Living in New York can curiously and frequently feel like an exercise played out on a narrow emotional field, a continual toggle between envy and guilt. You wish for more; so many others seem to have it, after all — more space, nicer furniture, a greater number of things from Lululemon. But you also harbor a discomfort at possessing plenty while legions haven’t nearly enough. In any given hour you might veer from feeling unduly blessed to woefully disadvantaged. It is not the job of politics to solve the problem of this kind of split perspective, but it remains one of the chief psychological byproducts of inequality for those who occupy a place in the city’s vast and steeply tiered middle class.

For many years, Karen Paperno told me, she hadn’t paid much attention to those variations and distinctions; she lived above them, maintaining her equilibrium. A child of leftist parentage, she had spent her early years in the Grand Street co-ops, the Lower East Side housing complex developed by trade unions in the middle of the last century. She went to college in Austin, Tex., and worked variously as a waitress, a roofer, a bartender, a substitute teacher, a phone sex operator, a saleswoman. Her values were hippie-ish rather than careerist or materialistic.

In 1996, she settled into work that made her happy, opening a store called Boing Boing in Park Slope, Brooklyn, catering to the needs of new breast-feeding mothers. For the first decade things went well. Ms. Paperno held classes in nursing and baby-wearing and sold infant garments with the words “Made in Brooklyn” emblazoned on the front. But about six or seven years ago, she began to feel uneasy, she said one afternoon in the small apartment she shares with her husband and two teenage children a few blocks from the Gowanus Expressway.

“I was still middle class,” Ms. Paperno said, “but no one else seemed to be.”

“I no longer felt comfortable in my store. I was self-conscious about my appearance,” she said.