“It seemed so blatantly artificial. Nobody I worked with actually wanted to be in Midland. But the only reason they were was for money,” he said. The idea, Father Matthew explained, was that you would, until you hit sixty-three, do a job you didn’t want to do, in a place you didn’t want to be, so you could drive a car you paid multiple times the average American income for. And you would then show off that car to other people who were working a job they didn’t want to work, in a place they didn’t want to be, so they too could drive fancy cars.
