Middle class is a feeling

However anyone else defines it, for me being middle class is a feeling. It is the middle way outside of class though the word "class" is part of the phrase as it is about living without a continual sense of fear, while class is about fear.

Classed societies separate themselves into at least two groups out of fear, and in the past when disease, famine or war could dramatically cut into the size of a population beyond 1/3 those fears were continually reinforced by losses hard to properly imagine today.

But today many people can be more afraid about hurting others than being hurt by them, and more concerned about their hopes and expectations than daily fights for survival--in middle class societies.

Those who pine for class do not understand it.

Possibly they have naive dreams of being royalty where to them that is just about parades and adulation, ordering others around and having plenty.

But class was about deciding who lived and who died, about surviving when so many others died to re-teach, and hold on to culture, as otherwise everything would have to be re-discovered. Starting would be from scratch.

The leaders were servants of the people, burdened with the task of living for the future no matter who else died, told that their duty was to preserve the knowledge, and rebuild after the disasters that always struck, killing vast numbers of their people.

Their lives were about pain and its inevitability.

Simply feeling safe is the most powerful gift of the modern world, and one worth striving to help others achieve.

Feeling safe is possibly the most under appreciated feeling in the world, until you lose that feeling, or live a life, where you never had it.