I grew up in an upwardly mobile striving family and I know a lot of those people, and they're happy. Freakishly, frighteningly, bizarrely happy. They know nothing, they believe nothing. They go through life without any understanding and without understanding that they have no understanding. They don't care about anyone or anything except themselves and people they view as possessions or accessories.

Like Fight Club and it's consequences, yadda yadda, but Pahlniuk wrote one of the most on the money "Are the straights okay?" books of the 20th century. What makes Jack so relatable to so many disaffected white young men is that they recognize the absolute emptiness of this kind of life, a life without politics, without passion, without a past or a future. Pahlniuk recognized that most straight white guys, lacking any positive cultural or community influences, turn to self-destructive nihilism in a desperate attempt to escape the profound meaninglessness of their lives. Like lots of white suburbanoids are perfectly happy in their comfortable cages. They have no self awareness, no curiosity, and no angst. They have never stared in to the void. They don't even know there is a void. But if you're just self aware enough to know there is something profoundly wrong with your existence, you're in hell, because you're utterly alone surrounded by stepford robots who will turn on you if you start showing evidence of non-compliance with the required social and cultural uniform. Like these guys have no theory. They have no narrative to explain why their lives are empty, why they feel a yawning gulf even though they have everything society says they should want. They don't know capitalism exists or what it is anymore than fish are aware of water, but they know they're drowning.

Like obviously your pity is better spent elsewhere, but Pahlniuk correctly identified that this kind of profound alienation tends to produce nihilistic reactions. The end is very poignant - Jack realizes that what Tyler promises isn't liberation but a spiral of self destruction and tries to escape, only to find that Project Mayhem is everywhere, that the disaffected, angry young men are everywhere, that there's no way out for men in his social and economic class. The end of the book is much bleaker than the movie - Jack wakes up in a stretcher having blown a big, ugly hole in his jaw, thinking he's finally safe now that Tyler is dead, only to realize that the EMTs treating him are Project Mayhem fanatics.

And like this is all very 90s shit. These guys don't exist anymore as far as I know. Or maybe they do and I just don't move in those circles anymore. Now we've got what comes next, the angry reaction, the right wing radicalization, the lashing out as they look for someone to blame, for a cause to believe in, for something that promises the dynamism and change they instinctively want but have been denied by the smothering weight of neoliberal capitalism. After the .Com boom collapsed, after 2007, all these guys had lost even the middle class eternity they were consigned to, and the rise of the alt-Right and then overt Fascism was at least partially a result of this type of guy becoming politically conscious in the absolute worst way. The 90s era guys are all like me - middle aged, over weight, long past their best fighting years, but their younger brothers or older children grew up expecting to at least inherit the conformist hell of suburban liberalism, only to find they wouldn't even get that, and they need someone to blame and someone to hurt for it.