Recently I had an odd experience staying with some friends in a nearby suburb. These are folks I love dearly, they eat similar stuff to what I eat, read similar stuff, get similar cultural references... but unlike me, they never went through an outsider subculture, and in their world, everything is available by commercial transaction. You get food from a store; you get fit by joining a gym; you get smart by going to school. Its hard for me to remember that people live like this, but they do.
The fact is, commercial relationships are corrosive. Do you really expect comfort and a sense of being cared about from spilling your guts to the twenty-five year old bartender at Chili's? So after a while, people become obsessed by two delusions. First, that if the good life is out there, it must be something you buy, and it must cost a lot because you can't afford it right now. And second, that all these people you only interact with in ritualized commercial ways are something you can't wait to leave behind.
What I notice most about the Thoreaus or the Suelos is how assiduously they maintain non-commercial social connections, and what I notice about the internet discussions where people plan to buy their way off the treadmill, is how much they look forward to spending a butt-ton of money and never having to talk to anyone again.
This reminds me of something I read years ago in a zine. The author was traveling around dressed in anarchist punk clothing, and someone asked her why she was dressed that way. She said, if I dress like this, I can go up to other people who are dressed like this, and they're likely to help me out with food and a place to stay. But if I'm dressed conventionally, and talk to other people dressed conventionally, there's almost no chance they'll help me out.
As I think more about commercial vs non-commercial relationships, suddenly I understand why I haven't done anything to monetize this blog. It's not that I think money is evil and I want to stay pure. In this society, both the commercial and the social are necessary. Some things are much easier to get with money, and other things are much easier to get through friends. But when the commercial and social get blurred together, it makes people confused and insane. If I demand payment, are you my friends or my customers? If I sell ads, then every time I make a post, part of me will be asking how it will effect my income.
My philosophy is, with any particular decision, make up your mind if you're going for money or love, and go all out. If there ends up being some of both, that's great, as long as one or the other is one hundred percent. One example of half-assed blurring of money and love is socially conscious investing. You want to believe you're making money doing good, but there's a risk you'll end up losing money serving the lesser of two evils. A reader thought I was trolling yesterday when I mentioned investing in Monsanto. That was an extreme example, and I have no idea if Monsanto is actually a good investment. But the point is, when you go into the money universe, jump in with both feet and make damn sure you're making good money. Then if you want to save the world, do it in your own neighborhood, among your own friends, with your own hands.
Oprah: Are you just not interested in material [things]?
Cormac McCarthy: I'm really not. I mean, it's not that I don't like things. Some things are really nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and do what you want to do. And I always knew that I didn't want to work.
Oprah: How did you manage that? Most people want to know how to do that.
McCarthy: Well, you have to be dedicated. But it was my Number One priority.
Oprah: That you didn't want to have a nine-to-five job?
McCarthy: Yeah. I thought, 'You're just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.' And I don't have any advice for anybody on how to go about that, except that if you're really dedicated you can probably do it.
Oprah: So you worked at not working.
McCarthy: Absolutely. Yeah, it was the Number One priority.
Now, it's not my position that anyone can live without having a job if they really try. But I think almost everyone has room to move in that direction. And some of the obstacles are not economic but psychological. Why do we idolize Dick Proenneke who built a cabin in Alaska, and despise some guy living in his parents' basement, even though they're equally dependent on friends and family? Why are the cool ways of dropping out so difficult, and the easy ways so uncool? I'm totally in favor of living with your parents, going on the dole, investing in Monsanto, marrying into money, selling ads on your blog, whatever your easiest path is to the foundation and precondition of true meaning in life: giant blocks of time when there's nothing you're supposed to be doing. This is what I was getting at in How To Drop Out, when I said it's better to get a slack job you don't care about, than try to get a job doing something you love. Because you don't even know what you love until you break your life down and build it up from giant blocks of unstructured time. One word of caution: whatever you're doing to make money so you can do nothing, don't get sucked into the game; keep your eye on the prize.
]]>This applies not only to emotions but identity. Our culture gives us a set of cliches, or myths, or stereotypes. The more you show yourself as you really are, the more you will come into conflict with people who want you to fit a box that's already in their head, so they don't have to think to understand you. And the more perfectly someone seems to fit one of those boxes, the more likely they're faking it. (There's a grey area between pretending to be what you're not, and changing yourself, which I'm not going to get into now.)If an emotional display comes raw from inside you, you will most likely be punished for it; if there is an emotional display that you are rewarded for showing, most people who show it will be faking it.
]]>Glance back over American history and it's hard to miss the pattern, repeating over a period that runs roughly seventy to eighty years. The dictator-figures were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, each of whom overturned existing structures in order to consolidate their power, and did so with scant regard for existing law. The juntas were the old Whigs, the Republicans, and the New Deal Democrats, each of them representatives of a single social class; they were overthrown in turn by Jacksonian populism, the Progressive movement, and the complex social convulsions of the Sixties, each of which diffused power across a broader section of the citizenry. The first cycle ended in stalemate over the issue of slavery; the second ended in a comparable stalemate over finding an effective response to the Great Depression; the third -- well, that's where we are right now.
I gave up health/vision/dental insurance nearly six years ago. Instead, I put that money toward saving, buying what I need without going into debt, etc. And you know what? I don't even miss it. Honestly, if the worst happened, and I could only be helped by being hospitalized, then I would have no plans to pay the bill. Invariably I get the response of "but that's what makes it more expensive for everyone else." But at some point, somebody has to stop caring about this so much.
Now I'm thinking, (permalink...) why exactly is modern health care so expensive? The answer we take for granted is that it's better, because of technology. Okay, but it is 100 times better than preindustrial health care? Then why does it cost 100 times as much? And why are other things that have improved with technology not more expensive? Wikipedia is faster, bigger, and cheaper than a paper encyclopedia. A gore tex jacket is better rain protection than an animal skin, and you can get one with fewer hours of labor. We travel more efficiently on airplanes than our ancestors did on foot. If transportation were like health care, we'd say, "It used to take a whole day to travel 20 miles. Now, with miraculous technologies, it only takes half a day, and that's why it costs ten thousand dollars."
The difference is, people feel differently about adding an hour to the end of their lives, than saving an hour of walking. (Related: How Doctors Die.) Modern health care is expensive, not for technological reasons, but for cultural reasons. There's a lot of room to use high tech (or low tech) to make it cheaper, if we can stop mystifying it, and take the same risks and responsibilities that we take in other parts of our lives. Anne, who is in medical school, comments:
]]>I think the secret behind the health care debate is that it doesn't work for anyone. It's not some conspiracy to get people into college, or debt, or shitty jobs, it's just a complete floor-to-ceiling trainwreck. The core belief is that money conquers mortality. It doesn't, but that won't stop people from spending everything they have to try. Even the people who talk about how they don't want health insurance only like to discuss the financial aspects -- "well, then I'd have to declare bankruptcy" -- more than the health consequences. The truth is, if you have a heart attack, there's a good chance you'll lie on your back for a few weeks and then die, no matter how much money anyone spends. If you break a hip, same thing. Pneumonia, same thing. You can push the margins a bit, with a firehose-full of cash, and that's why the system doesn't work.
Health insurance is the biggest point of conflict between me and my mother. This most recent time, I left her house so frustrated and hopeless that I actually considered going on food stamps so I could divert $300 or $400 per month to buy health insurance. We eat well, we're active. I found a physician who takes actual cash, and I saw her last summer when my body went into crisis mode. I understand that if I break a bone, I'll be screwed, but the only other solution that would satisfy my mother would be to go back to school, go $100,000 deeper into debt to get qualified for a job I won't be passionate about so maybe they'll give me health insurance. I think that's crazy, she thinks that's the American Dream.
In this context, I can see that the health care issue is tied up with more difficult issues of class and the meaning of life. I bet most people reading this do not have a single ancestor who had a job they were passionate about. Our remote ancestors had nothing we would call a "job", and our recent ancestors saw wage labor as a chore they had to do in exchange for the benefits of modernity. Only a few lucky people get to have jobs they love -- and that's okay. We haven't worked out yet how to build a complex society out of intrinsically meaningful activity, and it's better for some people to love their jobs than nobody.
But the present situation is much, much worse. The American managerial class is so powerful, so immature, and so secretly unhappy, that it's not enough for them to love their jobs personally -- they expect everyone under them to also love their jobs. You can't even get a job at McDonalds if you admit that you're just doing it because you need the money. I'm tempted to say this is worse than slavery, except it must happen with slavery too. If the managers can not only fire you, but can also have you beaten and killed, then they can really force you to pretend to enjoy your work so they can feel good about themselves.
It also happens with parents. The baby boomers, and to some extent the two generations before them, got to live the American dream -- but some of them are not satisfied, and want their kids to live it too. George Carlin said "it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." Even at its best, it only gave people enough ribbons and toys to not notice they had no participation in power. Now even the ribbons and toys are becoming vaporous. A college degree is like a $100,000 lottery ticket, guaranteed to put you in debt and unlikely to get you a job. Young people can't afford cars or houses but they can still afford to play Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft. Even jobs that "give you" health insurance typically sell you very expensive health insurance by deducting the premiums from your salary.
So what's the answer? Economic collapse is already underway, and we have to surf it down. The first step is to let go of some of the things you're supposed to care about. Here's a related reddit thread, For anyone who stopped giving a fuck, what were the results?
As for health care, I have yet to see any solution that's politically realistic. My personal strategy is to live like I'm already in the Zombie Apocalypse: if I get seriously sick or injured, I die. Really I would just lose all my savings and be in the same boat as everyone else -- that is, out of my lifeboat and back on the Titanic. To expand the metaphor, we're all on a big ship that's sinking, we're getting on lifeboats, but only the ship has a hospital! So if you get sick you have to go back on the ship and maybe sink with it. The solution, then, is to build lifeboat clinics: sources of good health care, including emergency care, on the fringes of the money economy.
people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40% higher risk of dying in the next three years than people who sat less than four hours a day. This was after adjusting for factors such as age, weight, physical activity and general health status, all of which affect the death risk. It also found a clear dose-response effect: the more people sat, the higher their risk of death.
So I've converted my sitting computer desk to a stand-up desk, by stacking a table on top of it. Wait, here's a photo. This effectively limits my computer time because my feet get tired!
Also I've been stretching and exercising more, especially the doorway stretch (illustrated on this page). More than one massage therapist has told me that if everyone did this stretch, they'd be out of a job.
And I'm experimenting with biphasic sleep. Supposedly, before the industrial age, it was normal for humans to get up in the middle of the night and do stuff, instead of lying awake. It probably takes practice, because the last time I tried it, my second phase of sleep was so low quality that it took me two days to catch up. Maybe I could just get up at 4am and then take a giant nap in the middle of the day.
Staple production is easier for gang-bosses to monitor than more diversified farming. Staple production also has lower skill requirements for workers. When demand for staple products is very high -- to feed the proletariat of imperial Rome, to feed the growing cities of late-Medieval Flanders, or to supply the cheap luxuries demanded by early modern England -- slavery or serfdom can emerge even without an extraordinarily high land/labor ratio.
Joel adds that this could answer Krugman's puzzle of why serfdom did not reemerge after the catastrophes of the 1300's crashed the population of Europe. As Carol Deppe mentions in The Resilient Gardener, farmers adapted to the instability of the time by adding many different crops and animals, and this could have made the agriculture system too complex to be managed by slave bosses.
Of course, today plantation slaves have been replaced by industrial machinery. Going back to this link from a few days ago, I used to think this whole system was doomed, but now I think it has an enduring niche. For turning sunlight to physical work, solar panels plus electric motors are more efficient than photosynthesis plus mammalian digestion. Unless there's a universal tech crash, which I doubt, large-scale mechanized agriculture will remain economically sustainable, and reforms to preserve topsoil could make it ecologically sustainable. So the reason to grow food in your backyard is not to save the world, but because it improves your own life.
The idea of something called "An Economy" as distinct from the larger society was invented by political philosophers in the eighteenth century as a way of rationalizing certain self-interested, avaricious and greedy behaviors that take place in a market economy which were formerly sanctioned by ethical and moral systems. A totally arbitrary distinction is made between behaviors that are "economic" and hence outside all other spheres of human relationships - political, social, ethical, religious etc. where naked self-interest is expected and justifiable.
From 2003, Paul Krugman on serfdom and population. The idea is, when population density is high, it's cheaper to hire a worker than to feed a slave. When population density is low, the ruling powers have to hold their workers through violence to stop them from running off and being self-sufficient. This is something we'll have to struggle with as global population declines.
The Beer Game, or Why Apple Can't Build iPads in the US. The idea is, if a manufacturing and distribution system is too far-flung, then each part of the system tries to make up for delays by anticipating future orders. This leads to a feedback loop, instability, and failure. So China is good at manufacturing because the supply chains are so dense. I'm wondering how this will change as home-scale fabricators get cheaper and better. Maybe in 20 years a town will decide to specialize in building ultracapacitors or brain implants or airships, with all components made locally by different people in their garages.