In Our Time

Two people are given identical, expensive fountain pens. One sees a beautiful tool for signing important documents—a symbol of arrival, an instrument for formal, deliberate acts. The pen lives in a velvet-lined box, emerging only for occasions. The other person sees a device for capturing the messy, fleeting thoughts of daily life. This pen gets clipped to a pocket, its nib stained with ink from frantic grocery lists, half-finished poems on napkins, and angry letters never sent. The first pen records a life's official history, the clean and curated final draft. The second captures the chaotic, unedited process of living, full of corrections, false starts, and raw emotion. The objects are the same, but the stories they tell are worlds apart, one of polished presentation, the other of vibrant, untidy reality.

The drive to document this gap—between the public self we perform and the private self we live—was the engine behind Tom Wolfe's career. Armed with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale and a reporter's eye for the telling detail, Wolfe became a pioneer of what he called the "New Journalism." He felt that traditional reporting, with its focus on objective facts, was missing the real story: the status anxieties, the tribal codes, and the sheer absurdity of life in the latter half of the 20th century. "In Our Time" is a culmination of this approach, combining Wolfe's sharp, satirical prose with his equally incisive drawings to capture the messy, vibrant, and often hilarious inner life of an era.

Module 1: The Great Reevaluation of Values

The 1970s were a time of total reevaluation. Wolfe argues that the decade saw a fundamental collapse of old moral and social structures. This was a rapid demolition.

First, the ancient wall around sexual promiscuity completely crumbled. What was a "lurid novelty" in the late 1960s, like co-ed dorms, became standard practice by the early 70s. The change was swift and total. Pornography moved from back alleys to mainstream theaters. Even in the rural South, roadside brothels began to appear. This shift had a direct impact on the family unit. It fueled what Wolfe calls the "great Divorce Epidemic." A new social archetype emerged: the "New Cookie." This was the younger woman for whom a middle-aged man would leave his wife and family. The old rules of fidelity and lifelong partnership were no longer assumed.

Consequently, public decorum and the concept of shame were monetized. The Watergate scandal provides a perfect example. After the dust settled, everyone involved seemed to cash in. Both the convicted, like Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the heroes, like Judge Sirica and Senator Sam Ervin, signed lucrative book deals. This was simply smart business. This trend extended to other revered figures. Astronauts and senators started appearing in television commercials for brands like American Express. The idea of leveraging public trust for personal profit became conventional.

And here’s the thing, drug use shifted from a subcultural rebellion to a professional-class norm. In the late sixties, a marijuana arrest could ruin a prominent family's reputation. By 1979, in places like New York and California, police barely bothered with possession of small amounts. Wolfe paints a picture of open marijuana use on the office terraces of Manhattan. What was once a symbol of counterculture became just another part of the urban professional's lifestyle. It shifted to recreation and became normalized.

So what happens next? We see how this moral and social flux was supercharged by an unprecedented economic boom.

Module 2: The Rise of a Mass Aristocracy

We've explored the social shifts of the 70s. But Tom Wolfe argues that none of it makes sense without understanding the economic engine driving it. A massive, sustained post-war boom created a new kind of society. It created a world where old labels like "proletarian" simply stopped making sense.

This brings us to a key insight: Unprecedented prosperity created a new mass aristocracy from the working class. By the 1970s, blue-collar workers were earning serious money. Wolfe gives examples of truck dispatchers and sanitation workers earning salaries that put them squarely in the middle class, or even upper-middle class. We're talking $15,000 to $20,000 a year, an income that could afford tropical vacations and luxury RVs. This was an international phenomenon. Workers in Western Europe and Japan were experiencing the same surge. A Swiss factory worker might earn more than their American counterpart and own a sports car. The old Marxist idea of a downtrodden working class felt completely obsolete.

Here's where it gets interesting. Capitalism accidentally fulfilled old utopian dreams. Nineteenth-century thinkers like Saint-Simon dreamed of a world with abundant leisure and freedom from drudgery. They believed socialism would deliver it. But Wolfe points out the irony. The post-war capitalist boom actually delivered the goods. At the very same time, the grim realities of socialist states were being exposed. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago revealed the horrors of the Soviet system. News from Cambodia and Cuba further discredited Marxism as a spiritual or moral force. Capitalism was creating a "Rise of the West" built on prosperity, while socialism's ideological power was collapsing.

Building on that idea, with basic needs met, society turned its focus inward to the "Me Decade." When economic security is a given, people's aspirations change. They move beyond simply buying things. They start focusing on self-analysis, self-improvement, and personal drama. Wolfe identifies this as the birth of the "Me Decade." The feminist movement, for example, elevated the experience of being a "woman" or "housewife" into a subject of intense, almost religious, scrutiny. This self-obsession represented a new way of finding meaning.

But flip the coin. This inward turn wasn't purely intellectual. It had a deeply spiritual, and often paradoxical, dimension.