[BoxFour]

Most of the examples you gave seem focused on life outside of work aside from the last one, so I’m curious which of them you’d say don’t also apply to lower-income jobs. There are lots of ways for middle-class people to “fail” too outside of work.

Personally, I worked in food service for a decade (mostly as a line cook of some sort) and most of these rules still applied, maybe to a slightly lesser degree.

Even with dishwashing, if you have some way of dishwashing that halves utility costs, someone would listen to you.

The answer might also be “who cares, get back to work” but that’s also true of a lot of middle-class employment. Your manager won’t give a shit if you think the expense reporting system sucks. Amazon’s famous for “disagree and commit” which is just a corporate way of saying the same thing.

[ElevenLathe]

That's fair, but I don't totally agree that there is a "work sphere" that is different from the "life sphere" in this regard. That distinction between politics and economics is a synthetic big-L Liberal one that only goes back to approximately Napoleon. The fact that some people have worse jobs, worse working conditions, and worse pay is fundamentally related to the fact that they rent, struggle with money, and have a poor education. Our society has bucketed them into this life, which is a package deal, just like the middle class package is.

Anyway, in this context I was mostly addressing the idea that these "lessons" from high school don't hold in the "real world". To me, the "real world" includes your landlord, the cop on your street, etc., just as much as it does your job.

[BoxFour]

Sure, but these are all true of middle-class employees as well:

1) Many middle-class families rent and their landlords aren’t necessarily any more understanding.

2) Not to be too political, but many middle-class employees don’t enjoy a friendly relationship with police either and similarly can easily “fail”.

If your argument is that being wealthy affords you a lot of leeway to fail in life, I mostly agree (though again, there are plenty of minority groups who would disagree that wealth always affords that privilege), but “middle class” encompasses a very wide swath of people which this doesn’t apply to. Many middle-class employees in the US are a paycheck or two away from being pretty destitute.

Maybe you meant “professional” or “upper class” instead?

[ElevenLathe]

We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposite of true. Many others wish life was as easy as high school. Thanks for the engagement but I don't see any point in "arguing" this point -- that we appear to both agree on -- any further.

[BoxFour]

I don’t think we do agree, but fair enough. I’ll “disagree and commit”.