Illustration by Midjourney

Before I grew up and discovered nuance, my friends and I had a simple scale for judging our relative success. How far from Bradford have you managed to move?[1] Some of us bounced around different bits of West Yorkshire. Some of us moved to London. Jon made it to Singapore. Ten years on and barely any of us still live in London. Most have moved back North to the areas surrounding Bradford: Ilkley, Leeds, Skipton. Our success criteria are more complex, less overt.

Social mobility has always been tied to physical mobility. The ability to leave your current circumstances and head off in search of something better is a luxury for some[2] but a necessity for many and the core of the American Dream.

But the pandemic exposed a more complex relationship between social mobility and physical mobility. In 2021, workplace promotions halved and Rishi Sunak urged us to get back to the office to get on in our careers. The continued proliferation of remote working hints at a link between social and physical mobility that flouts such presenteeism. It's a sign of enlightenment, rallying against the values of the old guard (who can't wait to get back to the office so they can signal their status physically). And it's a move signalling my status as a knowledge worker who doesn't need to be physically present to do my job. These signals point to a cultural reimagining of social mobility.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic hit, the yuppie had been replaced by the millennial: the first generation set to be worse off than their parents in terms of job status and income despite being more educated. Young people today are less socially mobile and, even before the pandemic, less physically mobile. And while we were told throughout school that the key to social mobility was to get a degree, get a job, work hard and rise through the ranks, the truth is this isn't enough any more. The assets required to generate real wealth are "no longer affordable to the average earner" according to research by L'Atelier.

While the middle classes have hit a ceiling, the reshaping of the labour market, sweeping urbanisation, improved living standards, and the accessibility of credit mean "there is less to distinguish poor from working class from middle class than there has been at any point in the last century. These three classes in particular are significantly less distinct." A success for society but, for the class anxious, a nightmare.

The ability to differentiate between classes is of vital importance to most humans. In her wonderful book Watching the English Professor Kate Fox explains how the English have developed an "acute sensitivity of our on-board class-radar systems" and she marvels at "the minutiae and sheer mind-boggling silliness of our class indicators and class anxieties". Some indicators are not so small. Several past cultures, including the English, expressed a preference for pale skin among the rich, evidence that they do not have to toil in the fields like the lower classes. The ability to work remotely is a class indicator in exactly the same way. I mean, 60% of the time we're saving on commutes, we spend working! So there must be a status signal in play.

I expect other behaviours reminiscent of past cultures will follow. While poorer classes may be forced into chasing in-person work from city to city, knowledge workers will give up on the nomadic lifestyle that has long been touted as the promise of remote work. Instead they will establish firm roots - finding their forever homes earlier - leading to a decrease in house moves. Link this to increasingly unaffordable housing and we might see the adoption in the west of intergenerational households as is common in many Eastern cultures. Already in the UK, 42% of 15-34 year olds live with their parents, a proportion that has risen sharply in the last few years.

The Great Resignation is also partly in service of social mobility. Not through the accumulation of money, but instead through our most valuable resource, time. A 2016 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research found that societies which believe social status can be earned through success and accomplishments are more likely to view busyness as a status symbol, leading to our fetishisation of long work hours. If our societal mood has shifted, and I think it has, we can expect to hear fewer and fewer people telling us how busy they've been when we ask them how they are.

The paper also speculated that the busyness had to be voluntary to carry status: "One could imagine that a person with many financial burdens has no choice but to be busy with work, working overtime or even taking more than one job, and thus may be perceived to have less status." The same agency would have to be true in the reversal of this behaviour. As the number of freelancers continues to grow people will go to great lengths to distinguish between those who are forced into unstable work through zero-hours contracts and the growth of gig economy labour, and those who choose to freelance in order to gain more control of their time. The dichotomy is already there in the language of freelancing vs gig economy. And while the phrase, "I quit the rat race", is common parlance, few really hear the distancing and belittling within it, marking out the speaker's status through their agency and abstention.

I'd expect to start seeing more behaviours which demonstrate the amount of leisure time people have available rather than the amount of time they're spending working. Lengthy coffee rituals is one aspect of this. Gardening, another. Really anything that requires a significant, consistent, time investment. I often think of the surge in popularity of ultra running and Ironman triathlons as the ultimate expression of this trend; the huge number of hours it takes to train for them a clear signal of available leisure time.

We find ways to judge status in whatever situation we find ourselves in. As Will Storr writes in The Status Game, "Humans are extraordinarily imaginative creatures who can turn almost anything into status symbols." When physical mobility is reduced, we will find status in our immobility. When social mobility is reduced, we look for status not in the accumulation of money, but in the accumulation of time.

Notes: [1] Having grown up in Bradford (UK) we are allowed to say such disparaging things. I won't hear a bad word about the place from anyone who hasn't grown up there. [2] The gap year abroad is a massive class indicator in the UK. In case you’re wondering, I did not have one.