Brief observations on class

And suggestive political commentary from the rural mountain west

I grew up between Eugene, OR and Denver, CO. I’m a big hiker, backpacker, and skiier. Relatively competent mountaineer. Done some rock climbing and mountain biking too, though not nearly as much. I avidly trail-run. I like swimming in mountain lakes fed by glacier runoff. Well, like is a strong word, but I do it. When my wife and I started dating we used to drive up to the continental divide when there was a cloudless new moon and watch the stars. I would, in brief, identify myself as an outdoorsman.

What I realized on a recent summer trip to see my folks in CO is that there are at least two distinct classes of highly competent outdoorsman who are starkly different. They occupy much of the same space and have very similar hobbies, education levels, and incomes. But they have antithetical strategies for signalling status, and generally tend to belong to opposed politico-cultural groups. This is interesting.

I call the two classes the adventurers and the survivors.

The Adventurers

Adventurers dropped out of college to work ski lifts in the winter and guide white water rafting tours in the summer. The men wear baggy shorts with 5” inseams and either t-shirts from obscure bands or outdoorsy button-ups. The most basic of you wear Patagonia, but you can signal really high status if you have access to a wardrobe of brands that rich East Coast people don’t know about — think Cotopaxi or Kavu, and bonus points if your gear is really hard to get (like Melanzana). You like to supplement your gear with an ultra-expensive, ultra-useful, ultra-durable accent piece, like a hardshell from Mountain Hardwear or Helly Hansen. But if you have too much fancy gear, people might think you’re a wealthy European on vacation, and not a true adventurer.

The women dress relatively modestly; in fact, you mostly dress the same as the men. You have lots of facial piercings. You wear shallow five-panel hats with short, wide, flat brims (the men also wear these, but they have more conventional ballcaps in their rotation too). You wear sandals everywear and paint your toenails, and somehow manage to keep them in pretty good shape even when you’re doing lots of near-barefoot hiking.

For both men and women your car has to have four- or all-wheel-drive, but it must be inexpensive and near breakdown. Otherwise you look like a European on vacation — not a true adventurer. Your ideal car is a 2001 Subaru Outback with 284,000 miles on its engine and an AC unit that’s been shorted for 10 years and a radio that won’t turn on unless you hit a bump just right, in which case it won’t turn off. You do not own a boat (unless it’s a kayak) or a trailer or a camper. You spend your weekends sleeping in a tent or, if you’re exceptionally high status, a hammock.

You don’t smoke cigarettes, but you might smoke weed. If you do smoke cigarettes, it’s a kind of unexpected brand, like American Spirits. You find most of your expensive clothes at a steep discount from the off-season clearance rack or the thrift store. You don’t really know how to work on your car, which is a constant source of anxiety, given that it’s on its last legs, but you can put on snow tires or chains. You drink anything cheap, but you like expensive stuff when you can get it at a discount — like your clothes. You prefer part-time work so you can spend more time outside, and you make ends meet by illegally subletting your couches.

You know a lot about a very niche kind of ethnic food or jazz music or coffee roasting or fermenting kombucha or contemporary literary fiction. You are extremely athletic but you don’t lift weights. You vote Democrat or not at all. You might hunt or fish, but if you fish you flyfish, and if you hunt you still have a bunch of vegan friends who won’t touch your elk jerky.

In general, you climb the status hierarchy of adventurers by disdaining the status signals of the wealthy and the amateur. You value skilled performance and expertise. That’s why you flyfish — the point isn’t to catch the fish per se, it’s to catch a fish by skillfully deceiving it with your fly. And that’s why you don’t work on your car — you can pay a few dozen people around town to do it for you. You want to avoid coming across as either blue collar (experts in stuff that anyone can be an expert in) or white collar (experts in getting money, which is crass and pathetic). You’ll drop $100 on Black Diamond trekking poles that look indistinguishable from $10 Walmart poles because only other adventurers will be able to tell the difference. Your poles say, “I climb a lot of mountains and I’m good at it,” but only to those in the know.

In the winter you ski or snowboard, and if you’re really cool, you do backcountry skiing/riding. You might snowshoe on occasion, or practice winter mountaineering with spikes and ice axes.

Religiously you’re probably either a very lax charismatic Christian or you’re into indigenous shamanism (or both).

The Survivors

Survivors are also college dropouts, but you work in agriculture, trades, or law enforcement. You spend your free time camping and hiking, like the adventurers, but you never sleep in hammocks, and many of you have RVs. When you’re in the wilderness, you have have a purpose: killing wildlife. You’re bait fishermen and rifle hunters and even when you’re just camping you might spend yours afternoons shooting guns at targets, or maybe .22s at squirrels that you then skin and cook.

The men dress in Walmart cargo shorts with 9”-11” inseams and wear ballcaps and t-shirts with vulgar slogans. Expensive clothes are a waste of money, unless you’re a hunter, in which case you have some real pricy camoflauge jackets from Cabela’s. The women wear the same sorts of things but deliberately more revealing: gas station t-shirts cropped high, camo leggings. Leopard print is also good.

Your car, however, must be big, expensive, and American. Ideally you drive a pickup truck, ideally a brand-new 2026 Chevy, with a crazy speaker system that you can blast contemporary pop-country and old-school Taylor Swift on. You pull a trailer with a boat on it, or you have a pop-up camper. You never wear sandals but you might have camo Crocs. Sometimes you hike in jeans.

Status for you comes in disdain for the useless: if something is pretty but not functional, it’s out. That’s why you wear cheap clothes: they work pretty much just as well. That’s why you’re willing to splurge on your car: it’s about the most useful thing you own. That’s why your car has huge tires and ridiculous clearance: you can get about 5 more miles down the 4x4 road before you have to start hiking, unlike the poor souls stuck in Subarus. You’re in the wilderness to bring in fish and game as efficiently as possible. Status comes in being good at what you do, and what you do is produce. More specifically: you produce at low cost. The highest status among you are bow-hunters, because bow-hunting licenses are cheap — so if you’re good at it, you can get bears for $20.

You drink Coors Light no matter what else is on tap. You might smoke Marlboros or Pall Malls, but probably not marijuana. You’re real strong, and you might even go to the gym a lot, but you’re not really athletic. Of course you can trek for a long time when you’re chasing game, but rock-climbing is exhausting and god forbid you go on a run — what could be more useless? Similarly, you don’t ski or do much winter mountaineering, though you might like to ice fish (or do donuts on a frozen lake with your truck).

Religiously you go to a conservative baptist church every Sunday, but you don’t think much about God outside of election season, when Democrats are trying to kick him out of the schools. You know you’re saved and you pride yourself on being useful to others in the meantime. You can build things, you can fix things, and you can survive on your own and provide for your family.

You own a house that you live in with your nuclear family, and maybe an elderly relative. You like mowing your lawn on Saturday mornings — especially if you have a big lawn and a zero-turn ride-in mower.

Comparison

Both classes have a disdain for elites, pretentiousness, and signals of elite status: higher education, East Coast fashion, sports cars, cocaine. They both are suspicious of elite epistemology, i.e. science, in particular medical science. Lots of “crunchy” folks on both sides — anti-vaxxers, vinegar-drinkers, cure-all chiropractors. Both are relatively spiritual; strict atheism is just not on the table. Both love the wilderness and hate to see people who don’t know what they’re doing on the trail, particularly if those people seem like elites, i.e. from the East Coast or Europe.

Both, too, value competence extremely highly. But here’s where they start to look different. The survivors value useful competence. They want to do things excellently insofar as those things translate into produce. They like nature because it’s a source of food for those in the know. The adventurers value useless competence. They like to see a skilled performance executed for its own sake. The point is not what the performance gets you; it’s that it’s cool to do something hard. That’s why they rockclimb and backcountry ski.

This difference is interesting to me because of how it maps onto the two classes’ political differences. The right-wing survivors value utility. The left-wing adventurers value art. What I want to suggest is that this is not simply a difference between the survivors and adventurers, but between the value paradigms of right and left generally. The rhetoric of the right is largely about usefulness: cut government waste, cut welfare (conceived of as subsidies for useless people), cut subsidies for college (mostly useless training for useless jobs), subsidize trades, industry, military and police — transfer wealth away from those who don’t produce measurable value for others and to those who do. The rhetoric of the left is largely about expanding access to uselessness: fund arts (especially for the underprivileged) and welfare programs by cutting funding to the useful things. The useful things will pay for themselves, but art won’t.

Antielitism runs through both camps. Both camps want to confiscate wealth from the haves and give it to the have-nots, but different have-nots. Both camps, in fact, want to be have-nots, but different have nots. The aspiration of the political right is to be a self-sufficient hunter, farmer, or rancher. The aspiration of the political left to be a starving artist. Both aspire to poverty, but the aspiration of the right is to a poverty characterized by constant labor, and of the left to a poverty of constant leisure.

I don’t have much else to say; I’ve just found the distinction between adventurers and survivors to be illuminating. I’ve joked before that I’m right-wing with left-wing tastes, and now I think I know what I mean by that. I’m an adventurer (I’m wearing baggy Patagonia shorts with a 5” inseam and a shirt from the band mewithoutYou as I write this lol).¹ But I also go to church every Sunday (not baptist though) and, well, I’ve got a PhD in economics from GMU, so I’m at minimum libertarian-adjacent in my views on public policy.²

I’m obviously biased, but I think I’ve hit something close to the correct position. On the level of public policy, we should focus on enabling productivity. But in our personal lives, we should seek to rest, and rest well. High per capita GDP lets more people afford expensive, interesting leisure, and that’s good. That’s one really important reason why GDP growth is good at all.

However, policies that produce high per capita GDP — like free trade — also often end up being elite-coded. So I guess I’m doubly a class traitor? I’ve got antigovernment politics and artsy hobbies, but I’m a shill for the academy and economic expertise. My personal aspiration is to a life of leisure made affordable by deregulated global markets, in a house with my nuclear family with a nice lawn that I mow every Saturday morning, where we are very involved with our local church and generally submit to scientific consensus when it touches our personal lives. This seems like something that everyone should be on board with, but adventurers and survivors despise it alike.

1. Edit: I’d like to clarify that while do identify with the adventurers, the reader should not interpret my description of their class as autobiography. I do not own a Subaru. More importantly, as a rule I do not break the law — not even by subletting couches in violation of a lease or recreationally using Schedule I narcotics. This is because in addition to my identity as an adventurer I am much more a member of the class of WASPy-dads-in-small-town-mid-America. When the spirits appeared to me and asked, “Which wolf will you feed?” I reluctantly withheld food from the Patagonia wolf and gave it to the wolf of the Old Navy onesie.

2. Is libertarianism still right-coded? Things got weird these past few years, so idk.