Cheap Thrills

Last week, I took my nieces to Six Flags New England. The moment we walked through those gates, two kids who love their devices dropped their screens entirely. For six hours, they were fully present, screaming on coasters, begging for one more ride on the Sky Screamer despite a 30-minute wait.

Shortly into our visit, I watched a family of four glide past us in the Flash Pass express lane. Then another, and another. My eight-year-old niece tugged my shirt and asked: "Uncle Jake, why do those kids get to go first?"

I stood there, sweating in the 90-degree heat, watching purchased privilege march past unpurchased patience.

I saw this for what it was: a lesson in economic segregation.

For an additional $149 per person, families can skip every line, transforming the fundamental theme park experience from shared waiting to tiered access.

The visual hierarchy was unmistakable: express lanes flowing while we shuffled forward, dripping sweat while watching other people's children learn that inconvenience is optional.

My nieces were learning that their time matters less.

Over the past few decades, Six Flags’ quarterly earnings calls became performances about "premium-ization" and "guest experience optimization." The stock rewarded revenue-per-guest metrics over all else. Six Flags learned to charge luxury prices for the same aging coasters, the same sticky surfaces, the same tinny speakers blasting recycled pop music.

The product never improved, only the barriers to entry.

The Flash Pass system represents something more insidious than convenience pricing. It's economic segregation with superhero branding.

I'll be honest: my entire life philosophy revolves around paying to skip friction. I fly business class, DoorDash dinner, and generally believe in purchasing my way out of inconvenience. That ethos powers half the American economy: find the friction, inject the solution, bill monthly.

The Flash Pass isn't just about skipping lines, it's teaching economic hierarchy to children. Kids in express lanes learn that discomfort is avoidable, for a fee. Kids in standard lines learn their time has less value. Both lessons are toxic, but the second is corrosive to any notion that America rewards effort with access to its pleasures.

Eventually, I did rent a private cabana at the water park. Priorities.

Six Flags is just the most visible symptom of the middle-class evisceration. The same pattern infects summer camps (now $3,500 for two weeks), youth sports (travel teams cost $15,000+ annually), and even school field trips (many districts charge families directly rather than risk budget strain).

As I’ve written about previously, we’re slowly but surely dismantling the infrastructure of shared American childhood.

The experiences that once taught kids they belonged to something larger than their family's tax bracket have become luxury goods. The spaces where a plumber's kid and a lawyer's kid waited in the same line, ate the same limp pizza, and screamed the same way on the same rides… those shared thrills are dying.

What we're building instead: curated, expensive, segregated by economic tier. Childhood as subscription service, with premium features locked behind paywalls.

This trajectory has a logical endpoint: the complete privatization of joy.

When shared experiences become luxury goods, social cohesion collapses. More than just economic inequality, we're creating experiential inequality that shapes how entire generations understand belonging, fairness, and community.

The kids streaming past us in express lanes today will become adults who've never learned to navigate uncertainty alongside people from different economic backgrounds. They'll design systems that feel natural to them: convenience for those who can pay, friction for everyone else.

Meanwhile, the kids sweating in standard lines will become adults who've internalized that comfort isn't for them, that premium experiences happen to other people, that their role is to wait while others advance.

It’s clear we have accepted this architecture of a divided society.

The childhood we're engineering, where access to joy correlates directly with family income, produces adults who think stratification is natural, inequality is inevitable, and shared struggle is obsolete.

The memories I carry from childhood Six Flags trips aren't about the rides themselves. They're about the radical idea that big experiences were accessible to regular families. That a day of wonder didn't require financial planning. That the line itself was part of the experience, shared waiting that built anticipation and community.

Six Flags used to be trashy and affordable. Now it's trashy and expensive. That transformation, from accessible amusement to premium-priced mediocrity, might be the most telling story about American democracy today.

We haven't lost our capacity for joy, we’ve just engineered it out of reach for most Americans.

When a day of family fun costs more than many families spend on groceries in a month, we’ve accepted the notion that working families simply don’t deserve leisure, recreation, and the pursuit of happiness.

A functioning democracy requires shared experiences. It needs spaces where different economic classes encounter each other as equals, where children learn that excitement doesn't correlate with family income, where the line itself becomes a temporary community of anticipation.

Without those spaces, we're not raising citizens, we’re just raising customers.

And customers, unlike citizens, get exactly the democracy they can afford.

Up and to the right.