>five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children.

This is cultural bias spoken as though it’s universal

Plenty of fulfilling lives out there that don’t include home ownership, being a parent, having secondary schooling or being partnered with offspring.

This is sort of orthogonal to the point though, people who want those things (the author being one of them) aren't able to achieve them.

Plenty of fulfilling lives out there for any conceivable metric, it doesn't mean that the article is incorrect.

I don’t even think there can be an agreed upon metric for life satisfaction, let alone what an ideal “middle class existence” looks like. It’s going to be different for everyone.

For me, home ownership nor children would be part of my “ideal middle-class existence” quite the opposite. I want stable housing, I don’t necessarily want to own it and all the burden that comes with ownership, and I definitely did not and still do not want responsibility over bring a child into the world. Thankfully, my wife agrees.

If we were to even approach a definition it might be something like “Do you have stable housing, access to nutrition, hygiene, transportation, etc. while also having enough capital resources and time to achieve your personal goals?” And that’s going to look different for everyone.

Regardless of the path you have chosen for yourself, your existence is owed to your parents having had at least some, if not most, of those things.

You’re saying one can be happy without being bourgeois. I think that’s self-evident.