Perhaps the most telling examples of the scope of our contemporary epidemic of anxiety about our place in the world are the people who own the kinds of homes, and drive the kinds of cars, and splurge on the kinds of vacations that the rest of us can only dream of.   They often turn out to be just as keenly aware of the precariousness of their status as we are.

Today, the path to these elite lifestyles (for people who haven’t simply inherited their money) runs through an extremely small set of prestigious universities and graduate programs.   Top-tier firms in lucrative career fields like finance, consulting, and law generally do most of their recruiting at just 3 to 5 “core” universities, and passively accept applications from only 5 to 15 other schools.   They won’t even read the resumes of people who have gotten their degrees elsewhere.

Young people have to work their butts off in high school to get onto this pathway to success, and then repeat the process to make themselves attractive to employers at its end.

If they’re lucky enough to be selected by a prestige firm in one of the high-paying fields described above, they’ll typically begin their careers working 60 to 80 hours a week—and during crunch times, 90, 100, or even more.   At some shops, they’re worked even harder. A leaked 2021 presentation by the renowned investment banking firm Goldman Sachs showed that for their new analysts, the averages were a 98-hour work week, 5 hours of sleep per night, and a 3 AM bedtime.

Hours like these make it virtually impossible to have a life outside work.   And for consultants, forming or maintaining social connections—especially efforts to acquire a mate—are made even more difficult by living in an ever-changing succession of hotels in places they’re unlikely to visit again, most of which are far from their nominal homes.

When people in these lucrative fields finally do have time to find a mate, marry, and start a family, they tend to become many times more obsessively concerned than average parents about the future status of their offspring—beginning with near-unbearable attacks of existential anguish if their progeny aren’t accepted at the “right” elite preschools.