(2023-02-06) The Fleishman Effect

Caitlin Moscatello: The Fleishman Effect. There’s a game a friend of mine likes to play in her affluent Brooklyn neighborhood: When she’s walking down Henry Street, she looks up at the multimillion-dollar brownstones and imagines the lives of the people inside.

“It’s so crazy how rich you have to be in New York to live comfortably, just comfortably,” she tells me, slightly out of breath, while she runs to a meeting. “There’s this very subtle heartbreak that perhaps people made better life choices than you and their houses are bigger and they are happier.”

The crazy thing is that this friend, at 45, has not only an apartment in the city but a weekend house outside it

“If you find yourself in your 40s still living in New York, still hustling, still striving, there’s a part of you that is completely beat down and a little bit unwell,” she says.

Fleishman Is in Trouble, the TV series and book by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, which now, more than a month after its on-air finale, is still the subject of rumination for a certain set of New York women

set off an internal alarm that sounds a lot like the voice-over in the show: Is all this really worth it? Am I spending these years, maybe the best years, focused on the right things? When does it get easier? Or as Libby put it, “How did I get here?”

more than a dozen women I’ve spoken with recently who have found themselves talking about the themes of Fleishman — which on its surface is about divorce but is really about aging, ambition, class, and identity

Ross Douthat wrote that Rachel, in comparison with her ex-husband, Toby, “is much more in tune with the deeper and darker ethos of meritocracy: the abiding insecurity that comes with being trained for constant competition.

It’s like we’ve died and these houses are our headstones.

When Libby is passed over for the ambitious assignments at the men’s magazine where she worked, which went to her male colleagues over and over and over again.

At their school, “unless you’re a parent who’s a banker with a capital B or a lawyer with a capital L, it’s like you don’t exist,” she says

there’s this whole thought process of We signed them (the kids) up for this, so we have to go along with it. They didn’t choose this life, we chose it. I was naïve when I put them on this treadmill, and now we can’t get off.

It’s a total syndrome of this Fleishman class of people in the city. When literally is it good enough, and what is the end game?

In Fleishman, Toby resents it when he finds himself signing his kids up for summer camp in Rachel’s absence — or, as Libby narrates it, “doing exactly what Rachel would have done,” i.e., “throwing money at the problem.”

consultant she and her husband hired to help their 5-year-old get into a private kindergarten next year. (Educating Kids in NYC)

They’ve also hired a tutor and enrolled their child in Russian math — a trend now among preschool parents who’ve heard that the old Soviet method might give their children a leg up. (heh I got my kids Singapore Math books.)

I was just fun and fabulous and doing things, and you know, in it — not anchored down by my children and husband and work

Both avenues are shit. You can stay in New York and climb, climb, climb and never get where you need to go and give yourself a nervous breakdown, or you can move to the suburbs and be like, Who the fuck are these pod people? (normie)

Beth, also 39 and in the suburbs, finds herself constantly asking her husband, “How do we get back to the city?” The math feels impossible. Even with a combined household income of $500,000, the New York life she wants for her family feels out of reach

How do I make the $700,000 that I’m going to need to send her to private school?

The show ends without tidy answers, just a reminder that time is ticking.

“Did Fleishman make you want to change anything about your life?” I finally ask her. “Yeah,” she says. “It got me thinking it’s time for me to get therapy.”

My take

• some of the issue is the fear around their children's future, contra very broken city public schools
• but a lot is shallowly mistaking ambition for crap (money, stuff, status) as a meaning of life