together as a concept. "To be mid

This article puts into words a conglomoration of experiences and thoughts I've had over and over, but never really considered together as a concept. "To be middle-middle class, you need to have all the correct opinions.... This requires memorizing endless lists of taboos and shibboleths, which is a conspicuous waste of time. “The news” and the political internet are tools for this. The high cost of keeping track of all that meaningless noise, and the ease of verifying it by asking your opinion of last night’s synthetic outrage event, makes it an effective signal. To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for." To take this further, I think the New Upper Middle Class signaling strategy is to be conspicuosly ignorant of the latest "synthetic outrage" -- "I don't have a TV" is a refrain that comes to mind. "I don't have Facebook" is another. Then again, I find myself directly in between these two: a news junkie devoted to understanding "what really matters in the world." That is, my signaling strategy is to have the right opinions about the right topics while publically rejecting the wrong topics (and, in a non-confrontational way, the wrong opinons). It's a way to signal opennesss (an agreeable trait) while maintaining sufficient cost.