You Think Ya Betta Than Me?!

On Expertise, Resentment, and Who Gets to Be Right.

Photo by Arthur Edelmans on Unsplash

In How I Met Your Mother, there’s a joke about the “drunk train,” the late-night commuter line that ferries the revelers from Manhattan back out to Long Island. Marshall and Lily, the show’s married couple, are desperate to catch an earlier train before it fills up with partiers, while Ted and Barney, the two eternal bachelors, see the late train as their chance to meet women. Problematic show in hindsight, yes; it’s a cultural time capsule of the aughts’ casual misogyny. But the image still works: city professionals colliding with suburbanites, all class boundaries blurred by the haze of alcohol. The punchline was always the same: drinks thrown in their faces, women shouting, “You think you’re better than me?!”

That refrain has been echoing in my head lately. The open hostility toward expertise in America today, whether it’s scientists, policy specialists, or civil servants, has a familiar rhythm to it. The sitcom was joking about Manhattan yuppies crossing into outer borough territory. Still, the dynamic feels broader: professionals with pedigrees straying into spaces where their degrees, suits, and résumés don’t translate into authority. You show up with credentials, and instead of applause, you get suspicion. And maybe a drink in the face.

The irony is that we live in an era where access to good and bad information has never been more widespread. Degrees, certificates, online courses, YouTube tutorials — the markers of knowledge are everywhere, as are the ways to dismiss them. Expertise, in other words, is no longer a gate to authority but a target for mockery. On the “drunk train” of our politics, a suit like Barney’s or an architectural pedigree like Ted’s doesn’t open doors, but raises hackles. When you’re balancing debt on three gig jobs or wondering how to keep up with rent, the guy in the suit isn’t a symbol of success. Instead, he’s an easy mark for resentment.

The Baby Boomers were the first generation of great college students, and they passed that ambition on to their children. But by the time Millennials and Gen Z came of age, higher education was no longer a ladder, but a paywall. College became brutally competitive, graduate school the “real prize,” and all of it came stapled to crushing debt. For many, the payoff never matched the burden. The gig economy rose to meet the shortfall: multiple jobs to keep the lights on, multiple hustles to cover rent. And for those who never went to college, whether by choice, discouragement, or circumstance, the economy tilted further into intangibles: cloud storage, e-business, apps. The old assembly line got replaced by the iCloud. The most visible, tactile job of the modern economy might just be the cashier, and even there, the cashier is being replaced by a phone scan and a beep.

Living along the Acela Corridor, Washington to Boston, luncheons to LinkedIn, networking to e-business cards, it’s easy to forget how alien this all feels outside the bubble.

I admit it.

The rituals of expertise can feel self-reinforcing, even smug. But when experts are being symbolically defenestrated, laughed out of the room, or straight-up ignored, it’s not just ignorance at play. It’s resentment born of very real shifts in what’s valued, what pays, what counts as “work.” You can’t separate the distrust of experts from the dislocations of the economy.

Yes, racism and bigotry still shape so much of this dynamic, America’s oldest script still being read aloud, louder than ever.

However, the rejection of expertise also stems from something deeper: a sense that the very rules of success changed in the middle of the game. Once, hard work and education were supposed to guarantee stability. Now, they often guarantee debt. Once, a trade could keep you rooted in a community. Now, trades are dismissed while knowledge workers zip off into the cloud. That breeds bitterness, and the bitterness finds an outlet in suspicion: of the “expert,” of the “elite,” of anyone whose credentials don’t feel earned in the same way as daily survival.

But let’s be clear: resentment doesn’t make the resenter right. The drink hurled across the train may feel justified, but that doesn’t mean the target deserved it or that the anger holds the better argument.

Resentment can be misguided, manipulated, and stoked by people who profit from keeping the crowd mad. Still, the emotional undertow can’t be ignored. To stop the cycle (i.e., the firings, the scapegoating, the symbolic purges), you have to understand the resentment, even if you refuse to baptize it as truth.

The task of storytellers, whether we’re policy wonks, journalists, artists, or just folks with a keyboard, is to sit with that tension. To recognize that people aren’t always rejecting knowledge out of stupidity, but out of bruised pride, economic fracture, or cultural mismatch. Not everyone has the language to articulate why they feel dismissed.

Sometimes that language comes out as “You think you’re better than me?!”

And if we, in our suits and graduate degrees, can’t figure out how to ride the drunk train without sneering, we shouldn’t be surprised when the drinks keep flying.