Over the past week or two, I’ve sat down and started three or four different Substack articles, but every time I get to the middle, I get lost in the weeds. I start wondering why the heck I’m even writing this. If I’m not finding whatever point I’m spiraling toward in my writing interesting, you internet men certainly won’t.
Usually, the words just fall out of me, like I can’t help it. I get these tickles in my mind bouncing around, and if I don’t write, they make it hard to focus on other things. But life’s been eating up all of my focus and energy lately. In fact, life has really sucked the past couple of months.
Over here in the Archwinger household, we live what looks like the fairly idyllic suburbia life. Five-bedroom in a cookie-cutter subdivision in the Texas hill country with a good school district, loving wife, three kids, a neighborhood scene that’s practically a throwback from the 80s with the neighbors and kids out in the street playing late into the night whenever school’s out and the weather’s good. Me a patent attorney, the wife a mental health therapist, both working from home giving us amazing flexibility and the ability to pivot to handle whatever the kids need, while still having smart people white collar jobs that make good money.
Big picture, the economy’s been sucking it up the past few years. A lot of families like ours that are used to being comfortably middle class — even upper middle class — have watched their savings accounts dwindle, started racking up credit card debt, and started having to think about which investment accounts to start liquidating to keep paying the mortgage. It’s bad out there. It used to be that once you made a six-figure salary, you’d made it. You were rich. Today, that’s still way better than most, but if the first digit of your six-figure salary is a one, or the low side of the twos, that doesn’t get you the five-bedroom in suburbia with the good school district lifestyle any more. You can budget well, make some other cuts, and make that life happen, but just barely. You’re barely breaking even most months. So if there are any outside-the-norm expenses, those come out of your savings, which isn’t growing because you’re just breaking even.
Our third kid is a fairly new addition. Ten months old. When you work for a small business, your health insurance sucks. You’re paying close to 2000 USD/month for a horrible plan that doesn’t cover lots of stuff and has a 12000 deductible. It keeps your family from going completely bankrupt if you get into a car crash or get cancer, but is pretty useless for regular healthcare. So when you give birth to a baby in a hospital, that’s not free. We’re paying that off in installments.
In preparation for the new kid, we moved to a larger house. Luckily, we had a lot of equity in the old house, so our new mortgage isn’t huge even though interest rates are high (though in Texas, you pay an insane amount for property taxes, too). Trouble is, our old house was pretty dated. Great home, great neighborhood, but it had been lived in for over a decade. The interior was out of style, too. We had to replace the badly-worn carpet throughout — with LVP downstairs, have the cabinets and walls repainted, replace one of the water heaters, and get some work done on the AC. The remodeling was pretty extensive due to the floors. We took a trip to Costa Rica for a couple weeks so we’d be gone while our house was mostly uninhabitable. We got ourselves a nice payment plan for those home remodel costs.
We needed a bigger car that could accommodate both boys in car seats, plus still have room for the girl and the wife. My car was about to crap out anyway. So we got a minivan, traded in my Altima, and I inherited my wife’s SUV. Now we have a car payment, too.
In a 2006 economy, that would all be fine. We’d eat up our savings, put the rest into debt, and pay it off pretty quickly since we’re both working. That doesn’t work in 2026 where a six-figure salary is just break-even territory for the upper middle class suburbia lifestyle. You have to live like a peasant to have enough extra to pay your debts down. Which is doable until a kid gets sick or something breaks in the house or a car — then you have to rush to urgent care or the ER or replace a washing machine or refrigerator. There’s always something. Always. If you’re not running at a significant profit every month, those somethings are going to happen more often than you’ll be able to save to prepare for.
Therapy is an elective service, and the kind of people who get therapy are usually poor, or if they’re not poor they’re frugal and savvy. After having the baby, the wife has had a really hard time rebuilding her business. She’s seeing some clients, but not enough to cover the cost of daycare for the kids. So she took a step back to work deliberate part time hours, during which I take care of the kids, while we pulled them out of daycare.
Patents are also an elective expense for individuals and companies, and most of my work for the past 12 years has been for a single large corporate client. Who considers it a privilege to have their work and has cut the rates it pays contractors three times so far, with another rate cut slated for this month. Despite the raises I’ve been getting from my boss over the years, I actually make less than when I started. So the boss gave these guys an ultimatum: we need market rate. Not big bucks, just what’s normal for our profession. They told him to fuck off, so he’s closing the firm and everyone’s laid off.
Did I mention my dad died at the end of May?
Luckily, I’m not a new kid begging for work any more. It’s a down economy and my profession isn’t exactly thriving, but if a firm has work, I’m a pretty desirable guy to do it. We had a vacation with the in-laws planned (that thankfully, they were paying for). A cruise with all the kids plus some of the extended family. We paid extra for internet during the trip. I was sending resumes from that boat. I actually have an interview in about five minutes.
Okay, so the interview went well. We’ll see what happens. Anyway, Red Pill stuff:
So here I am, a married guy, the backbone workhorse and provider of our family, and we’ve been struggling. Busting at the gills with kid and house stuff to do, constantly running out of money, and now my wife is barely employed and I’m unemployed. And my dad’s recently-dead, just for the universe to really drive home how much the past couple months have sucked.
This sort of situation puts a man on a clock. Any man, no matter how awesome he is. A wife can’t endure this kind of stress for too long without breaking. Women aren’t made for it.
If your wife is stressed out about money, you start to get weird behaviors like “I spent this extra money we didn’t need to spend on this thing for the kids we don’t need because it was on sale and we need to save money” and “Wait you already bought a new cheapy laptop because you have to give your employer’s laptop back? He’s not letting you keep it? (wtf?) And you should have let me buy it using my business account so we can deduct for taxes!” and “I scheduled some day care tours for the baby so we can get him back in day care so I can change my career and start making money but I don’t know what I want to do yet do you know anything about sales?”
Women… struggle with this kind of stress. Men are experts at getting things from “not fine” to “fine”. Women excel at getting things from “fine” to “a little better because I keep coming up with all these projects and little things to buy”. But if things are ever “not fine”, your woman is going to run around wringing her hands having complete executive disfunction. Women are great at improving things from “fine” to “a little better”, but completely freeze up if you’re ever at “not fine”.
So even when things are not fine, you have to act like they’re fine. In my case, like it’s pretty much a certainty I’ll have a new job, and soon. Especially since I started sending resumes literally before I was laid off, from boat docked in Mexico. That’s how on-top-of-this I appear to be. Sure, nothing is set yet, but you can’t act worried or defeated, even if you might be quietly raiding the 401(k)’s next month to make the next mortgage payment. You keep the family rhythm going, because slipping into visible worry amplifies her emotions.
That means:
You kill the visible stress. Vent to your bros or a journal, not her. Maybe post a Substack article.
You keep the standards: workouts, sleep, grooming, decisive action. Chaos outside, order inside.
You make the calls on money and priorities without turning every decision into a committee meeting.
You give her tasks that fit her strengths (nesting, kids, details) while you carry the load on the big picture.
You stay outcome independent enough that she can feel your quiet confidence isn’t fake.
So life in 2026 for the upper-middle guy trying to give his family the 1980s-90s childhood experience is a gauntlet. Inflation, property taxes, insurance, daycare math that doesn’t work, corporate clients squeezing contractors, and the constant “something breaks” tax on every household. Add a new baby, a move, remodeling, a minivan, and losing your dad in the middle of it… yeah, it sucks.
But the game doesn’t care how much it sucks. You still have to play it like a man. Head up, shoulders back, solving problems while everyone else is reacting to them. Your wife and kids need to see that version of you - even more when you’re grinding through the worst stretch in years.
On a brighter note, my first book “Wait. What Was the Question?” is releasing July 24 on Amazon, available for pre-order on Kindle now. More info in my article from last month:
If you’ve ever enjoyed anything I’ve written on social media, this novel takes my snark and wry humor and drops it into a punchier, simpler writing style, as it follows the story of a divorced dad navigating the dating scene, shared custody of his daughter, and difficulty connecting with others driven by his past trauma and Gex-X latchkey kid upbringing.
