Yuppie time travel

I have a soft spot for stories involving time travel. I was eight years old when I saw Back to the Future in a movie theater and it melted my brain. Not only did I find the film hilarious, the idea of moving backwards (and forwards in time) struck me as something I absolutely wanted to do. Marty McFly went to the 1950s, shredded on a skateboard, and his present day reality became that much cooler. He made his own life better. How rad was that?

Now that I’m older, I still enjoy time travel films, but for different reasons. I’m mostly interested in how the storyteller will tie together the paradoxes that inevitably result from adjusting timelines. And I take a certain pleasure when a character tries to explain it in a simple way. Noah Taylor in Edge of Tomorrow (2014), and Jeff Daniels in Looper (2012) are two especially enjoyable scenes.

Noah Taylor talks some time travel mumbo jumbo in Edge of Tomorrow

Being older, and having circled the sun many more times than when I was eight, time travel now evokes feelings of regret. What if I had made a different choice back then? Would my life have turned out better? Would I still be close to someone I loved? Could I have found the things that I lost? Could I have made more money? Or averted a tragedy?

I love a good historical fiction novel and I can often immerse myself in the historical world depicted by the author. But that feels like fiction, and the story is usually set in a time I never lived in.

That changed when I recently read Dylan Gottlieb’s Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (Harvard University Press). It felt like time travel. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a social history of a period that I lived through myself. The book was like peering into a distorted mirror of a reality I experienced personally. Now don’t get me wrong – I am too young to be a yuppie, just like boomers are too old. My professional career began about fifteen years after the height of yuppiedom, but what I enjoyed so much about the book is that it explained how much yuppies had shaped culture and my own career.

Yuppies depicts the rise of a new class of professionals in the 1970s and 80s in New York. There’s some debate about where the term originated, but it roughly stands for Young Urban Professionals – the “urban” being important because this phenomenon happened inside major cities during an era of “white flight,” when many white professionals had left cities for the suburbs. Yuppies are drawn to the city because new financial mechanisms such as complex bond deals, restructurings, and mergers require a new workforce to make them happen.

Gottlieb argues that the U.S. economy was shifting from manufacturing to a services based economy dominated by finance. It was a numbers game. These complex deals required more people to help out because there simply weren’t enough blue blood, white-shoe workers (traditionally the bastions of finance) to perform the work. Financial firms expanded their recruiting to “white ethnics” (Jews, Italians, and Poles), women, minorities, and gays. The hours were grueling, but the pay was extraordinary, especially because many young professionals put off marriage and children to focus on their careers. This means they had the ample disposable income to spend on restaurants, art, fashion, and partying. In real estate, landlords built thousands of upmarket apartments to accommodate this affluent new class, and also kicked out poorer tenants (more on this below.)

Yuppies also inspired new consumer categories. Before yuppies, Gottlieb states, most marketing focused on the middle class while luxury products were reserved for the elite. Yuppies elevated the “premium” economy, most exemplified by the BMW automobile — neither a Rolls Royce nor a Ford Pinto, but something in between.

Even an activity as quotidien as running a marathon – today a global phenomenon – was boosted by yuppies. These young go-getters took to Central Park and the city streets to stay fit and “optimize” their bodies. They worked hard and played hard. Our current obsession with longevity and healthy living owes a big debt to yuppies, for better or for worse.

But there were plenty of downsides. Yuppies impacted housing in horrific ways. Landlords were so eager to remove tenants protected by rent controls that they literally burnt down their own buildings, resulting in dozens of deaths. Importantly, Gottlieb notes that while ethnic whites, minorities, and women gained access to jobs at prestigious banks and law firms, most did not ascend to the executive ranks. Yuppies lifted the glass ceiling but did not break it.

Gottlieb provides enough financial and social data to back up his claims, and he couldn’t cover every aspect of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, he leaves out professional sports, popular music, and the influence of cocaine. He doesn’t track the interplay between yuppies and what became the multi-trillion dollar tech industry. And he doesn’t talk about the fear of the Soviet Union which influenced geopolitics and popular culture. But you can’t cover it all in a book, and I don’t fault him for that.

Why did it feel like time travel to me? I was too young to have experienced yuppiedom, but the culture made ripples that impacted my own life. I was aware of some of the trends, of course, if only by watching TV and absorbing popular culture. But more than that, yuppies affected my career choices. I went to elite schools and became an attorney (also a writer, which is why you’re reading this.) In my senior year in college, dozens of banks and consulting firms came on campus. When I asked the career counselor if there were any other options, because I wasn’t interested in finance, she handed me a generic plastic binder and told me to cold-call some folks. Amazingly, despite no meaningful financial skills at the time, I was recruited by two prestigious banks. At law school at Stanford, law firms flooded the campus and I worked for one briefly. (This was back when I wore dreadlocks, which makes it even more astounding.)

Gottlieb’s book explains that these were my choices because of yuppies. Banks and law firms needed to recruit talent at elite schools and so did law firms. They needed the bodies to complete their deals, and as a result, they crowded out most other recruiting efforts by industry. One reason why big law felt soulless – despite its good pay — is because partners were no longer invested in mentoring young attorneys, a phenomenon that Gottlieb documents in his book. Partners needed young associates to do the drudge work and not to organize the deal. I remember traveling to an oil refinery for a billion dollar bond deal to observe a partner negotiate a contract that I had no hope of understanding. When I asked him how I should contribute, he told me to pay attention to what the the giant industrial machines looked like. Not exactly rocket science – they were fifty feet tall. But that was kind of the point. He didn’t have time to mentor me.

These trends weren’t so obvious when I was living through them. I didn’t quite understand the rational for how things had come to be – everything during those years felt like it was moving at warp speed. Gottlieb’s book helped me understand what was happening, even if it did not precisely capture my own experience.

We are defined as much by the choices as we made as those that we didn’t make. I didn’t work for those investment banks. I left that large law firm. I wrote books, worked in human rights, learned martial arts, wrote science fiction novels, and on and on.

If I could hop in a Delorean to travel back in time like Marty McFly to alter my timeline, would I do it? I’m not sure. There’s a lot that I like about my life today. But Gottlieb’s book explains how my timeline came to be.