Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

Not having money is time consuming.

Nearly all people in nearly all nations, for nearly all of human history, he observes, have been poor. Widespread poverty is not an anomaly. But widespread affluence is. And if we meet this new affluence with old ideas forged in poverty, we will misunderstand ourselves.

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

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

“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.”

“If Amazon’s 575,000 total employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as the Sears workers did in the 1950s, they would each own shares worth $381,000,” write Nelson Schwartz and Michael Corkery. “This shift is broader than a single company’s culture. . . . In many cases publicly traded companies are concentrating wealth, not spreading it.”

Buying a ticket that allows cutting, he observes, amounts to paying to degrade other people’s experience. If some people don’t stand in line at all, then other people have to stand in line longer. Which, as any child can see, is unfair.

“We are all communists with our closest friends,” David Graeber writes, “and feudal lords when dealing with small children.”

Some people choose their precarity—evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to it. The precariat includes people who have forgone stable employment and retirement savings for temp work and travel and an uncertain future. Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting, as it does, that there might be something worth more than security.

the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

Health is a mark of money in our time, when a longer life span can be bought. The rich of this country are living to be older and older now, while everyone else is dying younger.