Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing.

These are not aspirational whites—these whites can afford to be modest. One is even called Blackened.

“The ease of self-invention that IKEA enables is liberating,” Lauren Collins writes, “but it can be sad to be able to make a life, or dispose of it, so cheaply.”

“People are so completely and so powerfully alienated that they are reduced to things; in the meantime, the things they produce and the things they purchase have acquired all the livingness that people have lost.”

She lives a life of contradictions and she’s caught between her own contradictory desires. She wants more and less at the same time, just as I do.

“One of the main things Marx noticed about capitalism,” she writes, “is that it really encourages people to have relationships with things instead of with other people.”

Music becomes part of us, as food does, but it isn’t destroyed in the process.

It’s absurd, I know, for me to spend this particular holiday feeling upset about having things I don’t want. And I don’t understand why I’m upset, other than that this all feels like too much. Even the phrase “our own house.”

“Modernization was supposed to fill the world—both communist and capitalist—with jobs, and not just any jobs but ‘standard employment’ with stable wages and benefits. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much more irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we used to call a ‘regular job.’”

Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake.

My adult life, I decide, can be divided into two distinct parts—the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after. I consider the possibility that the washing machine, more than the house, has changed my life. I call my sister and tell her that what I’ve really done is buy a $400,000 container for a washing machine. As I say this, I’m aware that the cost of our house was closer to $500,000. But I don’t say that out loud, it makes me too uncomfortable.

“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive,” John Kenneth Galbraith writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. “But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.”

What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

The very rich, her study revealed, are uncomfortable with being rich. If they are assholes, they are uneasy assholes. They try to hide their spending from their nannies, cutting the tags off new clothes and peeling the labels off expensive bread. They don’t boast about their wealth, but about their thrift. They talk about looking for good deals and driving old cars.

The rich feel morally compromised, so they try to be good.

Dividing the good rich from the bad rich is a waste of time, Sherman suggests, for the rich and everyone else. “Judging wealthy people on the basis of their individual behaviors—do they work hard enough, do they consume reasonably enough, do they give back enough—distracts us from other kinds of questions about the morality of vastly unequal distributions of wealth,” she writes. We shouldn’t ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

It is expensive, I admit, but it’s an investment in my writing. I don’t mean investment in the financial sense, as my writing does not reliably produce money.

But “it looked more ladylike to do something uselessly pretty than to do nothing.” And so, “in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, as well as in the rest of Europe, young feminine genteel idleness was mostly filled with a number of trivial occupations superficially related to the fine arts: they were known as ‘accomplishments.’”

Reading the notation takes everything I have and just eight measures of “Frère Jacques” breaks me. But there, in the break, is a moment of communion between the music and me. This is practice. And practice is all I want out of art.

But I don’t know what defines a working-class life. Is it the way you live, or the amount of money you make, or the nature of your work?

Opportunity hoarding

Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

Credit is a form of optimism, Yuval Noah Harari suggests. It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present.

Leisure meant something different in ancient Greece. It was the opposite of being busy but it wasn’t rest or play. It was time spent on reflective thought and wonder. To be at leisure, to live a life of study and contemplation, was to enjoy true freedom.

When time is money, as it is now, free time is never free. It’s expensive.

Leisure is how a class that doesn’t have to work displays its status.

“A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money,” Weber argues, “but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.”

I would still have plenty of work, I say, even without my job. I would have the work of writing, the work of research, housework and yard work, and the work of caring for a child. Work, in fact, is interfering with my work, and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work. I need another word.

Capitalism, she writes, has always depended on theft and violence.

The witch hunts, Federici argues, weren’t about superstition or religion so much as they were about suppressing the rebellions of women.

Later, as cities grew, women worked in hundreds of professions, as smiths, butchers, bakers, ale brewers, and retailers. But then, during the transition to capitalism, they lost the right to make contracts and represent themselves in court. Not carrying a baby to term became a crime punishable by death. And when married women earned money, their wages were paid to their husbands. Their work, unpaid and compulsory, was now to produce more workers.

“The witch,” Federici writes, “was the communist and terrorist of her time.”

A woman, under capitalism, was no longer considered dangerous—she was helpless.

Woolf wrote about her servants constantly, in her diary and her letters, but not with understanding.

Her crimes are many, Didion. She’s thin, she’s cool, she’s rich. She doesn’t interrogate her privilege, though neither do the men of her moment—Norman Mailer, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe in his white suit. I was primed for that argument with my mother, I was angry already, because I’d read a book review that suggested Didion neglected her child for her work. I was just back to work after having a child and the crazy bitch, I was sure, was me.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” was printed triumphantly across a banner at a writing conference I once attended. Had they read the rest of that paragraph, I wondered. Because what she means is not that stories are the stuff of life, but that we lie to ourselves. Self-deception has always been her subject. And this is why she follows me in a minivan.

“that ownership of all kinds is a precarious business at best, or at worst, a form of self-delusion.”

But I don’t see much evidence that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.

If that’s how it makes you feel, she says, then why do you do it? Because there’s no other choice, I’m tempted to answer, if you’re compelled to make art. But I think she’s asking where the pleasure is in this work. It’s in the making, I know that much, though the process itself isn’t exactly pleasurable. It is, as the composer chronicled, a series of difficult questions. Attending to those questions demands both work and labor.

Service is the act of paying interest on a debt, labor that doesn’t produce a commodity, and a ceremony of religious worship. That’s something close to what I had in mind.

But then I think maybe this is progress. Maybe what’s news is that now we’re calling this domination, when we used to just call it marriage.

“But how often do we have the ironic opportunity to consent to and control our own pain? I have discovered that consenting to small amounts of pain and abuse and suffering is like an inoculation of my soul against the pandemic of hatred.”

Toil is the word Galbraith uses for work that is fatiguing and monotonous and a source of no particular pleasure.

“Daily meaning as well as daily bread,” Terkel writes, is what people are looking for in work, “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.

You spend your life accumulating things, she said, and then you have to maintain them. Your house, your car, your body. You have to maintain your children, too, and your parents.

I want nothing to do with this, I think. But I want to retire.

The more comfortable we are, research suggests, the more destruction we are likely to be causing. No matter how much you care about the world, no matter how conscious you are, the best predictor of your impact on the environment is your income.

If we could think about value differently, we could modify our economic system so that something of value to our entire society, like the well-being of our children or the preservation of our environment, would also have economic value. Investment is essential, she argues. But we need to ask, “What are we investing in?”

I won’t buy our son out of an uncertain future, John says when we discuss life insurance. That’s what life is, he says. I don’t want to argue with that. Instead, I quietly submit a blood sample and sign the paperwork that will insure my life for $250,000.