Carve diem: The slippery slope to middle class
Sunday, 28 September 2025
Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.
OPINION: The bourgeois have much to answer for.
According to lore, they are petty, materialistic, and driven by a contemptible pursuit of comfort.
So much so, they are a loathsome sub-species, whose name is spat from the lips of the earnest and envious searching for an insult-du-jour.
I should know. I’ve damned many in my time with such superficial and silly slurs.
I don’t think I’d been introduced to the term until I went to university. But from that moment, as I studied progressive politics, it became a crucial social distinction.
The bourgeois were everywhere, with their odious affluence and repugnant luxuries.
Coming from a very humble background, as we like to euphemise it, they were easy targets for my emerging, doctrinaire view of the world.
And first against the wall were skiers.
University hostel colleagues they might have been, but skiing branded them as an indulgent elite, in my little red book.
They would head for the mountains on bright fine winter days. I would head to the library to sulk about social inequities.
In my nascent manifesto of life, the only honourable adventures in the mountains were long slogs in pinching boots and moth-eaten woollens, with overladen packs: the proletariat’s burden.
It was a time full of certainties and bitterness.
And then things changed.
After running out of steam and anger at university, I took a job at Mt Cook over winter, scrubbing toilets, making beds, waiting on tourists.
Mt Cook in winter is a stupendous place. Well, Mt Cook at any time it’s not completely choked with tourists is a stupendous place, but in winter there’s snow.
And you’ll never believe what happened…
When the first fall blanketed the village, everyone raided the ski shop and slid around the streets.
Before long, I was spending all my days off going to nearby skifields with a co-worker I’m pretty sure was called Donette, who had what I think was a Datsun.
In an instant, I shucked class war diatribes, and hurled myself into skiing.
I bought skis. I spent another winter near Queenstown just so I could go skiing.
I was a backsliding disgrace to the revolution.
In the years that have followed, I’ve skied whenever possible. If anything, I think I’ve become even more enthusiastic.
Don’t ask me to explain exactly why. It’s just fun in a lovely environment.
Despite it being essentially a solo sport where you attempt to stay upright at speed, it’s also a curiously communal pursuit.
It begins as you swing into a carpark that’s a mix of mud and ice and Subarus. Everyone’s kitting up, the routine rigmarole of layers and ungainly gear, shared by angle-parked neighbours.
In the queue while waiting for the lift to swing you towards the top of the mountain, you encounter the mix of skiing society.
The families shepherding young kids whose appetite for adventure exceeds their parents’ quotient of courage.
The teen thrusters who’ve turned tricks all the way down and videoed each other’s daring.
The 20-somethings reliving last night’s extravagances.
The 70-somethings still doing it, still gliding, still graceful.
And the guy the other weekend who was handing around a joint as everyone waited for the line to shuffle forwards. He had a blue woollen hat, and, suddenly, lots of friends.
He tipped his head back, let the sun warm his face, and exhaled.
“I’m half Orc. I was an Orc.”
He was having a special kind of day.
But it’s when you share a chairlift with people that you get truly fascinating glimpses into other people’s worlds.
Snippets and snapshots. It’s like speed-dating at altitude, except everybody’s just there for the chat.
The fretting guy who was silent for three-quarters of the ride only to exclaim he’d suddenly remembered where his car keys were. A tidal wave of relief swept over him, and he unloaded to complete strangers that they must be in the ski-box on his car, and hadn’t dropped from his open pocket on a mountainside of snow.
The school-leaver who went on and on about the “phat drops” he’d been doing, and how he saw his future in shooting more epic videos of himself to “build my brand”.
The middle-aged bloke blathering bollocks about his hire skis, and how he liked their performance in the front end, but the back end was too rigid.
And the mother cajoling her 7-year-old to carry on a bit longer, and bribing her with a small bag of scroggin.
“So how are you feeling?”
“Cold and hungry.”
“Maybe we could just do one more run?“
“Nope.”
“Well, it’s good to be skiing when everyone else is having lunch. So we could just have another run here?”
“Nope.”
The certitude of youth.
The frustrations of parenthood.
The randomness of the bourgeois.
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