I also see that I’m turning even more into the sort of person I describe in my book. The Bobos are bourgeois Bohemians, the people across upscale America who are half hippies and half Yuppies. They see themselves as artists and creative people who are trying to hang on to their high thinking even as they get drawn deeper into the world of high finance. You see them going to work in black T shirts and those teeny-tiny steel-frame glasses because they think they can keep up their counterculture bona fides if they show up for the morning meeting looking like Franz Kafka.

Bobos are surprised–and confused–by what they’ve become. In Boston a woman called in to a radio show I was doing to say that she’d grown up poor but now she and her husband had Internet stock options and sudden wealth. She was calling from her sport utility vehicle, which was parked outside one of those organic grocery stores where they sell vegetarian dog biscuits, rain-forest-friendly tree-oil soap and those obscure cognoscenti lettuces that taste so bad on sandwiches. She was wondering if she had betrayed her roots. In Philadelphia a woman called to say she’d been at Woodstock and had been a pure flower child. Then she spent two decades in marketing for a major corporation, and she felt a little guilty about all the compromises she’d made. But now, she said, there may be hope yet: she had enough money to rekindle her earlier interest in Zen rituals.

I’m discovering that the only people who seem completely comfortable talking about money these days are the intellectuals. When a business person comes up to talk about the book, she wants to discuss the ideas in it; when a writer or professor comes up, he wants to know how big was my advance and how’s it selling. In Washington an editor at a highbrow magazine called to see if I had any marketing advice so he could become one of those high-octane lecture-circuit intellectuals who jet around the country commanding five-figure appearance fees for 45 minutes of after-dinner profundity.

Coming to terms with money is the great Bobo quandary. When I was young and dreaming of writing a book, I thought all I wanted was glory. But then I had a kid, and another and another, and my dreams turned toward getting a house big enough to have a finished basement that could serve as a playroom. Funny how the most fulfilling events (having kids) force you to think about the crassest (building up enough dough for the mortgage). Over the past few weeks on book tour I’ve been shocked by how enthusiastically I try to move product. A few weeks ago I was sitting in a rinky-dink apartment in San Francisco with some aging hippie in his bathrobe who’d been gulping chicken soup. He was supposed to interview me for his “talk show.” Except this show doesn’t go out over TV or radio, but as streaming video over the Web. I got the distinct impression there was nobody out there watching this. I could have made a run for the front door. But then I thought, “Maybe there’s a book buyer out there.” So I put on my best smile and I started hawking.

Have I sold out? This is what we Bobos ask ourselves while staring into the dregs of our merlot. The great Bobo accomplishment has been to create a way of living that allows you to be both a worldly success and a free spirit. Founding design firms, Bobos find a way to be an artist and still rack up the 401(k) assets. Turning university towns like Princeton and Palo Alto into entrepreneurial centers, they have reconciled the highbrow with the high tax brackets. Now that I’ve actually tried capitalism, I’ve concluded all that art-crowd snobbery about commercial life was just wrong. Selling at least forces you to work hard and think about the needs of others. It can be an antidote to narcissism. It can be exciting and dramatic, and it is certainly challenging. In fact, the problem with the Bobos is not that they have become crass and greedy. It’s that they are too soft and pseudospiritual. I wrote a whole book making fun of them, and not one has come up to me on the street and thrown a latte in my face.