Originally, this essay was supposed to be about the futility of extreme New Year’s resolutions. There were going to be jokes about announcing your intent to leave Instagram on Instagram; reflections on the cultural amnesia of skidding into yet another January 1 with a vague commitment to “meditate daily,” only to duly abandon it by March. It was going to explore the way in which we doggedly persevere anyway, and how endearing I find the determination to individualize the same maladies year after year. Something-something “neoliberalism,” right?
But then, during the research (read: scrolling) phase, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how “The American worker is becoming more productive” and, against my better judgment, opened its batshit comments section. For reasons that will soon become evident, this misstep incinerated my editorial plan. I needed to figure out, with some Totally Real and Very Serious investigative journalism, the answer to a suddenly urgent question: What on Earth do these people want?
The Wall Street Journal is notable in the sense that it’s ostensibly a publication about business and finance for educated, upper-class readers (the digital-only subscription is $38.99/month after the introductory year). While other business news orgs like CNBC produce the spectacle Mad Money with infamous meme guru Jim Cramer, the Journal collects Pulitzers. If there were ever a media outfit serious about upholding the interests of capital, it is this one, featuring the ground zero of global markets—Wall Street—in its name. This is the newspaper of record for the status quo. That’s what makes the phenomenon of its notoriously incensed commenters so fascinating.
I needed to know more about this group that seemed so preternaturally pissed off at everyone and everything, yet simultaneously hellbent on everything remaining exactly the same. It turns out the average net worth of a Journal subscriber (which you must become, if you’d like to comment) is, per their classified advertising request form, $2.9 million. This media kit states that it’s “#1” in reaching “the most affluent individuals.” An audience profile one-sheeter from 2017 reported that 81% of its readers have graduated college, more than double the population-level rate. Seventy-five percent of them are male, and they are, on average, 59 years old. (The remaining 25% are, I can only assume, nosy 30-year-old female finance bloggers.) If there were ever a group that should feel pleased with the state of the world, a world their (presumably) preferred economic system has wrought, it’s these folks: its rich, educated winners.
The article that caused my writing plan to veer off a cliff was mundane. It demonstrated the way in which the American workforce is becoming more efficient, and therefore more productive, using a banal example of a gym owner in Boston who tapped artificial intelligence to generate social media captions and marketing emails. It rattled off some rote economic indicators and reviewed standard definitions of labor productivity, as well as post-pandemic changes to the workforce.
I would have expected the typical wealthy, shareholding Journal reader to respond enthusiastically to this information—their capital hard (and smart) at work! But at the end of this milquetoast report, I found 423 people who seized the opportunity to bemoan everything from “moochers” and “illegal alien invasions” (the piece mentioned immigration in the section about workforce trends) to customer service representatives whose first language isn’t English and airline seats getting smaller.
Once I started reading the comments, I couldn’t stop. I was a woman possessed by the misdirected ire of Keiths and Jims and Bills the world over. Nowhere else on the internet will you find a readership this devoted to articulating their scorn for random stuff. These people are locked in, putting up numbers you wouldn’t believe. It’s a hater’s paradise! You could spend all of your waking hours stationed next to a jammed vending machine located beside a flooded bathroom inside the most backlogged DMV in America and still never encounter a more grievance-forward group.
Another popular front page article that day detailed a move from the U.S. surgeon general to add cancer warnings on alcoholic beverages, in much the same way tobacco products have extensive health risk labels. It pointed out that such a warning was almost added in 1986, but ultimately abandoned thanks to lobbying from the alcohol industry (a story that’s as American as apple pie-flavored vodka).
I assumed the comments section—always so readily endorsing personal responsibility and austere discipline—would delight in this open acknowledgment of alcohol’s degenerative social harms. But what did the 1,159 comments, accrued within the first seven hours of publishing, have to add, you might ask? Such a warning was both evidence of a “nanny state” and critiqued for not going far enough, asking where was this same government scrutiny for (the federally illegal) marijuana? What about the potheads, they demanded to know. They complained about the devious machinations of some amorphous Marxist force, they complained about Hunter Biden’s laptop, they complained that openly fat-shaming people was now “politically incorrect.” They railed against California, cellphones, and lunch meat. And those were just the comments visible when sorted by “Most Liked.” (Recall that this article was about warning labels on liquor.)
In the chatter below an article about chronic pain, I expected to find readers commiserating about the inescapable effects of aging or the challenging gap between employer insurance and Medicare coverage. Instead, they fantasized about UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione eating “prison slop,” a chain of replies under which a man named RICK KESLER gleefully upped the ante: “Cold prison slop!” (Those were the tamest instances of schadenfreude; others were so graphic I cannot repeat them here without getting flagged by your email provider.) Another decried “leftist, free-market hating malcontents” who he felt were insufficiently appreciative of the spoils of American healthcare. Strangely, many of these comments began by detailing the commenter’s own harrowing, painful experience with the US healthcare system.
Because most people comment under their first and last names (inexplicably, often IN ALL CAPS LIKE THIS), you can look up the source of any given polemic. This allowed me to learn that “Tom,” the first commenter whom I selected at random, had shared his displeasure on nine separate articles in the previous 24 hours alone. Over the holidays, he averaged four comments per day. (No days off.)
If you waste an afternoon doing this, as I did, it becomes easy to predict which articles will whip up the most frenzied pile-ons: a piece about millennials being lazy and entitled? Slam dunk. When I noticed the detail toward the end of the piece about the 39-year-old woman who refuses to “give up luxuries” (like “her Spotify subscription,” cost: $11.99 per month) so she could afford a home, I braced myself. Things were about to get ugly. Sure enough: 2,211 comments. The most-liked read, “Sure, life is expensive. But it always was and always will be. Instead of buying $1,300 phones every year, having your food delivered to you by DoorDash and driving $70,000 Teslas, maybe scrabble a little bit and save money as all of our parents did,” to which a dude named Keith replied, “All about choices. Period. Full stop.” If there were ever a motto for this subscriber base, it’s definitely, “All about choices, period, full stop.”
More broadly, this comments section represents the way in which the predictive power of socioeconomic status has fractured into incoherence: no longer an orderly division of generational or class interests, but something more illegible and aimless. To some extent, this is typical of any internet forum, but nowhere else is the demographic and tonal mismatch so apparent, disproportionate, or manic. Every time I thought the readers might zig in celebration of their beloved capitalism producing the expected results (lower labor costs! increased productivity!), they zagged to decry everything from women in the workforce to processed food.
Regardless of the subject matter in a given article, you can almost always find more than a few commenters blaming the phenomenon at hand on Big Woke or, more commonly and bewilderingly, socialism. These accusations are spurious, as the frequent targets of their anger (smaller airline seats, outsourced jobs, young people failing to succeed, health insurance premiums, corporate price-gouging, low-quality food, “life being expensive”) are produced not by the Democratic Socialist Republic of America, but the existing one: Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan’s cursed 40-year-old lovechild. Still, despite the thick atmospheric layer of dissatisfaction, they never seem to want anything to actually change.
In defense of the private health insurers: Nicholas writes, “Capitalism is not responsible for potential treatments being withheld from people. [It’s] the sole reason that these treatments exist in the first place.” (You’re exactly halfway there!) About Netflix restricting their formerly year-long paid family leave policy, which was only slightly longer than the OECD average for parental leave: M. Wood says, “So [the Netflix staff] are crying ‘mommy, mommy’ because Netflix is cutting their ONE YEAR PAID LEAVE? Only the left can live in such a fantasy world and think it’s their birthright to have a one-year paid leave in a country where so many are unemployed or living under the poverty line.” (So close, yet so far!)
As I scrolled through one prolific discussion after another, I got the sense these self-styled realists see their role as the rightful winners in a game they don’t seem to realize they dislike—forever embroiled in battle with an imaginary enemy army of snowflakes and DEI consultants responsible for everything from inflation to falling birth rates. In this worldview, the problem is not that “so many are unemployed or living under the poverty line,” but that someone would dare suggest a “fantasy world” in which parental leave exists. I couldn’t help but wonder: Shouldn’t the self-appointed defenders of the status quo—“it always was and always will be”—be a little happier with the status quo?
Me, 37 comments sections deep, except sans cigarette (thanks to those nanny state FDA warning labels!).
Despite spending my afternoon in the Wall Street Bull’s pen, I felt no more clarity about what it is this rarefied demographic actually wants. Their resentments accrue to a disorganized protest that self-reportedly loves American capitalism but appears to hate the society and people it has produced. Wealth and education do not appear to soften this dejection—and on some level, they seem to sense something, somewhere, has gone awry. But if you refuse to acknowledge that a larger or more complex force than “all choices, period, full stop” might be generating these trends at scale, all you’re left with is the belief that individual people (or entire generations and movements) are lazy, stupid, or evil. I can see why that might make someone angry; how it could poison your perspective on everything from low-wage work to cancer warnings on Budlight.
For a long time, I feared my exposure to alternative economic ideas and systems-based thinking had made me cynical, nostalgic for the days of being an empty vessel for meritocracy. Life was simpler when I accepted, whole cloth, the legitimacy of a perfectly just, hard work-rewarding world. Back then, I perceived my success in money and business (as a healthy, able-bodied person who grew up the sole progeny of two financially dependable, college-educated people who prioritized things like private school and home-cooked dinners and ACT classes) as evidence of a fair-minded distribution of spoils to those who were most inherently deserving, not proof of the opposite. (Born on second base, thought she hit a double, etc.)
But then a few weeks ago—whilst our boy Tom the Commenter was surely clocking in for his daily shift banging out fan fiction about Nancy Pelosi or college protesters or whatever—I received a message from a reader that said, “I started with you from the very beginning and was interested in the same initial materials you were writing and talking about. And then I watched you evolve and grow and saw your material success and had a moment of, ‘Dang, this girl is accomplishing so much and making so much money, and I’m trapped here in my healthcare job with a firm income ceiling and nowhere to grow.’ I felt this frustration with not being able to keep up in the same ways financially as people I saw online. And then you kept learning and opened my eyes to systems-based thinking and my whole perspective shifted—I started focusing less on individual wealth accumulation and more on the ‘why’ behind it all.”
In an instant, her insight clarified that my concerns about becoming cynical as I gained more context were unfounded; that the opposite had been true. Recognizing these broader frameworks frees you from contempt for yourself and, critically, other people. It grows, rather than shrinks, your capacity to contain both the challenges and joys of modern life. (Nuance? In this economy?!) You become more durable, not less, when you realize setbacks are not a referendum on your personal ability, and fulfillment comes more easily when you stop expecting what’s broken to make you feel whole.
This recognition transformed Commenter Tom’s Christmas Day tirade marathon from just another cranky person online to a cautionary tale of foreclosing on the possibility that anything could ever improve, and the danger of taking it upon yourself to carry water for that belief. I’ll take a page from the US Surgeon General here: Please comment responsibly.