Coping
1,900 words. Seven minute read.
By Austin Kaiser, @Kaisermane
I have a lot on my mind. I'm thinking about college and why I went, my favorite writers and why they write, and my writing and the turn it's taken over the last year. I mentioned in Getting Bigger By Getting Smaller that you all have been reading these essays a lot. Fool Me Once was my most well-read essay and Taming The Shrew, within 24 hours, had already been read as many times. Why? Why were essays about glum, serious topics so interesting? I don't want to read about them. I don't want to write them. But I think we're all searching for ways to cope with the squeeze.
The world has always been troubled but now the trouble feels like really and truly what could be the last trouble. Most writers I know felt like they were living during the end of the world, that the downfall of civilization was around the corner. Dostoevsky in Russia. E.B. White on a farm. Keith Haring when Ronald Reagan was elected. Everyone felt, "How can this get any worse?" I remember thinking, "You silly writers. Focus on your art. Don't worry about current events. There's always going to be something that seems more threatening than it is." But since then I've turned inside out.
I went to school to study environmental science. I didn't pursue it because I felt like the only real way to make an impact was to become a lawyer and go to war with Exxon. Being that I wasn't that passionate, being that I was more fascinated than anything, I went into communications. But I remember not being so worried about the world because my peers were determined, intelligent, and working on incredible renewable energy products — easy setups for home aquaponic gardens and ways to turn food waste into fuel. Even though the problems were dire, there were such exciting solutions that I had a positive feeling. Wind turbines. Geothermal. Solar. These solutions combined science, agriculture, society at large, and were quickly advancing. Even though I wasn't pursuing it, I felt lucky to have had insider knowledge of why the world was in good hands
I also studied economics and it gave me a similar feeling. I felt at peace with what I was taught, that "the market" was a wondrous, natural entity that self-balanced and allocated resources appropriately. It managed to bring together buyers and sellers of all sorts and find what were called "equilibrium prices." These matched costs producers paid to make endeavors viable with prices that consumers could afford to pay to get worthwhile value from. The world, from my collegic point of view, was sound and satisfying. It was a perfect little bubble of solutions.
But I feel differently now and not just because I've lived through George Floyd, Trump, and covid. I feel differently because upon further inspection, economics in practice is more fiendish than theory and science is less influential than the industries that implement it. Profit-maximizing, which was always taught as an neutral and objective method of ordering a business's goals and priorities, is actually a device to hurt people. Economics now tells me that the world is on the brink of something more horrible than anything a writer has written before. Even if there was no global warming, no prejudice anywhere, the world would still be headed for disaster because the wealth gap is growing. Rich people, who have always existed, are becoming richer proportionally.
Are you rich? Do you have money? Most people I know aren't and don't. But profits have never been higher, not in the history of the world. The S&P 500 is up 100% since 2017. 100% means double. It means the value of goods produced in America has doubled in five years. Has our quality of life doubled? Our pay? Society at large? It's dropped relatively speaking. If you didn't get a 5% raise this year, your salary went down due to inflation. Where has all the value gone? To the people who have always received it, of course.
The type of end-of-the-world scenario that the wealth gap causes isn't about anything fantastical or sci-fi like a 1984 situation. It's not about enslaving anybody or implanting microchips. It's about slowly crushing people economically and seeing how long they last. Like I wrote in Taming The Shrew, we have enough resources for everybody to be middle class and live comfortably but that may never happen because we've managed to subsist at the level we are. That's been established. We have cars, heat, and electricity, and, knowing the strict laws of economics, there's no incentive for corporations to let our standard of living rise any higher.
What is the end of the world? What does that really mean? I'm afraid our generation is poised to find out the answer. I don't think it's going to be dramatic. I think it's going to be a slow, grinding, and suffocating squish. I'm afraid of it. So many of us don't have enough already. We're overworked and disrespected and it's frightening to think of how far that will go. A simple way of looking at the situation is that the minimum wage is $7.25 federally and it's been that way since 2009. Cost of living has gone up 23% since then. Average salary of CEOs has gone up 104%. The top 10% richest people own 70% of total wealth, up from 67%. That's what the grind looks like, the grind of living in a world that doesn't ever tip over into a futuristic totalitarian regime but instead is composed of rich people living on bigger islands with bigger boats while the rest of us work an extra few hours a week to splurge on name brand cereal.
My favorite scientist, Richard Feynman, articulated this strange depression well. He was, among many things, one of the physicists to help develop the nuclear bomb in the Manhattan Project. The nuclear bomb, you could say, was “global warming junior” — the first time people truly thought about the possibility of the world in a real way. He said,
"I remember being with my mother at a restaurant right after and thinking about New York. I knew how big the bomb in Hiroshima was, how big an area it covered and so on. I realized where we were at 59th street, to drop one at 34th, it would spread all the way out to here and all these people would be killed. There wasn’t only one bomb available but it was easy to continue to make them. Therefore things were sort of doomed because already it appeared to me, very early — earlier than to others who were more optimistic — that international relations and the way people were behaving was no different than it had ever been before. It was just going to go out the same way as any other thing. I was sure it was therefore going to be used very soon.
I felt very uncomfortable and thought — really believed — that it was silly. I would see people building a bridge and say, 'They don't understand.' I really believed it was senseless to make anything because it would all be very destroyed very soon anyway. They didn't understand that and I had this strange view of any construction I would see. I would always think, 'How foolish they are to try and make something.' I was in a sort of depressive condition."
Richard may have been one of the first people to feel a feeling many of us have. What happens now that it's not looking good? The possibility of some end is real and I didn’t sign up for it. I was raised to think I would have a life. I want a pool and a BBQ grill. I want children. I've never had to believe something like this would happen outside of a movie that ended with credits peacefully rolling up.
A lot of people believe that the world has simply always had its problems and always will and therefore these modern problems are nothing to lose one's head over. "Don't be depressed because it's largely your imagination getting the best of you." But that's not true. My imagination is running wild and I am losing it, but the causes are real. "Everyone has some good and bad in them, both sides. It's not right to blame just one." I don't believe in sides or good and bad. I don't think about life in a philosophical way. I believe in actual events: the specific CEOs in specific companies appointed under specific politicians that cause specific damage. I am not a believer that we're all inherently a little evil or that the world's condition is the result of "the human condition." The world is the direct creation of rich people deregulating the economy. It isn't any more complicated than that.
Inflation is coming. Bread and eggs are already more expensive and how we can afford them is of no consequence. It's just for us to shoulder. That's how the world ends, through goods rising in price and salaries staying the same until something drastic happens. It is happening now. That makes me feel like nothing matters. Why do anything? I know I should and will because, well, I'm alive but what is the point if the grind is going to get harder and lead to more suffering? Getting out of it is no longer just a tough journey or worthwhile fight but a sheer impossibility. It would be more appropriate to discuss why it's an impossibility and depict the gross machinery at work rather than pretend to strive for a solution when the scope of the problem is unknown.
A CEO's job is to see how much tighter the squeeze can get while they profit. The name of the game is “maximizing” and if you're willing to buy a water bottle for $100, they'll sell it to you. It doesn't matter what your quality of life is. If people can live with the minimum wage still being at $7, they'll keep it there. We can't live at $7 but the "can't" is not are we happy? Are we working a reasonable amount of hours? Are we sound of mind and body? The "can't" is are we physically protesting and burning down corporations? That's the only response that would get them to change. Corporations' jobs are to extract money and they will take from society and it will never end. There's no goal. It doesn't reach a point where enough is enough.
How many essays will there be before I fully understand it all? How much thought will it take to comprehend the problem well enough to think of what to do? Then how likely is the solution to be created? When I said corporations will keep widening the wealth gap unless we revolt physically, I said that not because I have any interest in throwing a molotov cocktail though that sounds good right about now, but because that truly is, and has only ever been, the way they respond. Every labor law has come through revolt. Every civil right. None were invented by the people elected to represent us. Within the laws of economics and the bureaucracy of the political system, there is no room to appreciate human suffering. It can only move forward and create more.
By Austin Kaiser, @Kaisermane
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