Prole Drift

I just got hip to this phrase “prole drift.”

It’s a fancy term for something I’ve been watching happen for years: middle-class Americans gradually adopting the lifestyles and habits I grew up around in the projects.

And I’m witnessing this trend with a rather unique perspective.

I was born and raised in the ghetto, the hood, the projects, or whatever name you prefer for government-subsidized housing.

Not just a run-down neighborhood that’s been overrun by hordes of Section 8 vouchers, but entire city blocks that function more as a theatre of war for rival street gangs than a place to raise a family.

But then, by the grace of a school magnet program, I spent my teenage years at a high school across town, where I no longer had to worry about what colors I wore to school or getting made fun of for using proper grammar and speaking in complete sentences.

In terms of attitudes and behaviors, for a long time, the ghetto was like Vegas: what happened in the hood stayed in the hood. But now, many of the behaviors I associated with the ghetto are becoming surprisingly common in the middle class.

Why is this happening, and what does it mean?

Is the whole country turning into the damn ghetto?

That depends on where you’re looking, who you’re looking at, and—most importantly of all—what you know about both sides of the fence.

It’s easy to call something ghetto if you’ve never been there and all you know is from rap music and that one time you decided to “learn the culture” and marathon-watched BET.

It’s even easier to think something is for middle and upper classes if the only card you’ve ever touched is EBT. I remember thinking my high school classmates were rich because they had a house, a car, and a fridge full of food that didn’t depend on the first of the month to be refilled.

Growing up in one world and going to school in another made it easier to see which habits were crossing that fence. What interested me was how they went from being things my classmates would have called ghetto to things their peers took for granted.

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What Prole Drift Means

“Prole drift” is short for “proletariat drift,” and it’s the tendency for everything to get worse in a particular direction.

The proletariat is the working class. “Prole,” depending on who’s saying it, comes with considerably more disdain.

You can think of “prole” as the hard-R version of calling someone a wage slave.

Speaking of things getting more ghetto, if you’ve ever been called “bougie,” it comes from the word “bourgeoisie,” and it’s essentially the opposite.

If prole is the hard-R version of wage slave, then bougie is how you call someone “uppity” for having higher standards.

When we talk about a society going through prole drift, we’re talking about standards, behaviors, and expectations degrading—and that diminished quality becoming the new norm.

Way back in 1982, author Curt Suplee summed up the idea in a Washington Post article:

“Everything in the modern world drifts prole-ward all the time.”

His examples included longer lines, worse food, and more cramped airline seating. Although I think using cramped airline seats as an example is a bit out of touch, the general idea is still solid: experiences associated with people at the bottom of society were being extended to everyone.

Suplee was writing about things like legroom. Where I grew up, the differences in what people considered normal were harder to miss.

Why does it feel like there’s a weed dealer—I mean dispensary—on every corner? Why do so many adults struggle to build stable families, and why does it seem like no one can read a whole book anymore?

A whole book. With chapters and everything.

These examples aren’t all equally important, and they don’t all have the same cause. But together, they raise a question: how do behaviors and conditions once associated with the margins become ordinary middle-class life?

Thermal equilibrium helps explain how classes influence each other once the barriers between them weaken. Incentives help explain which habits spread, which ones stick, and why people keep adopting them.

How Culture Crosses Class Lines

Historically, there were substantial barriers between the social worlds of the “poors” and the rich. Sure, the rich had servants, slaves, and people they ruled over. And the poor occasionally robbed the rich or, if they were particularly pissed off and well-organized, overthrew and executed them.

But taking orders from someone isn’t the same as sharing their social circle, entertainment, or life expectations.

Those worlds come into closer contact when people share workplaces, public spaces, and entertainment.

Maybe finally, some money will flow from the rich to the poor—at least to the ambitious and motivated poor. We poors can certainly dream.

But anyone familiar with universities sharing borders with some of the worst neighborhoods in a city knows that proximity alone doesn’t transfer prosperity.

On the other hand, culture travels much more easily.

Yes, attitudes and tastes flow from the rich to the poors. Poor people imitate the clothes, tastes, and status symbols of the classes above them, even when they can’t afford them.

The knockoff designer market is an obvious example. You can get an imitation Gucci belt or Louis Vuitton bag for the price of a high-end Walmart outfit. People want to look fly, and someone has to meet the demand.

This behavior isn’t new.

Once upon a time, England passed sumptuary laws dictating what people could wear based on their income and social rank.

Queen Elizabeth I’s 1574 proclamation complained about people “seeking by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen.”

You could have the money to buy the outfit and still lack the status to wear it.

In other words, people have always had cocaine tastes on a crack rock budget, but they still tried to look like Tony Montana even if they had only the resources of Tyrone Biggums.

The exchange goes both ways, but it’s rarely equal.

Imagine pouring a small cup of boiling water into a bathtub full of cold water.

The hot water warms the cold water, and the cold water cools the hot water. They move toward thermal equilibrium: a shared temperature at which there is no longer any net transfer of heat between them.

But the final temperature won’t be halfway between boiling and cold. It will be much closer to the bathtub’s original temperature because the bathtub contains far more water than the cup.

The analogy helps explain why a cultural exchange can change both sides without changing them equally.

Each side borrows whatever the other has that looks desirable and is easiest to copy.

For the poor, that’s the appearance of wealth: the clothes, the cars, the vacations. I always like to say that most people don’t want to actually be rich. They want the freedom they think rich people have. In place of that freedom, they take the proxy of excess.

For the rich, it’s the appearance of authenticity: the slang, the music, the attitude that says you’re not just a spoiled brat.

You can buy the rich man’s outfit without acquiring his financial security, and you can borrow the poor man’s attitude without owning his problems.

Contact changes both sides, but the first things to spread are the ones you can imitate without having to live the life that produced them. Both sides can start to look and sound more alike while remaining worlds apart in what their choices cost them.

And because there are far more poor and working-class people than rich ones, the cultural equilibrium doesn’t land directly in the middle.

The larger group has more influence over what becomes normal.

Class Is Partly a Time Horizon

Money gives you the power to purchase things. Class is how you earned it, who you know, how you were raised, and what the people around you consider normal.

An app builder, a professional athlete, an author, and a drug dealer can all become millionaires. But they tend to inhabit different social worlds, with different backgrounds, expectations, and standards.

Class shows up in how you speak, what you value, what you expect from life, and which behaviors earn you respect—or get you embarrassed—in your social circle.

One of the biggest class differences I noticed growing up was how far ahead people expected to be able to plan.

Class is partly a time horizon.

Poor people are not necessarily less intelligent or less capable of planning. They often live in environments where long-term planning yields lower returns, and failing to plan for the future—whether by necessity or choice—usually looks stupid.

Traditionally, the middle class has been better about delaying gratification because they believe it will pay off.

They built careers, expecting the profession to remain. They purchased homes not just to raise a family but because homeownership is considered an investment. Even their relationship choices—marriage and two-parent households—were an investment in the future of their bloodline.

Many of my middle- and upper-middle-class friends are incredibly stable as adults, but they also have very little tolerance for risk or for making uncertain moves to create a better life.

That’s one of the trade-offs. You get a stable mindset with an eye towards the future, but you have less incentive to take life-changing risks and potentially not meet the expectations of your class level and family.

Some habits help you get through a week when you have no idea what next week will bring. My concern is what happens when those same habits become ideals. People pick them up by imitation, or they develop them because their own circumstances start rewarding the same choices.

What Gets Attention Becomes Familiar

For a long time, geography, money, education, and social institutions acted as insulation between classes. Then television weakened the insulation. The internet cracked it in a thousand places. Social media made contact constant.

Today, a teenager in the projects and a millionaire’s daughter can listen to the same music, repeat the same slang, get the same cultural references, and argue with each other in a YouTube comments section.

But contact alone doesn’t explain which behaviors get amplified.

For most of history, culture wasn’t democratic.

Institutions protected and enforced particular standards, either legally or through heavy social ostracization.

Those standards weren’t always fair. But they did place barriers between what attracts attention and what receives public approval.

Social media did more than weaken those barriers. It turned the resulting spectacle into a source of revenue.

Media companies competed for clicks, views, subscriptions, and engagement. And they could measure exactly what kept you watching.

Anchorman 2 is a wonderfully hilarious piece of commentary on this shift. Ron Burgundy figures out that the easiest way to increase ratings is to give people what they want to watch instead of what they need to know.

A car chase beats actual reporting. The network gets rewarded for feeding the appetite, so it keeps doing that.

Sex is easier to sell than restraint. Outrage is easier to sell than reason. The fantasy of wealth is easier to sell than the discipline of building it. Drama is easier to sell than stability.

And watching people argue about what women bring to the table is easier to sell than reading a psychology book. Or reading any book, for that matter.

In the late 1970s, about 60 percent of high school seniors said they read a book or magazine for pleasure almost every day. By 2016, that number was down to 16 percent.

In 2024, The Atlantic reported that professors at elite universities were finding students increasingly unable to handle the whole books their courses required. These students could read the words. The problem was sustaining attention and following the argument long enough to get something out of them.

Technology and short-term gratification also play a significant role, but the shift toward behavior that was once a hallmark of the lower class is undeniable.

I remember growing up in the hood, kids who read books were considered lame and made fun of almost as badly as the kids who used proper grammar and “talked white.”

But now, education has experienced a prole-drift to the point that students at schools like Columbia and Princeton—institutions strongly associated with the upper class—are having trouble reading books.

A book asks you to think, focus, follow unfamiliar ideas, and push through a boring stretch before you understand why it matters, while a 20-second clip with people arguing about dating is a mentally non-taxing, immediate emotional payoff.

My concern is what happens when we organize more and more of our culture around that immediate payoff.

We make fewer demands on people’s attention, then act surprised when they struggle with anything that demands more focus than a TikTok video, Instagram reel, or YouTube short.

And the same process that changes what people can pay attention to also changes what they consider normal.

If the algorithm gives you a steady diet of people behaving in ways you might once have found embarrassing, irresponsible, or downright tacky, eventually the shock wears off.

You get used to seeing it, which is a dangerous step closer to doing it.

Familiarity doesn’t automatically produce imitation, but it does make a behavior easier to propagate, for better or worse. There’s a reason why they say if you spend time with four dope fiends, you’ll be the fifth.

And you don’t have to convince everyone to behave that way. You just have to keep putting it in front of them until it no longer looks unusual. And from that point, their resistance to the behavior is much lower.

This is where prole drift starts to resemble the movement of an Overton window.

The term usually refers to the range of politically acceptable ideas, but the same thing happens with social behavior.

Something that begins on the fringe doesn’t need to convince everybody immediately. It only needs to become visible enough to stop appearing unthinkable.

Then it becomes controversial. Still unacceptable, but you just get used to dealing with it.

After a while, a controversial stance becomes acceptable, albeit not popular.

However, it doesn’t just stay acceptable for long. Eventually, it becomes the new normal.

And once it becomes normal, criticizing it becomes controversial.

Aesthetic prole drift is an especially visible example, though usually less consequential. Tattoos used to be reserved for criminals and soldiers, but they’re now ubiquitous in all classes.

The thing that once marked you as marginal becomes evidence that you are authentic, nonconformist, or compassionate. It gets a moral upgrade and a place in ordinary life.

This is why the deeper concern goes beyond the masses of the middle class listening to rap music, getting tattoos, or adopting street slang.

Those are mostly aesthetic changes.

The stakes rise when unstable behavior receives the same upgrade—and when selling that upgrade becomes profitable.

When Disorder Becomes Profitable

Whenever you say the word capitalism, people have an intense reaction. Depending on who hears it, they mentally gear themselves up for an argument with a lazy communist or a greedy capitalist.

For the record, I’m very pro-capitalism. But capitalism is a lot like salt.

Salt makes everything delicious and has been useful for the advancement of civilization, especially before refrigeration. But pour enough of it onto something, and you’ll ruin it.

Markets can turn self-interest into useful products and services. They can also reward people for selling whatever keeps customers consuming, regardless of what that consumption does to them.

When disorder becomes profitable entertainment, middle- and upper-class institutions have an incentive to produce it, promote it, and eventually legitimize it.

Some of the people who helped build our screen-driven world have strict boundaries around it for their own children.

Bill Gates withheld phones until his children turned fourteen. When asked if his children loved the newly released iPad in a 2010 conversation later reported by The New York Times, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs stated, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

Apparently, what keeps your family engaged isn’t necessarily what they want shaping theirs.

The music industry offers an earlier version of this arrangement. Gangster rap grew out of artists and communities with real exposure to street violence, but its expansion into mass entertainment involved people far removed from that life.

Eazy-E built Ruthless Records with veteran music executive Jerry Heller. Time Warner owned half of Interscope, which distributed Death Row’s releases.

Corporate money helped turn the violence of particular neighborhoods into entertainment for people who would never have to live there.

A lot of people think this was a conspiracy, but you don’t need a secret meeting or a coordinated plot for that arrangement to reward the worst parts of a culture. Once the gangster image becomes profitable, there’s an incentive to keep selling it—and for performers to keep supplying it.

The businessman can sell the lifestyle without living it. Listeners can enjoy the danger and “embrace the culture.” That includes plenty of people in the neighborhoods the music came from, who still have to live with the violence when the song ends.

Marijuana went from something people hid to something businesses advertise.

Smoking weed has become so mainstream now that it feels like there’s a dispensary on the corner of every major city.

So many cities now smell like a trap house. And not the bad parts of the city either.

I’m talking downtown commercial areas during lunch.

An interesting side effect of a once fringe—or at least controversial behavior, like smoking weed—becoming mainstream is that once there’s mainstream money behind it, capitalism does what it tends to do, and figures out ways to make even more money.

The weakest weed today is stronger than the strongest stuff you used to get in the 90s. It turns out that making something legal doesn’t inherently make it safer, as the rates of cannabis-induced psychosis have skyrocketed—which is crazy because if you talk to any weed smoker from back in the day—sheesh, the 90s really is back in the day—you never heard of someone losing their mind.

And just to put a cherry on the top of this point, prole-drifting is leading society to the legalization of drugs like ketamine and cocaine.

Luxury Poverty

But people don’t always arrive at short-term behavior through imitation.

Sometimes their confidence in the future disappears, and their time horizon gets shorter.

That is another, deeper form of drift: a population becoming less willing to sacrifice today for a tomorrow it no longer trusts.

When I was growing up, poor people put things on layaway. You found something you wanted, made payments over time, and received it after you finished paying. Everybody understood what that meant: you didn’t have the money to buy it yet.

There was no shame in using layaway, but nobody confused it with financial innovation.

Today, we have Buy Now, Pay Later apps like Klarna. Combined with credit-card borrowing, they make it easy to consume first and deal with the cost afterward.

It’s basically reverse layaway.

The old arrangement delayed consumption until you had paid. The new arrangement accelerates consumption by placing the burden on your future income.

But because the new version happens through a clean app with smooth graphics and four interest-free payments, it no longer feels like something poor people do.

The television got cheaper, but the wall you hang it on got more expensive.

You may struggle to purchase a home, build savings, or create meaningful financial security, but you can split the cost of shoes, a vacation, or a DoorDash order into four manageable payments.

That’s just luxury poverty.

The internet calls this a new phenomenon affecting the middle class. If you’re from the ghetto, you know it as hood rich.

The difference is that hood-rich consumption was treated as a dysfunction of poverty. Now the same psychology comes with a polished interface, a business model, and a much wider market.

The Promise of Flexibility

The same drift appears in work.

Poor people have long understood unstable employment. You worked when somebody needed you. Your hours changed without warning. You took whatever jobs were available. You did side work, cash work, temporary work, or seasonal work because you couldn’t depend on a single employer.

Nobody called this freedom. They called it survival.

Now we have the gig economy. You can drive strangers around, deliver their food, complete small online tasks, and piece together income streams without knowing exactly how much you’ll earn next month.

But instead of calling this unstable employment, we call it flexibility.

“Be your own boss” sounds a lot better than “receive all the risk without owning the platform, the customers, or the terms of service.”

There is real freedom in entrepreneurship. I’ve experienced it myself. Building something you own can give you control over your time and income.

But owning a business and checking Fiverr or Upwork fifty times a day—or waiting for a ride request that pays enough to justify the gas—are different arrangements.

For someone with savings and valuable skills, gig work can provide useful flexibility. For someone living paycheck to paycheck, the same arrangement can mean never knowing what next month will look like.

The opportunity may be real, but so is the risk. Calling the arrangement freedom doesn’t tell you who has enough security to enjoy it.

Relationships Built Around the Exit

Relationships provide another example.

In the unstable communities I grew up around, durable relationships weren’t exactly common. People still wanted love and companionship. But when people disappear, emotional detachment can become a form of self-protection.

That strategy makes sense in its original circumstances. The problem comes when it becomes an ideal for how everybody should live.

When these patterns were associated with poor communities, they were described as family dysfunction. Now we have situationship podcasts.

Fear of commitment becomes a way of preserving your independence. Emotional detachment becomes protecting your peace. Avoiding responsibility becomes refusing to settle. Keeping several romantic options becomes being in your hot girl era, or whatever it is the kids say.

Once again, the modern, middle-class version comes with better language.

Not every person wants marriage, and not every marriage should survive. Some traditional relationships trapped people in abuse, dependence, and misery.

But a society cannot build stable families entirely around exit strategies.

Commitment always reduces your options. That is the point of commitment. Marriage excludes other romantic possibilities. Parenthood restricts your freedom. Community requires you to tolerate people who occasionally annoy or inconvenience you.

Don’t enter relationships, and you avoid some relationship problems. Don’t have kids, and you avoid parenting problems. Don’t own anything that needs upkeep, and you won’t have to maintain it.

Fair enough. But removing the things that demand effort doesn’t automatically give you a better life. Sometimes you also remove the reasons to make the effort in the first place.

A family gives you more people to worry about, but it can also give you more people to depend on. Owning a home gives you something to maintain, but it can also give you something to build on. Commitments create problems. They can also give your life structure.

Freedom from obligations can mean freedom from the support those obligations create.

That’s the trap: counting the responsibilities you’ve escaped without counting the stability they might have provided.

What It Takes to Keep the Water Warm

This brings me back to thermodynamics and the limits of the bathtub analogy.

Society isn’t a tub of water left alone to reach a final temperature. People continually build institutions, enforce standards, change incentives, and invest effort. The outcome depends partly on whether they keep doing those things.

Some standards require more effort to maintain than others.

A stable family requires effort. A functioning institution requires effort. Physical fitness, formal education, and delayed gratification require effort. Trust takes enormous effort to build and almost none to destroy.

Your apartment won’t clean itself. Your finances won’t organize themselves. Your relationships won’t stay strong just because they used to be.

Even if you’ve worked your way into a more comfortable life, maintaining it requires continued investment. Stop making that investment, and you can drift back toward the conditions you thought you’d escaped.

And when the institutions and expectations supporting that investment weaken, short-term strategies become more attractive. Some people adopt them because their circumstances demand it. Others adopt them because they’re convenient, fashionable, or constantly promoted.

Then, because nobody wants to think of himself as moving downward, we develop a vocabulary that allows the change to feel like progress.

“I can’t depend on it” becomes “I prefer flexibility.”

“I can’t maintain it” becomes “I’m protecting my peace.”

“I can’t build it” becomes “I refuse to be tied down.”

Sometimes those statements are completely sincere. Sometimes the old standard genuinely wasn’t worth preserving. But sometimes we are celebrating what we can no longer afford—or no longer know how to sustain.

That makes prole drift difficult to confront.

You cannot solve a problem that has been converted into a personality. And you cannot reverse a decline that everybody has agreed to call liberation.

The country isn’t becoming more like the ghetto simply because middle-class people developed a fascination with poor people.

The instability that shaped the ghetto is no longer confined there, and the habits it encouraged now have industries selling them as entertainment, identity, and freedom.

The hood wasn’t unique because it contained a different kind of human being. Many of the incentives changed there first.

Now those incentives are spreading.

The bathtub is getting bigger. The insulation is thinner. And keeping something worth preserving requires more than remembering how warm the water used to be.

Somebody has to keep supplying the energy.

The rest is up to you.