➺ June 9, 2026

Two students pull all-nighters working on the final paper for a post-war European history class. The first wants an A. The second – the dangerous one – wants to write the best paper. As the philosopher Kamila Pacovská argues in a new paper in Philosophia, strivers who seek subjective status — admiration rooted in relative performance – are unstable because the social-comparison machinery that powers their ambition guarantees periodic collapses in self-worth. (It's impossible to write the best paper on Václav Havel every damn time.) The net result: The student compelled to succeed by beating others takes an inevitable failure personally, burns out, and pivots to other forms of status seeking – probably involving accusing the T.A. of "implicit bias.”

The cheapest, most abundant alternative to subjective status is moral status, which is why strivers who can't out-earn their peers often try to out-virtue them. Self-righteousness is a consolation prize. Thus the radicalized middle manager. Thus the downwardly mobile vegan friend. And thus Pacovská's work being funded by a grant focused on studying "self-righteousness as a vice of the digital age"—awarded by the Czech government, which, in its prior communist instantiation, led a 40-year inquisition against professionals whose objective success made them morally suspect. In 1989, that regime was overthrown. Still, the suspicion persists. For good reason.

Like Cary Grant's Mid-Atlantic accent, the Educational Influencer Accent is a glorious put-on audio-engineered to make mildly sophisticated people sound authoritative to audiences who don't care enough to know better. Popularized on YouTube by Hank Green, Johnny Harris, and the Vox video department then adopted by a horde of painfully earnest straight-to-camera TikTokers, the accent exists because content algorithms read natural pauses as dead air, and doomscrollers hear the NPR caesura — that space between words where an idea lands — as an appeal to precisely the sort of patience they don’t have.


Fortunately for those who want to dominate conversations or talk down to their friends without anyone noticing, talking like an educational influencer is no more difficult than talking like a pirate. The rules are a just bit different.

1. Stress words that don't require it so your listener assumes they missed something.
2. Use rising intonation so every sentence feels like a micro-cliffhanger.
3. Never pause.
4. Overuse discourse-marking adverbs.

In practice, that looks like...

Networks love a former A-minus-list star for a parent-focused B-Plot on a chosen family sitcom. John Lithgow on How I Met Your Mother. Bradley Whitford on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Elliott Gould on Friends. It's sweeps week stunt casting for mid-careerists in the target demo –  many of whom experience their own parents as a B-Plot.

The Gellers turning up for Thanksgiving and driving home before dessert. Jamie Lee Curtis smooching her ex in the New Girl loft elevator. Familiar. Relatable. Irrelevant to the season arc.

B-Plot Parents are the endgame of Type-A Parenting. Parents that prepare their kids children to succeed in academic (APs, SATs, IVYs), professional (white-shoe, white jacket, whitespace), and social (marriage, book club) institutions undermine the institution of family by restructuring it to run on pure feeling – a volatile arrangement.

In 1945, Ernest Burgess described family changing "from institution to companionship." In 2004, Andrew Cherlin described the reorganization of the family unit around self-development – a sort of expressive individualism. In combination, these two slightly (if not semantically) different ideas describe a grown child-parent relationship predicated on both parties’ ability to make the counterparty feel a certain way.

That’s a bit bleak. It may not be bleak enough.

According to the College Board's own data, students who score above 2100 on the old SAT move, on average, over three hundred miles further from home than those who score 1200 to 1500. Some 77% of college grads leave their home towns compared to 56% of those who don't matriculate. Departure is not a side effect of class reproduction; it's the intended effect.

When achievement is the work of the child and achievement leads to disconnection, abandonment is all but an obligation for both children and parents. The workhorse child-parent relationship becomes a Pushmepullyou.

Still, early investment in children push out of the home is rational – just not reciprocal. In America, the return on human capital is so much higher than the return on training a kid to take over the family farm or shop or Jersey Mike's franchise that the $300K outlay normalized for well-to-do children – not to mention the nine hours a week of additional maternal childcare tacked on since the mid-1990s – is a solid (although not risk-free investment). But the returns – the child's long-term economic and social capital – don’t accrue to the parent. All those extracurriculars are an exhausting, frontloaded inheritance.

There is a major downsides to inheriting from people who aren’t dead (yet): obligation.

The logic of the arrangement mirrors that old and awful relationship advice: "If you love someone, set them free. If they come back, they're yours; if they don't, they never were." As anyone who ever went long-distance during college knows, the thing let free tends to stay free. Autonomy begets autonomy. And also resentment. Of course most parents love their children so no reciprocation is required per se. But that doesn’t mean grand gestures are not expected or that disappointment in successful children isn’t common.

Most type-A parents get jilted or, at minimum, semi-jilted.

On television, the B-Plot Parent is almost always written as a narcissist: There’s Debbie Reynolds on Will & Grace treating her daughter's life as a backdrop for performance, the Gellers’ unsolocited feedback for Monica and Lucille Bluth generally. Comedy, yes, but structurally accurate. When the only thing a parent can extract from a grown child is a feeling, every visit is like a heist movie where the big score is validation.

Of course, some parents get more validation than they want in the form of children who come home too soon or under the wrong conditions.

The reason Atlantic columnist are so alarmed by the roughly one-in-three young adults now living in their parents’ homes (aside from the fact they write for the owners of said homes) is that a failure to launch implies a failure of the family, an institution now organized around the launch sequence. In the last two years, the Times has run something like four dozen op-eds about Gen-Z's struggles to achieve release velocity and a fraction of a fraction of that about estrangement even though an astonishing 27% of American adults are cut off from a parent or a child.

That’s the historical outlier. And it begs a question: How does an institution organized around pure feeling survive. Maybe traditions. Maybe stories. Maybe places. Maybe religion. Maybe even the odd trip to the lake house. Lots of logistics. All these things require making time, but feelings-making takes a backseat to money-making or, once children have children of their own, investment-making. The shared experiences that break through are, almost by definition, disruptive and stressful. Disease. Death. Debt. Aunt Debbie.

Pure feeling and stress are not a fun mix – especially among people with no real experience of working together as adults.

The fights that ensue feel inevitable. Yes, the result of avoidance and avoidant attachment, but also just physics. Natural laws that apply to… white people? Black, Hispanic, Asian, and working-class families consistently test higher for feelings of filial duty than white professionals who prioritize their spouses (and often the found family across the hall). Privilege is the necessary and sufficient condition for institutional degradation.

In 2020, Schitt's Creek hit big as the pandemic turned everyone into a captive Netflix audience. The show followed a rich family brought low; parents and siblings forced to choose each other. Eugene Levy's Johnny and Catherine O'Hara's Moira were main cast. Naturally, it was the rare show that hit with adults under and over 60. In a sense, it was a fantasy for both. What if the achievement wasn't the only way to repay a debt? What if we shared an A-Plot? 

But, unlike most televised fantasies, the Schitt’s Creek fantasy was achievable. Everyone just had to fail at everything.