We all know the saying. If you’re poor, you’re insane. If you’re rich, you’re eccentric. It’s one of those rules that permeate society, like never accidentally hitting “reply all” on an email when you've written a facetious response.
So where, exactly, does this leave the middle class?
When exploring wealthy eccentricity, no discussion would be complete without Elon Musk. His children’s names, had they been scribbled onto a birth certificate in a modest suburban hospital, might have triggered the arrival of some serious men in white coats with clipboards. But because there are rockets involved, Musk can brand this as vision – a disruption of conventional nomenclature.
Money, it seems, is the difference between unconventional and concerning.
But I don't explore space. And once, I swallowed my earring. In the morning rush of kettle-boiling, lunch-packing, dog-feeding domestic choreography, I placed my earrings next to my pills on the kitchen counter. This was a perfectly reasonable decision, if one ignores that fact that I swallowed my tablets and only realised something was amiss when I noticed that I had asymmetrical ears and was somewhat undermedicated.
There’s something deeply humbling about standing in your kitchen, clutching a lone earring, and thinking, “Well, I guess I’m not wearing those today”.
On another occasion, I took the dog’s anti-inflammatories instead of my own. In my defence, we’re both old and arthritic. The tablets were similar. The pain was similar. The only real difference was species, and frankly, when one reaches a certain age, those lines begin to blur.
A friend of mine did something similar, but with more intention. She took her dog’s medication deliberately because she’d run out of the human version and needed something before work. This is a most pragmatic approach to pharmacology. She didn’t disturb the local pharmacist by demanding emergency supplies. She just eyed the pooch, thought “same knee problem” and proceeded with her day.
Another friend once deliberately superglued her hand to her face.
She was attempting to prove the glue's inefficiency and placed some on her palm and pressed it to her cheek. It turns out that, while this glue failed spectacularly on plastic, it was deeply committed to skin adhesion.
The rich are allowed to be strange because their actions look intentional. It becomes part of their brand. The poor are labelled unstable because their chaos seems uncontrolled. The middle class, meanwhile, just look disorganised. We have the education to know better, but our salaries don’t quite stretch to staff who can prevent us from ingesting accessories.
Society classifies behaviour through the lens of status. The same act is interpreted differently depending on the bank balance. Wealth confers a narrative of control. Poverty removes it. And the middle class are stuck surreptitiously Googling “What happens when you snack on sterling silver” in a staff meeting.
Perhaps we’re neither crazy nor eccentric, and we’re just absurdly functional. We glue hands to our faces, and after what looks like a living art installation involving solvents, we quietly cook dinner. We take Labrador pills and carry on with the day. There’s no trust fund to buffer the narrative and no social worker in sensible shoes with a serious demeanour to intervene. All we have is slightly embarrassed confessions to our friends, and a cup of coffee.
Maybe the middle class isn’t a financial category at all. Maybe it’s a performance: a constant, slightly frantic effort to appear sane. We’re just unsupervised, slightly adhesive, faintly metallic and mildly mis-medicated.