The Costumes We Wear: Class, Belonging, and the Search for a Parent

I was walking my dog Leo when it hit me: every social class has a costume, and we’re all performing for an invisible parent.

Watch people long enough and you’ll see it. The wealthy wear their status like armor, but there’s a crack in it—a psychological split where they simultaneously believe they don’t deserve what they have and desperately need to prove they do. Every luxury purchase, every name-drop, every casual mention of where they summered becomes evidence in a trial where they’re both prosecutor and defendant.

The middle class performs aspiration. You have to show you’re climbing, improving, investing in yourself. The right degree, the right neighborhood, the optimization rituals. You’re not allowed to be satisfied because satisfaction means you’ve stopped reaching, and if you’ve stopped reaching, you’ve failed the middle-class script.

The lower class performs resilience. You have to show you can take the hit and keep going. There’s a pride in toughness, in making it work, in not complaining. Drop that performance and you risk being seen as defeated, as having given up—and that’s social death in a context where resilience is your only recognized currency.

Here’s what makes this insidious: these aren’t just social performances. They’re survival mechanisms. Drop your class costume and you risk exile from your in-group, which feels like psychological annihilation. We’re tribal creatures. Exile once meant death. That fear still lives in our nervous systems.

But here’s the deeper pattern I’m seeing: capitalism—and really, the state itself—wants to be your parent. It offers the same deal parents offer children: perform correctly and you’ll be safe, valued, provided for. Fail to perform and you’ll be abandoned.

And we accept this deal because most of us never fully individuated from our actual parents. We never completed that psychological separation where we become our own authority. So we keep looking for someone to tell us we’re good enough, that we’re doing it right, that we belong.

This is where it gets interesting. I’ve been watching the emergence of a new class structure in spiritual communities—these traveling yoga practitioners and wellness seekers who orbit around charismatic teachers. Same pattern, different costume. Instead of wearing status or aspiration or resilience, they wear enlightenment. Spiritual achievement becomes the new performance, and the guru becomes the new parent-state hybrid.

They’re seeking “belonging” and “acceptance,” but what they’re really seeking is permission to exist without anxiety. They want someone to finally say: you’re enough. But they’re looking in the wrong direction—outward instead of inward.

True sovereignty lives on the other side of this pattern. It emerges when you stop performing for the invisible parent—whether that parent is your class, your guru, the state, or the internalized voice of your actual parents. Sovereignty means you become your own authority. You stop asking permission to exist.

This doesn’t mean rejecting community or connection. It means those things stop being psychological life-support systems. You engage with others from fullness rather than need, from choice rather than terror of abandonment.

The costumes we wear aren’t really about class. They’re about the unfinished business of childhood projected onto every social structure we encounter. And until we see that pattern clearly, we’ll keep dancing for invisible parents, hoping that if we just perform well enough, we’ll finally be allowed to rest.

Maybe it’s time to stop auditioning.