Interrogating Luxury Beliefs

I can't put down Rob Henderson's book 'Troubled'

I’ve come across the term “Luxury beliefs” on social media kind of a lot. It refers to beliefs that the wealthy and powerful hold that are fashionable for them and don’t affect them, but adopting those beliefs hurts less-privileged people.

It’s stuff like “all drugs should be legalized” or “defund the police” which will disproportionately affect poorer people when seen to its logical end. It’s also stuff like “It’s just luck that led me to be successful” or “Marriage is outdated”. These beliefs are mostly held by people who work their ass off to get to where they are, and are raised by married parents, and plan to get married before having kids. When they are internalized by those with worse life circumstances, though, they tend to keep people stuck or lead to worse outcomes for their kids. Another one is “college isn’t important” by Silicon Valley CEOs who then go on to only hire those from Ivies. So anyone taking their advice seriously ends up much, much worse off.

Turns out, that phrase was coined recently by Dr. Rob Henderson, who has penned Troubled, which is a great memoir. In it, he describes his journey from being taken away from his drug-using mother, who was then deported, being stuck in the foster care system before finally being adopted into a blue-collar family in a rural town, followed by an unstable childhood. He then enlists in the Air Force, finds himself, and goes to Yale on the GI Bill in the mid-2010s, and finds himself confused about many things in elite culture. ‘Luxury Beliefs’ is one of the concepts he came up with while trying to make sense of Yale from his perspective.

It is a great coming-of-age tale, quite unlike anything else you’ve read. While we might have read Glass Castle or Hillbilly Elegy or Educated in this vein, Dr. Henderson got a PhD in psychology, so there is a lot more metacognition compared to the other works. In the other books, college, army, or work are touted as ways out, but Dr. Henderson is quite blatant that none of it replaces a stable family environment. He doesn’t attempt to provide easy, comfortable answers. If anything, he takes down several popular narratives about adverse childhood experiences. That makes us uncomfortable, and it should. As a parent, it made me think a lot. I highly recommend the book.

I listened to a few dozen interviews of Dr. Henderson right after, and he talks about Luxury Beliefs in each one of those. But in all of them, I don’t see anyone push back against what he’s saying, and they take his definition and the motives he assigns to those who hold these beliefs for granted. I’m quite surprised no one who acts like he portrays has said anything about why they do it. I’m going to try interrogating the concept here.

Are luxury beliefs just politeness?

I was going to quote from his book, but this recent interview is more concise.

This quote gives an idea of what I interpret differently

I got to Yale and saw students expressing strange opinions I had never heard, many of whom were hard-working. To get into a place like Harvard or Yale, you have to be at the top of your game. Yet, I saw many students, professors, and graduates of these places denigrate the very habits that led them to these schools. They'd work very hard, but then their public stance was that hard work was unimportant and that everything ultimately comes down to systemic forces, a bit of luck, and factors beyond your control. 

In their private lives, they exercise a lot of agency, focus, and discipline to adhere to a rigid structure for their studies, exercise routines, internships, networking, and everything else. Everything is so meticulously planned, but then, publicly, they would proclaim this relativism, saying that it's no one's fault if someone fails.

So this isn’t something strange to me. One of my closest friends would always show up to exams like “I didn’t study anything, I don’t know, can you teach me?”. And then she’d get the highest marks in class. This wasn’t unique to her. A lot of people would do this. Some of them would actively be a bad influence, interrupting your studying to drag you out to play, but when it was their time to study, they’d not answer.

At one level, the cool thing to do was to not study at all and still do well. With some friends, effort wasn’t cool. Effort means vulnerability. You suck at something and are trying hard to be better. But with some other friends, you can be vulnerable and take your studies seriously. These friends would usually be those at the same level as you.

It’s just uncomfortable to talk about the importance of studying hard to someone who just struggles with books, that’s just being preachy and making those friends uncomfortable. If they failed in class and you told them to try harder, that’s just mean. If you’re a close friend, you got to do that. But if you weren’t, you didn’t get to be judgy about something they probably already feel bad about. And you going on about the right thing to do doesn’t help them do it. The reason they usually struggle are often to do with reasons beyond your control, and you don’t want to open that can of worms, especially when you’re a child.

As for the bad influences who still did well - they just wanted to study and play on their schedule. That’s just selfishness.

But I’ve had a friend’s very Type-A mom take an active interest in me doing better in my IIT-JEE coaching classes, and I have got to say, 22 years later, that hour of conversation still makes me want to throw up. The problem is you usually don’t know someone else’s life enough to tell them what to do. You don’t know their challenges, and you don’t know what’s possible for them. If you can’t hold their hand through the whole vision you have for them, don’t start. Sure, it’s fun to say, “You need to wake up at 4 am and grind Irodov if you want to have any hope of scoring well in physics”, but my friend’s mom wasn’t going to be waking up with me at 4 am. Nor was she going to help me figure out how to balance my other interests with JEE math. At that point, that made her a well-meaning but annoying busybody who made me feel bad about myself and I avoided her after.

Another aspect here is success is complicated. You can’t just boil it down to ‘work hard’ or ‘show up every day’. Being able to work hard and showing up daily depends on systemic factors. If you’re working two jobs while studying, your study hours aren’t going to be as effective as someone who can play pickleball before sitting down to study and gets 9 hours of sleep every night. At that point, can someone tell you you must quit your job without offering you an alternative?

There’s another instance quoted in the book that feels similar:

Later, at Cambridge, I told a fellow graduate student about my friend Antonio, who could have been recruited to play college football. All he had to do was attend makeup classes for two weeks and get a B. He went for the first week only and then bailed.

My Cambridge friend replied, “Maybe it’s good he didn’t go to college. If that’s who he was and what he enjoyed doing, maybe he wasn’t meant to go.”

I asked if that was her son, what would she have done. “Forced him to go to class and threaten to kill him if he didn’t.”

(….)It’s fine if Antonio and I skip class and ruin our futures, but it’s definitely not fine if their kids do so.Many of the people who wield the most influence in society have isolated themselves and their children from the world I grew up in, while paying lip service to the challenges of inequality.

Again, this just seems like politeness. It seems like the kind of thing you say when you want to look at the bright side of things. Hearing of someone squandering an opportunity is horrible and quite discomfiting. Leaning into the positive, how much ever of a stretch it is, is what you say about people you’ve never met. It’s code for “Okay, that sucks, I don’t know what else to say while not overstepping my bounds.”

When I was about four, there was a small shop opposite our house. Kids from the neighborhood and the school nearby would throng it to buy snacks and candy. My uncle would hang out with me on the porch, watching the shop opposite, telling me about why I shouldn’t be eating all that processed food and how it would ruin my life.

I took it to heart. When two boys of about ten from down the street were standing near our house, crossing the street, I went straight up to them and said, “Why do you ruin your health and finances eating those awful chips and candy? Go home!” Those boys were dumbfounded. I looked to my righteous uncle for backup. He picked me up and took me back in, laughing. He said to me, “Those boys have an uncle too to tell them what’s good and what’s bad, we don’t need to.”

Not Your Brother, Not Your Keeper

Irrespective of what he told me, my uncle would and still does give unsolicited advice to everyone. He tells people what to do with their alcoholic brothers, tells distant relatives what to do with their property, how to deal with their divorce despite never being divorced himself, tells people how to accept their children marrying out of religion, tells young women they need to do their bit to up the TFR. And he does it all in an uncle way, so no one’s that mad.

The problem is, it’s very very very uncool to be this kind of a busybody in America. He visits his daughter in Ohio, gets talking with his grandkids’ nanny, and pisses her off by asking why she didn’t marry the father of her children. The amount of cringe one experiences witnessing a young American woman being asked these questions and not knowing how to react is something else altogether.

In America, you’re supposed to reckon with everyone as an equal. You don’t talk down to people. You assume their choices are valid, and they made them for very good reasons. Your social skills translate to how comfortable you make the people around you feel. You’re supposed to “be cool”.

So, yeah, the coolest Americans are going to not want to call you out on choices you make that they might themselves perceive as mistaken or destructive. After all, who gave them any authority to consider themselves better than you?

Plus, most people increasingly don’t even know their neighbors. The average number of friends each person has is drastically dropping. Third places are disappearing. We really don’t know each other well enough to be vulnerable or call people out on choices you wouldn’t have made.

Irrespective.

You get into the territory of societal change when you get to stuff like “marriage is not important to be a parent” or “college isn’t worth it”. There’s plenty of research on why those things matter. Melissa Kearney, in her book The Two-Parent Privilege, asserts why in America at least, you need marriage to ensure stability for children. And just going to college seems to increase your lifespan by 7 years on average, which is completely wild.

Why do people say these things then?

I suppose it’s a matter of fish not knowing they swim in water.

Everyone around me had married parents. When an aunt got divorced, it was a family scandal. It was hard not to feel like less stigma around divorce might have made her life easier. Plus, it just felt way more romantic to consider how someone might just be so in love with their spouse that they didn’t need the “piece of paper” to conduct life the same as a married couple. Especially since there were so many absentee or abusive dads. Why did a woman need to admit that man into her life when he barely parents his children or provides?

But what I didn’t see then was that there were involved grandparents who were playing a big role. Children need to know who their father is, at the very least. You can’t just swap out a dad for a stepdad or a mom for a stepmom and hope kids don’t notice (Believe me, I did assume that wouldn’t be so bad). And dads have a right to their kids! Somehow, that part never sank in for me. Those boxes to be ticked, which I found oppressive, are what ensure stability even in the face of upheaval. Unless you break a system apart and put it back together without one or more of the pieces, you don’t understand how important each part is. The folks who attend Yale have been in environments so stable that everything has multiple redundancies, and they can’t imagine how throwing out a few ugly pieces would be a problem.

They don’t know your life, and they shouldn’t be telling you how to think or what to do.

Don’t take too much advice from people whose lives are very different from yours

Whenever I’d say, “But ma, my friends are all doing it!”, my mother would get back with, “Just because it works for them doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.”

I rarely drank and avoided every other vice, because I was convinced I’d be addicted. Considering how it took me years to figure out the mental health issues that keep me down, I’m glad I didn’t add another complication, even as I saw several friends imbibe all kinds of substances and continue to be more successful than me. I straight-and-narrowed it harder than most other friends on the straight-and-narrow because I knew I didn’t have a cushion.

This is exactly what researchers Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton discovered and talked about in the book Paying For The Party. The book has them observing girls at a dorm for the years of college and following up with them for a few years after. Among other findings, they discovered that girls from more humble backgrounds had terrible outcomes if, during college, they followed the paths of girls from wealthier backgrounds.

You shouldn’t be majoring in sports broadcasting, for instance, if your parents can’t afford your rent in NYC for several years and if they don’t have connections that will help you land a job in the field.

You also should be focusing on your grades in a demanding course instead of joining a sorority and partying if you don’t belong to a socioeconomic class where your parents can help you figure out the balance between partying and studying.

If you do those things irrespective, you end up working minimum-wage jobs for years while trying desperately to pay off your college debt.

This type of wisdom was drilled into me to no end for years. Even now, I only have to fantasize about a beach house or talk about $75k a year private school for my mom to give me a sharp, anxious reality check.

I suppose it’s harsh to remind one of their place. If the prevailing narrative is “anyone can do anything,” then it might follow that doing exactly as the 1% say or do is what gets you into the 1%. I know two guys who cited “Bill Gates dropped out of college and founded Microsoft” when they dropped out of college. As a well-wisher, you can try telling these folks they are making a bad decision. But it gets quite rude real quick to give them a reality check, and before you know it, you’ve lost them.

When people make a big sweeping statement, they are trying to be liked, a little at least. So they’ll say the thing that people won’t take too personally. Saying “College doesn’t matter” wins you points from those who didn’t go to college, as well as those who did. College grads know the truth, and they also consider you so accepting for believing in those who didn’t go to college themselves. For non-college-grads, you are showing them a path forward. Both groups hear “Go to college, make something of yourself” all day, and the ones who go to college do know that just going isn’t enough, and college is not for everyone. So if you say something a little counterintuitive, it gets more attention.

Plus, it feels like a harmless white lie, like telling your wife she doesn’t look that fat in the striped dress.

The problem is when 1) your wife believes your lie and now exclusively buys clothes with thick horizontal stripes and 2) Chanel now sells clothes with thick horizontal stripes as having a “slimming look”, and because Chanel says so, no one dares say anything to the contrary. Plus the fashion police will now send you to prison for calling your wife fat when she’s wearing Chanel.

America is in this kind of timeline. With fewer friends you see daily or feel comfortable confiding in, you don’t have anyone giving you a reality check. Many people go up or down a social class and don’t know what the new normal is, and end up going by media tropes, the polite comments of strangers, and 14-year-olds on internet forums than what family or friends say. And correspondingly, their lives suck. It’s not even the fault of the people involved - they literally don’t have the people in their lives who’d give them honest feedback and advice. And heck, even here, I’m saying things like “it’s not their fault”, taking away people’s agency, because I don’t know what would help people who literally don’t have people around them to give them good, practical advice.

Mom Luxury Beliefs

Everyone knows what toxic places mom forums are. And that is because everyone’s trying to “think of the children”. Everyone’s trying to help everyone else be the best mom.

The problem is that people all have different parenting styles that are hard to divine from a forum post. Someone wants a “girl’s bike”, and someone else says why do you want to gender a toddler bike. Both things are valid. Maybe your kid likes unicorns and rainbows and you want something that looks like that. But also, why restrict yourself to bikes marketed towards girls?

It gets worse with contentious stuff like breastfeeding and formula feeding. Lot of people will breastfeed themselves but find the tone of others advising the same to be too judgemental and speak in favor of formula. In that case, are breastfeeding moms espousing luxury beliefs?

But the most egregious one I find is “kids need more neglect”. This is usually espoused by people like Jonathan Haidt, who talk about kids who are “coddled”. The kids who are “coddled” (side note: I don’t believe coddling kids is a real phenomenon) usually tend to be upper middle class with college-educated parents.

Meanwhile, as Dr. Henderson details in Troubled, there are houses full of foster children neglected in front of the TV all day, trying beer at age 5, smoking weed at age 9, and having no positive role models to learn how to communicate, and getting into fights instead.

The myth of the coddled child is a luxury belief. Note that none of these books by Jonathan Haidt or disgraced Stanford Dean Julie Lythcott Haims established any kind of a floor for neglect, but goes on to cite very benign examples as “coddling”, including… parents texting their kids jokes at college.

I’ve had so many parents tell me that “science says” you should put babies on a schedule and sleep train them early, otherwise they’ll “run the house”. This is what lies downstream of scolding parents for being too attentive to their children, instead of figuring out what the real problem is (IMO the mental health crisis in adolescents is the direct result of a declining economy and a very demanding college admissions process. Academics like Dr. Haidt are well-placed to actually reform college admissions, but they choose not to even bring it up. What does that say about how much they care?)

Good Advice Doesn’t Scale

Like Tina Fey said in her memoir, no one ever says to a pregnant woman “You must, must, must give birth to the baby” though they do tell her to breastfeed or read to her baby. When something is obvious, it doesn’t have to be said.

I wonder if that’s what Dr. Henderson is running into.

The folks around him are the sort who think if you’re Asian, you must probably have a Tiger Mom (especially since the OG Tiger Mom Amy Chua is a Yale prof). To them, it is obvious that getting your startup off the ground involves working late nights and weekends. Getting good grades involves working your ass off and not partying. They don’t consider it worth saying.

What they do see though is their peers being thoughtless when coming across those of different societal backgrounds. Thinking people are poor because they are lazy. Or being judgemental about a single mother. Or assuming someone without a college degree must not be smart. Hence, they say things that don’t seem that obvious to their peers.

Luxury beliefs are things that the people not close to you say to be nice. They are white lies. We ought to keep them in that position, not let them dictate public policy.

The “right things to do” are never going to be popular to say. They are obvious to a large section of the population. The folks who could actually use the advice usually need help following that advice or having it personalized for them. They need mentors, helpful peers, loving family to tell them these things in a way that is actually useful, and cut through the noise.

The takeaway for me is to not take advice from people who don’t know your situation too well, and definitely don’t take life advice from the media. I 100% recommend not taking parenting advice from mom forums or people who haven’t met your kids. If we’re not able to find good counsel among friends and family, that’s something we ought to spend time and energy improving.