Your parents were middle class. You won’t be.
Not because you’re lazy. Not because you failed.
Because every empire eventually feeds on the very people who built it.
It’s a rhythm older than currency. Rome had its farmers, Spain its merchants, France its professionals, Britain its workers, the Soviets their intelligentsia. Each empire promised security to those who produced and obeyed. Each, when cornered by its own growth, turned inward—taxing, inflating, and automating its lifeblood until nothing was left but elites and exhaustion.
Ours is no different. The algorithms that once promised freedom now auction our attention. The markets that once rewarded labour now monetize despair. We’ve replaced slaves with debtors, landlords with platforms, temples with malls, and emperors with brands. Every ad we click, every data point we feed, fattens the new aristocracy: systems that no longer need us to grow only to consume.
The Historical Rhythm
Rome began with farmers who owned their land and ended with debt slaves bound to estates.
The republic’s middle held the empire’s weight ..its taxes, its armies, its food. But when conquest slowed, wealth stopped circulating. The rich bought influence; the smallholders sold freedom. The middle collapsed, and the empire fed on its own citizens until it starved of purpose.
Spain repeated the dance with silver. Rivers of metal poured from the New World, and for a moment the merchants flourished. Then came inflation, corruption and war, the empire’s veins clogged with its own excess. The middle class, caught between the crown and the creditors, disappeared into poverty while nobles kept their titles and peasants their chains.
France built its dream on reason, education, and trade. It, too, promised mobility until taxation and privilege cracked it apart. By 1789, the professionals, the bourgeoisie, had become the revolutionaries. They didn’t want to burn the system. They wanted to fix it. But when the center breaks, there’s nothing left to fix.
Britain’s middle ruled an empire so vast it mistook global power for domestic stability. Then came deindustrialization, financialization, and the slow cannibalism of labor. By the late 1970s, the working middle miners, clerks, builders, was hollowed out by a system that outsourced both dignity and jobs.
Even the Soviet Union, which prided itself on equality, fell into the same trap. It built a vast class of engineers, doctors and teachers, but without private power or political freedom, their prosperity depended on the state’s illusion of control. When that illusion cracked, so did their security. Breadlines replaced the promise of socialism, and the intelligentsia became its ghosts.
The pattern is fractal. Every empire eats its middle first, mistaking it for fat when it was the heart.
The Modern Empire: Data, Debt, and Desire
Today’s empire doesn’t need armies, it has algorithms.
It doesn’t conquer land, it colonizes minds.
The middle class of the 20th century was the stabilizer of democracy: homeowners, consumers, taxpayers. They had just enough to believe the system worked. That belief was the glue holding modern civilization together.
But belief doesn’t pay the rent anymore. Wages froze while productivity soared. Housing, healthcare, and education, once tickets to security,became tolls on survival. The cost of staying middle class now exceeds the income of being it.
Meanwhile, the new emperors—platforms, funds, and AI labs, don’t rule nations. They rule attention. Their colonies are our screens; their currency, our data. We work without knowing it: every post, purchase, and search enriching systems that render our labor invisible yet indispensable.
The old empire taxed your crops. The new one taxes your cognition.
When citizens start slipping, the empire does what all empires do: it blames them. “You didn’t hustle enough.” “You bought the wrong house.” “You should have learned to code.”
It’s the same story Rome told its farmers, the same lie every crumbling system whispers to its victims: that personal failure, not structural rot, is the reason the ground is disappearing.
The Human Cost
Behind the data points are lives quietly breaking.
Parents working two jobs to afford what one salary once covered.
Children entering adulthood already in debt.
Entire generations realizing the finish line moved, and no one told them.
The middle class was never just an income bracket. It was a psychological contract: if you played by the rules, the future would take care of you.
That contract is gone.
What remains is a treadmill powered by hope and debt, where the faster you run, the further stability retreats.
The cruelty isn’t accidental, it’s engineered. A civilization built on perpetual growth must invent new appetites to feed itself, even if it means devouring the very people who sustain it.
Every empire thinks it’s the exception.
Every empire believes its collapse will be managed, its decline civilized.
But collapse isn’t a moment, it’s a mood. It begins when people stop believing the game is winnable.
If history repeats, the next stage is unrest: populism, extremism, escapism. When the middle disappears, democracy falters—because democracy depends on a class with enough stake to defend it.
So the question isn’t whether this empire will fall.
It’s whether we’ll recognize that it’s already eating us.
But maybe there’s another path. Empires fall, but communities endure.
What if instead of scaling endlessly upward, we started building sideways?
What if “middle” stopped meaning mediocre, and started meaning mutual. people choosing sufficiency over extraction, collaboration over consumption?
History tells us how the story ends.
Maybe, for once, we write a different ending.
