Julia Roberts, Applebee's, Bandcamp, your manager, and the death of everything in between. (Also, Sweetgreen is the A24 of dining and I will die on this hill.)
When I first read this, I also felt a kind of nostalgic mourning for the "Death of the Middle"—the idea that the loss of Applebee’s and $40 million Julia Roberts rom-coms was a collapse of the American Commons.
But upon sitting with it, I think it’s just because I’m in deep middle-age and everything’s on fire right now.
Because the middle tier wasn't really “the commons.” It was capitalism performing a monoculture. I mean I loved MTV when it mattered. I’m also fine that it no longer does.
We didn't sit in those booths because we were "sharing an experience.” We sat there because we had no choice. The "Common Ground” was mostly just the result of a limited inventory.
Let’s not mistake the illusion of a community for the reality of a captive audience.
When I first read this, I pictured that scene at the end of Goonies when the galleon sails away. This piece casts us as outcasts staring wistfully after a romantic ship carrying the bones of past adventures. When we’re really mourning the convenience of a time when everyone was stuck on the same shitty barge being pulled by a mediocre tug.
I don’t know. I think I’d rather be a scavenger in the wreckage of a barbell economy than a "managed unit" at a Buca di Beppo, pretending the breadsticks are a shared cultural heritage.
Still, you earned a sub for making me reflect. Definitely looking forward to more of your writing.
First of all, I feel honored! Thanks for subscribing to the newsletter. Your analysis is now making me think, which is the whole point of this thing.
You're 100% right that we shouldn't confuse a captive audience with a congregation. But IDK, here's what I keep turning over: the scavenger in the wreckage still has to find people, right? The managed unit at Buca di Beppo at least had a table full of strangers passing the same garlic bread. The monoculture was a cage, sure, but cages have the accidental property of forcing proximity. And proximity is the precondition for friction, and friction is the precondition for culture. What I worry about isn't the loss of the middle. It's the loss of the argument about the middle. When everyone's on their own raft, nobody's wrong — but nobody's interesting either.
Anyway, most importantly, I think you are 100% right; and your Goonies reframe is going to haunt me. Welcome aboard! #GooniesNeverSayDie
Ah, then I shall file this next to <a href=https://americanliterature.com/author/nathaniel-hawthorne/short-story/fire-worship>Nathaniel Hawthorn's 1846 screed against the heating stove and paen to the open hearth, "Fire Worship"</a>. It's 19th century literary prose, full of ornate description, cheerfully referencing Classical mythology and Christian doctrine indiscriminately, but in the last quarter of it he finally gets to the heart of his argument: "It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it has been, now that we have subtracted from it so important and vivifying an element as firelight... There will be nothing to attract these poor children to one centre. They will never behold one another through that peculiar medium of vision the ruddy gleam of blazing wood or bituminous coal—-which gives the human spirit so deep an insight into its fellows and melts all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts. Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious jest; the life-like, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word,—will disappear from earth. Conversation will contract the air of debate, and all mortal intercourse be chilled with a fatal frost."
yes! as a genxer been thinking much about curation/individualization/app culture (sony walkman as proto app) not to mention grubhub (you dont even need to go out to get yr sweetgreen) & streaming & youtube & other homebound consumption & not just home but individualized (people cohabitating neither eating or entertaining together...gone the common "hearth" for both cooking & storytelling). In some ways it seems like there's just sooooo much middle (specialty foods you can buy online...make yr own bloomin onion)... low middle, mid middle, high middle (all middling) so much "choice" that it's no longer shared...(back to the shared mythology piece) neither in terms of physical location, nor in terms of content. Of course who has time to bloom their own onion, brew there own beer, very few, but the illusion is a seduction. And since we're not sharing culture, however middling--tots agree--the easier to divide (we're already divided, hyper-individualized) & more thoroughly gut us.
Grubhub is its own hell. A restaurant runs out of something and leaves it off the order and you can't be reimbursed without spectacular hassle. The only way it's better than ordering directly from the restaurant is you don't need cash. What a bunch of lazy fools we are.
My instinct was the same as his. I don't really care if Applebee's goes out of business. Their food for the price was bad. I could go to a local restaurant, pay the same amount and get way better food. I am having similar thoughts with McDonald's $8 Big Macs. That's about the same price as 1 lb of pure hamburger meat. At a certain point these behemoths have become inefficient and must give way to common sense.
Now if local restaurants were going out of business that would be sad but these huge chains I just don't care about.
This is equally true of the mid-range family restaurant in any city, sadly just google "[your MSA] restaurant closures Jan 2025". Inflation pressure means chains who can negotiate better prices for inputs will eat competition and drive consolidation, sweetgreens comes not just for Applebee's but for us all
As someone that doesn’t go to the movies or sit down at restaurants here’s the answer. KIDS!
Have you tried doing those things with small children? It’s not an act of community. It’s a war.
I like ordering the pickup ahead on the way back from school so my kids can eat at the table right away and not be bored and it take an hour for a meal. I like streaming a movie for nothing in my house rather than driving somewhere to pay $100 bucks for take them to the bathroom in the middle and have my wife leave because the toddler is throwing a fit.
The Alamo drafthouse? The one with real food they bring to your seat that’s actually good and not overpriced (and maybe even themed to your movie). That’s not mid market bub. Mid market is dirty seats, sticky floors, bathrooms you gotta wipe down, and $8 popcorn you wait in a line for 15 min to buy (no free refills).
The same Alamo drafthouse btw were I took my wife for a viewing of Christmas vacation because it’s her favorite and they had props and decorations and a packed theatre of people acting it out together? Yeah, that’s as much community as you’re going to get from that kind of thing.
Look, I get it. There was something quaint about going to the video store and picking out a movie. Because you were a teenager/young adult and “killing time” was the point. Us busy people don’t have time to kill.
It's easy to complain about the monoculture when you have it and graduated out from it. But the kids growing up today don't have any kind of cohering shared experiences (that hated monoculture), and society is atomized, anxious, and distrustful as ppl get funneled into ever narrower cultural verticals by the algorithms. It's kind of like remote work - yes as a 40 year old it's perfect for me, but that's bc I'm riding off of the expertise and training i got from 10 years of working 60 hour weeks in an office getting mentorship and training you can't replicate for newbies over zoom.
Remote work is great for middle aged people who have already formed friend groups and families. If you are young and looking to find people with whom to form friend groups and start a family, it's a disaster.
In certain geographies sports and the weather can be shared experiences. And somehow in my world some of the streamers original content have become lunchtime topics of conversation - in some cases because we all randomly had seen and liked the same think and sometimes as suggestions for what to watch next.
Your analysis of the collapsing middle is pretty spot on. The economy is now K shaped and the upper arm of the K is staying affluent and spending more. That is what is keeping our economy afloat(barely). Is it sustainable? I have my doubts. 70% of our economy is based on goods and services. Gutting everything, homogenizing through Amazon and Spotify etc will only further rot out the independent businesses, musicians, and artists. I think a whole generation has to consciously move back to analog processes and small business communities to ever improve our shared experience, lives and genuine culture.
I’m a lifer musician who decided it’s a lifestyle not a paycheck because of the disillusionment of it all. I still create and really only do it for myself snd to share with friends now. As for work, a skilled trade is maybe one of the only somewhat safe options of survival in this rapidly changing world.
I fear for my kids future. Can only hope we taught them well.
Discord Records still releases some good music. DIY or don’t let the bastards grind you down.
it's possible there exists a glut where all the movies have been made, all the music recorded, all the menus posted, and an entropic future exists in the present as this generalized, deracinated content
analog processes slow things down and displace the rot experienced across all platforms
the hungry middle has always been subject to common performative metrics requiring more, more, and more
practice is the domain of ineffable quietude where the one thing is grasped as the one thing
One thought I often have is, "Do people just not want to DO anything anymore? Do they not WANT to be regular humans who do/read/watch/eat normal stuff?" And then I feel old for missing window shopping at the mall, eating at a chain restaurant, and picking a fun-sounding movie from the listings. OK, none of that's a thing anymore, so what are people doing for the hell of it?
(Also, I love this movie and used to own it on VHS. I also wrote a recap of the 90s film "The Cutting Edge" in part to honor a time when middle-of-the-road rom-coms/sports movies got greenlit all the time.)
"The Cutting Edge" is my favorite movie. And yes, it holds up all these years later. Aside from "Blue Crush," I never found another film that quite scratched that particular itch.
Definitely top 10 for me! I watched it again for "research" before writing that recap, but I probably could have done it from memory. Now I need to rewatch Blue Crush...
Awesome piece, consider me subscribed (I also am a sucker for parenthetical tangents—sometimes I use the em dash).
Another big contributor to this is the convenience economy.
Why go out to eat when you can have a restaurant bring the same food to your door?
Why go to theaters when you can stream at home?
Why go to the mall when you can shop online?
Why have a conversation with another human when you can listen to a podcast?
It's becoming more and more attractive to be an introvert. Which sounds great if you're an introvert, until you realize you haven't spoken to anyone but your spouse and dog in weeks and you start getting a bit too existential (oversharing much?).
It's much easier to commodify loneliness than community, no wonder the former won out.
I used to get computer games for my bdays in the late 80s and first took a programming class in 1996 — so I’m no luddite. However, my impression is that people are now being sold a _delusion_ that humans are “supposed” to meld with computers to become transhuman. That is the stupidest thing I can imagine. There’s a Simpsons episode from like 1991, where Homer designs a car, and it looks very, very, very poorly made. I think of that when I think of transhumanism.
The first thing I thought about reading this was how much easier it was to create for the middle before everything needed to be curated for social media. People don't go out to take and share photos of happy hour drink specials at Applebees. They take pictures of grass walls and $22 cocktails. So many reasons behind the death of the middle, and in part the middle, which so many of us once lived in or aspired to, stopped being okay to be a part of.
I also think about the need to niche down so far in today's market. "Middle" implies a certain level of general-ness that it's hard to be and gain attention from in an algorithm-driven world.
People don't take pictures of craft cocktails at Applebees, YES. But they took pictures of each other. In the beginning it social media felt like a place where you posted pictures of your friends at Applebees but it's not anymore.
And on the movie front, all my favorite actors are talking about the death of River Phoenix lately, and we all saw Stand By Me at the theater together.
Absolutely. For at least some of the Gen Z set, there has been a swing back in the opposite direction because there’s no way to keep up with the need to be constantly on.
This: “The first thing I thought about reading this was how much easier it was to create for the middle before everything needed to be curated for social media.”
Good column, and yeah, you're right about this, although the $38 million budget in 1997 would be close to $80 million today. Still, I don't think anybody is making $80 million dollar movies these days The biggest movie I worked on during my 40 years in Hollywood was "The Fifth Element" back in 1995, which I believe had an $80 million budget, which would be more than $150 million today -- still relatively small by modern superhero franchise standards.
The hollowing out you speak of is true of televison as well, where the good stuff -- and shows like "Sopranos," "The Wire," "Mad Men," and "Breaking Bad" really are good -- were all on cable networks, not broadcast television, and thus seen and appreciated by a tiny minority of viewers at home.
That said, I've never been to Sweetgreen, so can't comment on that. Good post -- I'll be back for more.
PS: As for Elvis, you might get a kick out this long-ago epiphany, when I finally realized why he mattered, and what he meant to people.
As a bartender at a dive bar in DC, I would contest that these middle spaces still exist, it's just that most people are no longer accepting corporate mediocrity as their flavor of choice. You can easily find at least a dozen bars just like mine in DC that serve better food for less than you'd spend at Applebee's, and you can eat it while you commiserate with a lawyer on your right and a public-school teacher on your left.
This is a really valuable counter and I think you're right that those spaces exist. A good dive bar might actually be the closest thing we have left to the old middle. Affordable, unpretentious, everyone welcome. And you're making an important distinction: the middle didn't die everywhere, it just stopped being corporate. The chains failed because they hollowed out the product, and places like yours survived because they kept the thing that actually mattered.
Where I'd push back slightly is on scale. A dozen great dive bars in DC serves a city of people who already know where to look. The thing the chains did, for all their mediocrity, was make the middle legible. You didn't need to be a local or know someone. You just saw the sign from the highway. The question is whether the dive bars and neighborhood spots can ever reach that kind of visibility, or whether they'll always be the best-kept secrets of the people lucky enough to find them.
Either way, your bar sounds like exactly the kind of place I'm arguing we need more of. Thanks for reading. If you're not subscribed, it's free. Would love to have a bartender's perspective in the mix going forward.
I really enjoyed this piece, the barbell metaphor is sharp and the parallel structure across industries is genuinely well done. But I think the thesis is doing some heavy lifting. Oppenheimer was a $100M adult drama about theoretical physics that made $950M, that’s the mid-budget adult movie thriving in the wild. Chili’s, Texas Roadhouse, and Olive Garden are all posting same-store sales growth right now. Casual dining is consolidating, not vanishing. And the restaurant collapses you cite are mostly private equity destruction stories, not barbell stories. Red Lobster died because Thai Union gutted its supply chain and a sale-leaseback deal strangled it with rent. TGI Fridays and Hooters were loaded with securitized debt. “The barbell ate it” reads better than “a PE firm executed a catastrophic financial engineering play,” but the second one is closer to what actually happened.
I also think the 2007 Best Picture lineup is doing more work than it should, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were specialty division releases playing to arthouse-adjacent audiences, not exactly the shared-culture-you-could-just-walk-into that the essay describes. None of this means the core instinct is wrong. The middle is under real pressure and the people narrating its decline are mostly the ones the new system serves, that’s a keen observation. But I’d love to see this argument wrestle with its counterexamples rather than route around them. The essay is at its best when it’s honest about complexity (the newsletter section is great) and at its weakest when it treats a pattern as a verdict.
that looks like really good. I just put it on hold at the library. random internet comments have recommended a lot of great books to me recently. I just read The Cold Vanish.
It doesn't matter how much your film costs, at some point it's going to come down to people talking to each other, usually in a room, sometimes outside
Smaller regional chain restaurants, local restaurants, with some exceptions, tend to be the places filling up more than Applebee's. Fast food drek is easy and convenient, not necessarily cheap, but they still have cheap options. So, we're losing those middle chain spots and more folks are eating from local restaurants more. Not so bad. Interesting thing about streaming has been how some of the higher quality broadcast and cable programs have so much replay value. Instead of re-runs, folks are choosing to re-watch old shows. Younger folks are finding relics of ages past to dive into and be fascinated by. I've dropped a reference to Forrest Gump a few times in the last few weeks to teenagers, thinking only their parents would get the reference. But no, kids as young as 13 know the movie as well as anyone in their 40s. I think the shifts we're seeing have been leveraged by the fulcrum of enshittification, producing the barbell economy, forcing more people into the extremes of income and thinning out the middle. I'm trying not to worry too much about the culture. I'll go to the local Italian restaurant, owned by a Sicilian immigrant, or the authentic Mexican joint owned by a guy from Jalisco, go see an occasional movie, but then beam old episodes of Seinfeld once in a while. And I'll be amused when a teenager gets a reference to something from 30 or 40 years ago.
The Forrest Gump detail is great and points to something genuinely hopeful. Streaming may have killed the shared opening weekend, but it accidentally created a kind of time-traveling monoculture where a 13-year-old and a 45-year-old can bond over the same reference. That's not nothing.
And I think your broader point is the optimistic version of the argument that I should spend more time with. The middle isn't dead so much as it's been relocated. The Sicilian-owned Italian place and the authentic Mexican joint are doing what Applebee's used to do, just better and with actual identity behind it. The risk is that those places are harder to find and less evenly distributed than the chains were, but where they exist, they're filling the same role.
"Enshittification as fulcrum for the barbell economy" is a line I wish I'd written, by the way.
Thanks for reading. If you're not subscribed, it's free. You're clearly already living the solution, which makes you exactly the kind of reader I want around here.
Thank you very much for this piece. I sense a somewhat different trend in fiction bestsellers, though it’s only a hunch. It seems to me that middlebrow fiction is on the rise. I’d love to read any essays on this if someone is willing to share.
That's a really interesting counterpoint and I think you might be onto something. Books may be the one medium where the middle is actually holding or even growing. BookTok, book clubs, the persistence of airport fiction that isn't embarrassed to be what it is. Publishing never went through the same consolidation-to-extremes that film and restaurants did, at least not to the same degree. I'd love to dig into why. If anyone in the comments has essays on this, please share.
Thanks for reading. If you're not subscribed, it's free. You might have just given me my next piece.
I teach screenwriting day USC (who, as an aside, just eliminated their expanded animation department) and am constantly talking about how Hollywood killed the movie business. The idea that a movie is only worth making if you spend 100 million dollars is a big part of the problem. It’s not the WGA strike - as execs claim or labor costs. It’s because the studios and streaming services are greedy bastards. They’re not satisfied making a ten million profit when they can MAYBE make a 200 million profit. The movies get worse every year. It’s depressing that the ONE real contribution the US has made to the world has been destroyed by rampant greed.
The USC animation detail is infuriating and perfectly illustrative. They're cutting the pipeline for the next generation of artists at the exact institution that's supposed to be building it. That's not a budget decision, that's a surrender. And you're naming the core problem more bluntly than I did: it's not that mid-budget movies stopped being profitable. It's that they stopped being profitable enough. A $40 million movie that returns $80 million is a great business by any sane standard. But when the entire industry is organized around chasing billion-dollar outcomes, a reliable double on your investment looks like a waste of a release slot. The logic is indistinguishable from gambling addiction.
Coming from someone who teaches the next generation of screenwriters, how do you talk to your students about this? I'm genuinely curious whether the advice is to write for the system as it exists or to write the things they believe in and hope the system catches up. Because that tension feels like it's at the center of everything right now.
Thanks for reading, and for fighting the good fight from inside the institution. If you're not subscribed, it's free. I'd love to have someone from the teaching side of this in the conversation.
And it's becoming an even narrower road with Netflix and now Paramount going to take over the creative product. Remember that Ellison owns Paramount and Larry Ellison, the father, has stated that his goal before he dies is that Oracle controls every bit of data about us throughout our lives. That it completely knows everything about us. That's who's controlling entertainment. It is all about data and controlling our desires.
Ellison is the devil, a real threat to free speech and everything that's decent. I abhor him. It's hard to believe that in such a short period of time, people can accumulate so much money and power - and do such awful things with it.
This piece hit a little differently for me because I'm old enough, and grew up poor and rural enough, that the things you describe as "middle" were largely aspirational to me for the first twenty years of my life, to the extent i was even aware of them.
Going out to eat was a rare treat and involved pepperoni pizza from the only mom-and-pop place in the nearest town. Literally the only movies I saw at the theater were the Star Wars movies; I went with my dad to a town an hour away and it was An Event. Probably the main experience I shared with the broader culture was music. The top 40 station was always on and I enjoyed knowing that I, too, was listening to what a lot of other people thought was cool.
I watched the chains gradually make their way to the nearest biggish town and understood that their presence there meant the same thing that it meant when a once-cool apparel brand turns up at Target: it's relinquished whatever pretense of prestige or coolness it ever had. When you're opening a store in Moscow, Idaho, you have jumped the shark.
I spent the next 20+ years in a major city where I never really learned to love the chains, although I could finally afford them. Having grown up with mom-and-pop businesses and experiences because it was what was available and what we could afford, I didn't have any nostalgic memories of these places. I liked the food carts and coffee shops and dive bars. Not the cool ones, but the kind of shabby ones in my low-rent neighborhood.
And now? I'm retired and back in the sticks. Different sticks and more disposable income, but I feel like I still don't have a shared understanding of the American experience described here.
I guess this is my rambling way of saying you're getting at a very specific kind of consumer. The middle hits different when you're looking at it from not even underneath, but entirely outside.
It's also useful to reflect that even a perceived monoculture was impossible then. With no internet and no cable, I had never heard of Applebee's or new releases. My entire reality was basically school, family, friends, the library, and the radio. It's wild to think that mine was the last generation to have that kind of childhood.
This is one of the most valuable responses I've gotten on this piece, and I want to sit with it honestly. You're pointing at a blind spot in the argument that I think is important: the "middle" I'm describing was never universal. It was a specific experience available to a specific kind of American, mostly suburban, mostly with enough disposable income to take it for granted. From where you were standing, Applebee's wasn't a gathering place being mourned. It was something you drove past on the way to somewhere else, if it existed at all.
And your childhood sounds like it had exactly the kind of genuine community the essay is reaching for, just built from completely different materials. School, family, friends, the library, the radio. No chains required. Which raises an uncomfortable question about whether the thing I'm actually mourning is community itself or just the particular commercial infrastructure that one segment of America mistook for community.
The top 40 detail is beautiful, though, and I think it cuts through the class distinction. That was the one truly democratic shared experience. You didn't need money or proximity or a car. You just needed a radio. And that's basically gone now too.
I really appreciate you sharing this. It's the kind of perspective that makes the argument better by making it more honest. If you're not subscribed, it's free. I think your vantage point from outside the middle might be the most useful one in this whole conversation.
This article made me realize why I started randomly going to the movies to watch anything, whatever was on, without researching it first. I understand now that I miss non-curated stuff. Not looking for the IMDb score or reviews about it or YouTube channels recommending it; not watching only what was greenlighted by "the cultured people". Simply going to the movies, and enjoying the entire experience, including being bored or the surprise of a great piece. Thank you for discussing this idea!
Dude, you knocked it out of the park here. Subscribed. Few thoughts…
Another place where this effect shows up, healthcare. What do GPs even do anymore. It’s all referrals to specialists. The healthcare industry has no appetite for jacks of all trades. Patients have something wrong with them, there’s no family doctor who can spend some time with you, people with a half dozen minor, nagging symptoms get referred out to two dozen specialists, each of which is “better,” in their deeper knowledge of their focus, but it’s not a better patient experience.
And the industries you covered… common denominator, private equity, and the insatiable desire for growth, returns and exits. I think most, if not all, of the restaurants you mentioned were PE owned.
This barbell effect shows up a lot in pro sports too. The worst thing an NBA team can be is low lottery or low playoff seed. Those teams have no future. Either have to be getting better or tank and rebuild. There’s a middle by default, but no teams want to stay there long.
Good post. Looking forward to reading more of your work.
When I first read this, I also felt a kind of nostalgic mourning for the "Death of the Middle"—the idea that the loss of Applebee’s and $40 million Julia Roberts rom-coms was a collapse of the American Commons.
But upon sitting with it, I think it’s just because I’m in deep middle-age and everything’s on fire right now.
Because the middle tier wasn't really “the commons.” It was capitalism performing a monoculture. I mean I loved MTV when it mattered. I’m also fine that it no longer does.
We didn't sit in those booths because we were "sharing an experience.” We sat there because we had no choice. The "Common Ground” was mostly just the result of a limited inventory.
Let’s not mistake the illusion of a community for the reality of a captive audience.
When I first read this, I pictured that scene at the end of Goonies when the galleon sails away. This piece casts us as outcasts staring wistfully after a romantic ship carrying the bones of past adventures. When we’re really mourning the convenience of a time when everyone was stuck on the same shitty barge being pulled by a mediocre tug.
I don’t know. I think I’d rather be a scavenger in the wreckage of a barbell economy than a "managed unit" at a Buca di Beppo, pretending the breadsticks are a shared cultural heritage.
Still, you earned a sub for making me reflect. Definitely looking forward to more of your writing.
First of all, I feel honored! Thanks for subscribing to the newsletter. Your analysis is now making me think, which is the whole point of this thing.
You're 100% right that we shouldn't confuse a captive audience with a congregation. But IDK, here's what I keep turning over: the scavenger in the wreckage still has to find people, right? The managed unit at Buca di Beppo at least had a table full of strangers passing the same garlic bread. The monoculture was a cage, sure, but cages have the accidental property of forcing proximity. And proximity is the precondition for friction, and friction is the precondition for culture. What I worry about isn't the loss of the middle. It's the loss of the argument about the middle. When everyone's on their own raft, nobody's wrong — but nobody's interesting either.
Anyway, most importantly, I think you are 100% right; and your Goonies reframe is going to haunt me. Welcome aboard! #GooniesNeverSayDie
Ah, then I shall file this next to <a href=https://americanliterature.com/author/nathaniel-hawthorne/short-story/fire-worship>Nathaniel Hawthorn's 1846 screed against the heating stove and paen to the open hearth, "Fire Worship"</a>. It's 19th century literary prose, full of ornate description, cheerfully referencing Classical mythology and Christian doctrine indiscriminately, but in the last quarter of it he finally gets to the heart of his argument: "It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it has been, now that we have subtracted from it so important and vivifying an element as firelight... There will be nothing to attract these poor children to one centre. They will never behold one another through that peculiar medium of vision the ruddy gleam of blazing wood or bituminous coal—-which gives the human spirit so deep an insight into its fellows and melts all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts. Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious jest; the life-like, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word,—will disappear from earth. Conversation will contract the air of debate, and all mortal intercourse be chilled with a fatal frost."
Thanks for reading and for taking the time to comment. Means a lot.
Man. Dropping Hawthorne makes me regret dropping The Goonies…
😆
I enjoyed reading this entire thread. Everyone makes valid points & offers interesting perspectives.
yes! as a genxer been thinking much about curation/individualization/app culture (sony walkman as proto app) not to mention grubhub (you dont even need to go out to get yr sweetgreen) & streaming & youtube & other homebound consumption & not just home but individualized (people cohabitating neither eating or entertaining together...gone the common "hearth" for both cooking & storytelling). In some ways it seems like there's just sooooo much middle (specialty foods you can buy online...make yr own bloomin onion)... low middle, mid middle, high middle (all middling) so much "choice" that it's no longer shared...(back to the shared mythology piece) neither in terms of physical location, nor in terms of content. Of course who has time to bloom their own onion, brew there own beer, very few, but the illusion is a seduction. And since we're not sharing culture, however middling--tots agree--the easier to divide (we're already divided, hyper-individualized) & more thoroughly gut us.
Grubhub is its own hell. A restaurant runs out of something and leaves it off the order and you can't be reimbursed without spectacular hassle. The only way it's better than ordering directly from the restaurant is you don't need cash. What a bunch of lazy fools we are.
Imagine if he knew what phones would do
My instinct was the same as his. I don't really care if Applebee's goes out of business. Their food for the price was bad. I could go to a local restaurant, pay the same amount and get way better food. I am having similar thoughts with McDonald's $8 Big Macs. That's about the same price as 1 lb of pure hamburger meat. At a certain point these behemoths have become inefficient and must give way to common sense.
Now if local restaurants were going out of business that would be sad but these huge chains I just don't care about.
This is equally true of the mid-range family restaurant in any city, sadly just google "[your MSA] restaurant closures Jan 2025". Inflation pressure means chains who can negotiate better prices for inputs will eat competition and drive consolidation, sweetgreens comes not just for Applebee's but for us all
Local restaurants are dying left and right — in large part because people like me don’t go there anymore.
We stay home to save money.
As someone that doesn’t go to the movies or sit down at restaurants here’s the answer. KIDS!
Have you tried doing those things with small children? It’s not an act of community. It’s a war.
I like ordering the pickup ahead on the way back from school so my kids can eat at the table right away and not be bored and it take an hour for a meal. I like streaming a movie for nothing in my house rather than driving somewhere to pay $100 bucks for take them to the bathroom in the middle and have my wife leave because the toddler is throwing a fit.
The Alamo drafthouse? The one with real food they bring to your seat that’s actually good and not overpriced (and maybe even themed to your movie). That’s not mid market bub. Mid market is dirty seats, sticky floors, bathrooms you gotta wipe down, and $8 popcorn you wait in a line for 15 min to buy (no free refills).
The same Alamo drafthouse btw were I took my wife for a viewing of Christmas vacation because it’s her favorite and they had props and decorations and a packed theatre of people acting it out together? Yeah, that’s as much community as you’re going to get from that kind of thing.
Look, I get it. There was something quaint about going to the video store and picking out a movie. Because you were a teenager/young adult and “killing time” was the point. Us busy people don’t have time to kill.
My wife and I were discussing your piece last night. You gave us a lot to think about.
It's easy to complain about the monoculture when you have it and graduated out from it. But the kids growing up today don't have any kind of cohering shared experiences (that hated monoculture), and society is atomized, anxious, and distrustful as ppl get funneled into ever narrower cultural verticals by the algorithms. It's kind of like remote work - yes as a 40 year old it's perfect for me, but that's bc I'm riding off of the expertise and training i got from 10 years of working 60 hour weeks in an office getting mentorship and training you can't replicate for newbies over zoom.
Remote work is great for middle aged people who have already formed friend groups and families. If you are young and looking to find people with whom to form friend groups and start a family, it's a disaster.
In certain geographies sports and the weather can be shared experiences. And somehow in my world some of the streamers original content have become lunchtime topics of conversation - in some cases because we all randomly had seen and liked the same think and sometimes as suggestions for what to watch next.
Your analysis of the collapsing middle is pretty spot on. The economy is now K shaped and the upper arm of the K is staying affluent and spending more. That is what is keeping our economy afloat(barely). Is it sustainable? I have my doubts. 70% of our economy is based on goods and services. Gutting everything, homogenizing through Amazon and Spotify etc will only further rot out the independent businesses, musicians, and artists. I think a whole generation has to consciously move back to analog processes and small business communities to ever improve our shared experience, lives and genuine culture.
I’m a lifer musician who decided it’s a lifestyle not a paycheck because of the disillusionment of it all. I still create and really only do it for myself snd to share with friends now. As for work, a skilled trade is maybe one of the only somewhat safe options of survival in this rapidly changing world.
I fear for my kids future. Can only hope we taught them well.
Discord Records still releases some good music. DIY or don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Speaking from the bottom of the K, it looks pretty bleak from down here.
Yeah I feel you. I’m not in the top K either.
it's possible there exists a glut where all the movies have been made, all the music recorded, all the menus posted, and an entropic future exists in the present as this generalized, deracinated content
analog processes slow things down and displace the rot experienced across all platforms
the hungry middle has always been subject to common performative metrics requiring more, more, and more
practice is the domain of ineffable quietude where the one thing is grasped as the one thing
it's still out there
go find it
One thought I often have is, "Do people just not want to DO anything anymore? Do they not WANT to be regular humans who do/read/watch/eat normal stuff?" And then I feel old for missing window shopping at the mall, eating at a chain restaurant, and picking a fun-sounding movie from the listings. OK, none of that's a thing anymore, so what are people doing for the hell of it?
(Also, I love this movie and used to own it on VHS. I also wrote a recap of the 90s film "The Cutting Edge" in part to honor a time when middle-of-the-road rom-coms/sports movies got greenlit all the time.)
Thank you — comments like this are what make the newsletter worth doing. Genuinely glad you’re reading
God I love The Cutting Edge
Is that the ice skating one where someone says “toe pick?”
Yes! The most iconic montage.
yes it is!
Staring at an endless scroll on their phone. That’s what they’re doing.
I didn't want to say it, but, yeah...
"The Cutting Edge" is my favorite movie. And yes, it holds up all these years later. Aside from "Blue Crush," I never found another film that quite scratched that particular itch.
I’ve seen it so many times. Man I miss DB Sweeney. And Moira Kelly. With Honors with her and Brendan Fraser was another fave.
Definitely top 10 for me! I watched it again for "research" before writing that recap, but I probably could have done it from memory. Now I need to rewatch Blue Crush...
Awesome piece, consider me subscribed (I also am a sucker for parenthetical tangents—sometimes I use the em dash).
Another big contributor to this is the convenience economy.
Why go out to eat when you can have a restaurant bring the same food to your door?
Why go to theaters when you can stream at home?
Why go to the mall when you can shop online?
Why have a conversation with another human when you can listen to a podcast?
It's becoming more and more attractive to be an introvert. Which sounds great if you're an introvert, until you realize you haven't spoken to anyone but your spouse and dog in weeks and you start getting a bit too existential (oversharing much?).
It's much easier to commodify loneliness than community, no wonder the former won out.
Lots to think about, thanks!
This made my week. Thank you!
I used to get computer games for my bdays in the late 80s and first took a programming class in 1996 — so I’m no luddite. However, my impression is that people are now being sold a _delusion_ that humans are “supposed” to meld with computers to become transhuman. That is the stupidest thing I can imagine. There’s a Simpsons episode from like 1991, where Homer designs a car, and it looks very, very, very poorly made. I think of that when I think of transhumanism.
The first thing I thought about reading this was how much easier it was to create for the middle before everything needed to be curated for social media. People don't go out to take and share photos of happy hour drink specials at Applebees. They take pictures of grass walls and $22 cocktails. So many reasons behind the death of the middle, and in part the middle, which so many of us once lived in or aspired to, stopped being okay to be a part of.
I also think about the need to niche down so far in today's market. "Middle" implies a certain level of general-ness that it's hard to be and gain attention from in an algorithm-driven world.
This is what makes Found Object feel like more than just a newsletter. Thanks for being part of it
People don't take pictures of craft cocktails at Applebees, YES. But they took pictures of each other. In the beginning it social media felt like a place where you posted pictures of your friends at Applebees but it's not anymore.
And on the movie front, all my favorite actors are talking about the death of River Phoenix lately, and we all saw Stand By Me at the theater together.
I feel bad for Gen Z and beyond. The constant performance seems exhausting.
Absolutely. For at least some of the Gen Z set, there has been a swing back in the opposite direction because there’s no way to keep up with the need to be constantly on.
This: “The first thing I thought about reading this was how much easier it was to create for the middle before everything needed to be curated for social media.”
Good column, and yeah, you're right about this, although the $38 million budget in 1997 would be close to $80 million today. Still, I don't think anybody is making $80 million dollar movies these days The biggest movie I worked on during my 40 years in Hollywood was "The Fifth Element" back in 1995, which I believe had an $80 million budget, which would be more than $150 million today -- still relatively small by modern superhero franchise standards.
The hollowing out you speak of is true of televison as well, where the good stuff -- and shows like "Sopranos," "The Wire," "Mad Men," and "Breaking Bad" really are good -- were all on cable networks, not broadcast television, and thus seen and appreciated by a tiny minority of viewers at home.
That said, I've never been to Sweetgreen, so can't comment on that. Good post -- I'll be back for more.
PS: As for Elvis, you might get a kick out this long-ago epiphany, when I finally realized why he mattered, and what he meant to people.
https://hollywoodjuicer.substack.com/p/the-king
You don’t know what it means to hear that after staring at a draft for hours. Thank you.
As a bartender at a dive bar in DC, I would contest that these middle spaces still exist, it's just that most people are no longer accepting corporate mediocrity as their flavor of choice. You can easily find at least a dozen bars just like mine in DC that serve better food for less than you'd spend at Applebee's, and you can eat it while you commiserate with a lawyer on your right and a public-school teacher on your left.
This is a really valuable counter and I think you're right that those spaces exist. A good dive bar might actually be the closest thing we have left to the old middle. Affordable, unpretentious, everyone welcome. And you're making an important distinction: the middle didn't die everywhere, it just stopped being corporate. The chains failed because they hollowed out the product, and places like yours survived because they kept the thing that actually mattered.
Where I'd push back slightly is on scale. A dozen great dive bars in DC serves a city of people who already know where to look. The thing the chains did, for all their mediocrity, was make the middle legible. You didn't need to be a local or know someone. You just saw the sign from the highway. The question is whether the dive bars and neighborhood spots can ever reach that kind of visibility, or whether they'll always be the best-kept secrets of the people lucky enough to find them.
Either way, your bar sounds like exactly the kind of place I'm arguing we need more of. Thanks for reading. If you're not subscribed, it's free. Would love to have a bartender's perspective in the mix going forward.
I really enjoyed this piece, the barbell metaphor is sharp and the parallel structure across industries is genuinely well done. But I think the thesis is doing some heavy lifting. Oppenheimer was a $100M adult drama about theoretical physics that made $950M, that’s the mid-budget adult movie thriving in the wild. Chili’s, Texas Roadhouse, and Olive Garden are all posting same-store sales growth right now. Casual dining is consolidating, not vanishing. And the restaurant collapses you cite are mostly private equity destruction stories, not barbell stories. Red Lobster died because Thai Union gutted its supply chain and a sale-leaseback deal strangled it with rent. TGI Fridays and Hooters were loaded with securitized debt. “The barbell ate it” reads better than “a PE firm executed a catastrophic financial engineering play,” but the second one is closer to what actually happened.
I also think the 2007 Best Picture lineup is doing more work than it should, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were specialty division releases playing to arthouse-adjacent audiences, not exactly the shared-culture-you-could-just-walk-into that the essay describes. None of this means the core instinct is wrong. The middle is under real pressure and the people narrating its decline are mostly the ones the new system serves, that’s a keen observation. But I’d love to see this argument wrestle with its counterexamples rather than route around them. The essay is at its best when it’s honest about complexity (the newsletter section is great) and at its weakest when it treats a pattern as a verdict.
That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to sit down and write the next one immediately. Thank you.
Welcome! This is what I love about substack. People discussing ideas. Keep on writing! 😄
Writing into the void gets easier when people like you write back. Thank you
She's at a White Sox game
You know, Stewart O'Nan wrote a book about a failing Red Lobster
Now I want to read it
that looks like really good. I just put it on hold at the library. random internet comments have recommended a lot of great books to me recently. I just read The Cold Vanish.
thnx
You know what? Red Lobster was good and anyone who claims otherwise can stuff a crab up their ass.
I haven’t been there in years because I can’t afford it anymore.
It doesn't matter how much your film costs, at some point it's going to come down to people talking to each other, usually in a room, sometimes outside
Smaller regional chain restaurants, local restaurants, with some exceptions, tend to be the places filling up more than Applebee's. Fast food drek is easy and convenient, not necessarily cheap, but they still have cheap options. So, we're losing those middle chain spots and more folks are eating from local restaurants more. Not so bad. Interesting thing about streaming has been how some of the higher quality broadcast and cable programs have so much replay value. Instead of re-runs, folks are choosing to re-watch old shows. Younger folks are finding relics of ages past to dive into and be fascinated by. I've dropped a reference to Forrest Gump a few times in the last few weeks to teenagers, thinking only their parents would get the reference. But no, kids as young as 13 know the movie as well as anyone in their 40s. I think the shifts we're seeing have been leveraged by the fulcrum of enshittification, producing the barbell economy, forcing more people into the extremes of income and thinning out the middle. I'm trying not to worry too much about the culture. I'll go to the local Italian restaurant, owned by a Sicilian immigrant, or the authentic Mexican joint owned by a guy from Jalisco, go see an occasional movie, but then beam old episodes of Seinfeld once in a while. And I'll be amused when a teenager gets a reference to something from 30 or 40 years ago.
The Forrest Gump detail is great and points to something genuinely hopeful. Streaming may have killed the shared opening weekend, but it accidentally created a kind of time-traveling monoculture where a 13-year-old and a 45-year-old can bond over the same reference. That's not nothing.
And I think your broader point is the optimistic version of the argument that I should spend more time with. The middle isn't dead so much as it's been relocated. The Sicilian-owned Italian place and the authentic Mexican joint are doing what Applebee's used to do, just better and with actual identity behind it. The risk is that those places are harder to find and less evenly distributed than the chains were, but where they exist, they're filling the same role.
"Enshittification as fulcrum for the barbell economy" is a line I wish I'd written, by the way.
Thanks for reading. If you're not subscribed, it's free. You're clearly already living the solution, which makes you exactly the kind of reader I want around here.
Thank you very much for this piece. I sense a somewhat different trend in fiction bestsellers, though it’s only a hunch. It seems to me that middlebrow fiction is on the rise. I’d love to read any essays on this if someone is willing to share.
That's a really interesting counterpoint and I think you might be onto something. Books may be the one medium where the middle is actually holding or even growing. BookTok, book clubs, the persistence of airport fiction that isn't embarrassed to be what it is. Publishing never went through the same consolidation-to-extremes that film and restaurants did, at least not to the same degree. I'd love to dig into why. If anyone in the comments has essays on this, please share.
Thanks for reading. If you're not subscribed, it's free. You might have just given me my next piece.
I teach screenwriting day USC (who, as an aside, just eliminated their expanded animation department) and am constantly talking about how Hollywood killed the movie business. The idea that a movie is only worth making if you spend 100 million dollars is a big part of the problem. It’s not the WGA strike - as execs claim or labor costs. It’s because the studios and streaming services are greedy bastards. They’re not satisfied making a ten million profit when they can MAYBE make a 200 million profit. The movies get worse every year. It’s depressing that the ONE real contribution the US has made to the world has been destroyed by rampant greed.
The USC animation detail is infuriating and perfectly illustrative. They're cutting the pipeline for the next generation of artists at the exact institution that's supposed to be building it. That's not a budget decision, that's a surrender. And you're naming the core problem more bluntly than I did: it's not that mid-budget movies stopped being profitable. It's that they stopped being profitable enough. A $40 million movie that returns $80 million is a great business by any sane standard. But when the entire industry is organized around chasing billion-dollar outcomes, a reliable double on your investment looks like a waste of a release slot. The logic is indistinguishable from gambling addiction.
Coming from someone who teaches the next generation of screenwriters, how do you talk to your students about this? I'm genuinely curious whether the advice is to write for the system as it exists or to write the things they believe in and hope the system catches up. Because that tension feels like it's at the center of everything right now.
Thanks for reading, and for fighting the good fight from inside the institution. If you're not subscribed, it's free. I'd love to have someone from the teaching side of this in the conversation.
And it's becoming an even narrower road with Netflix and now Paramount going to take over the creative product. Remember that Ellison owns Paramount and Larry Ellison, the father, has stated that his goal before he dies is that Oracle controls every bit of data about us throughout our lives. That it completely knows everything about us. That's who's controlling entertainment. It is all about data and controlling our desires.
Ellison is the devil, a real threat to free speech and everything that's decent. I abhor him. It's hard to believe that in such a short period of time, people can accumulate so much money and power - and do such awful things with it.
This piece hit a little differently for me because I'm old enough, and grew up poor and rural enough, that the things you describe as "middle" were largely aspirational to me for the first twenty years of my life, to the extent i was even aware of them.
Going out to eat was a rare treat and involved pepperoni pizza from the only mom-and-pop place in the nearest town. Literally the only movies I saw at the theater were the Star Wars movies; I went with my dad to a town an hour away and it was An Event. Probably the main experience I shared with the broader culture was music. The top 40 station was always on and I enjoyed knowing that I, too, was listening to what a lot of other people thought was cool.
I watched the chains gradually make their way to the nearest biggish town and understood that their presence there meant the same thing that it meant when a once-cool apparel brand turns up at Target: it's relinquished whatever pretense of prestige or coolness it ever had. When you're opening a store in Moscow, Idaho, you have jumped the shark.
I spent the next 20+ years in a major city where I never really learned to love the chains, although I could finally afford them. Having grown up with mom-and-pop businesses and experiences because it was what was available and what we could afford, I didn't have any nostalgic memories of these places. I liked the food carts and coffee shops and dive bars. Not the cool ones, but the kind of shabby ones in my low-rent neighborhood.
And now? I'm retired and back in the sticks. Different sticks and more disposable income, but I feel like I still don't have a shared understanding of the American experience described here.
I guess this is my rambling way of saying you're getting at a very specific kind of consumer. The middle hits different when you're looking at it from not even underneath, but entirely outside.
It's also useful to reflect that even a perceived monoculture was impossible then. With no internet and no cable, I had never heard of Applebee's or new releases. My entire reality was basically school, family, friends, the library, and the radio. It's wild to think that mine was the last generation to have that kind of childhood.
This is one of the most valuable responses I've gotten on this piece, and I want to sit with it honestly. You're pointing at a blind spot in the argument that I think is important: the "middle" I'm describing was never universal. It was a specific experience available to a specific kind of American, mostly suburban, mostly with enough disposable income to take it for granted. From where you were standing, Applebee's wasn't a gathering place being mourned. It was something you drove past on the way to somewhere else, if it existed at all.
And your childhood sounds like it had exactly the kind of genuine community the essay is reaching for, just built from completely different materials. School, family, friends, the library, the radio. No chains required. Which raises an uncomfortable question about whether the thing I'm actually mourning is community itself or just the particular commercial infrastructure that one segment of America mistook for community.
The top 40 detail is beautiful, though, and I think it cuts through the class distinction. That was the one truly democratic shared experience. You didn't need money or proximity or a car. You just needed a radio. And that's basically gone now too.
I really appreciate you sharing this. It's the kind of perspective that makes the argument better by making it more honest. If you're not subscribed, it's free. I think your vantage point from outside the middle might be the most useful one in this whole conversation.
This article made me realize why I started randomly going to the movies to watch anything, whatever was on, without researching it first. I understand now that I miss non-curated stuff. Not looking for the IMDb score or reviews about it or YouTube channels recommending it; not watching only what was greenlighted by "the cultured people". Simply going to the movies, and enjoying the entire experience, including being bored or the surprise of a great piece. Thank you for discussing this idea!
Honestly, comments like this are the whole reason I keep writing. Thank you.
Outstanding title. Saved and will read and comment more later.
Thanks!!!
Dude, you knocked it out of the park here. Subscribed. Few thoughts…
Another place where this effect shows up, healthcare. What do GPs even do anymore. It’s all referrals to specialists. The healthcare industry has no appetite for jacks of all trades. Patients have something wrong with them, there’s no family doctor who can spend some time with you, people with a half dozen minor, nagging symptoms get referred out to two dozen specialists, each of which is “better,” in their deeper knowledge of their focus, but it’s not a better patient experience.
And the industries you covered… common denominator, private equity, and the insatiable desire for growth, returns and exits. I think most, if not all, of the restaurants you mentioned were PE owned.
This barbell effect shows up a lot in pro sports too. The worst thing an NBA team can be is low lottery or low playoff seed. Those teams have no future. Either have to be getting better or tank and rebuild. There’s a middle by default, but no teams want to stay there long.
Good post. Looking forward to reading more of your work.