The Ballad of Downward Mobility

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I of my youth, the rooms were always air-conditioned. This machine-cooled air came not from window units, which were a relic of the cities, but from central systems that chilled every inch of living space to an Alaskan 67 degrees. The air seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It had no warm spots, no eddies, no pockets of humidity. It was a sea of comfort that ran from the threshold of the front door—passing from yard to house was like moving between seasons—to the peak of the finished attic. Now here I am, in the late summer of 2022, eons away from my 1970s and ’80s suburban childhood, in a world beset by heat waves, droughts, wars, and disasters, sitting before a Walgreens fan, bathed in sweat and meditating on the wealth of nations and the fate of the American dream. And the realization comes that I am just one of the millions of members of Generation X who, looking into the sun of the