Americans have matured, it is mind-boggling to consider that anybody here could be unhappy. But everywhere I go, I can see it, such unhappiness, such an overwhelming need to be drugged and distracted, lest a moment of silent, melancholy self-reflection pierce our fragile hearts!
We are, at our heart, a nation of rugged individualists. Not in the absurd, capitalistic manner of an Ayn Rand protagonist or a blue-blooded intern at the American Enterprise Institute, but certainly in the manner of our philosophical forefathers—Emerson, Thoreau, Jefferson, Paine. These men all advocated a nation, a way of living, where men and women are free to march to the beat of their own drummer, empowered by self-reliance, by an abundance of practical skills, and by an economic and political system that champions pluck and innovation over size and institution.
How quickly has such an American ideal faded! Now, we are all slaves to institutions. Educated in them from the age of five, or younger, and often imprisoned within them, accumulating piles of debt, until we are pushing thirty. At the end of our educational process, we know what? How to plant a garden? Build a home? Repair and maintain machines? Hunt? Fish? Camp?
Hardly. Rather, we leave these institutions with only one small skill—trading commodities, analyzing prose, ceramics, welding widget A to widget B—and we immediately need to find another institution to take us in: General Motors, Yale, the Federal Reserve, the UAW, Target, any place that will allow us to put food on the table.
Once food is on the table, we must find shelter, often for a growing family, and instead of having any idea of how to build a shelter, we must buy a shelter, and because the costs of shelter are so absurdly prohibitive in comparison with actual wages, we must move immediately into the debtor system Thoreau likened to slavery. We must move into a home that is owned by an institution—Bank of America, Countrywide, CitiFinancial—and we must make ourselves adhere to a payment schedule. We must then secure health care coverage from a large institution, finance transportation through a large institution, deficit-spend based on the leverage of a large institution, worship the Lord at an approved institution, and then, one morning, our children enter a federally mandated pre-K program or a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year private preschool. And the cycle begins again. You can almost hear the tiny hearts of America's children breaking as they gather around the story circle or line up for a carton of milk. Slaves!
Thus, for most Americans, life becomes a series of debts and dependencies on entities much larger, and much more powerful, than ourselves.
The paradox is this: in the middle of such indebtedness and dependence, we are bombarded with an apparent array of choices, are we not? Walk into a Walmart, surf Amazon, pull off at the Des Plaines Oasis, and you instantly are given the illusion of freedom. You can buy anything you want! Read anything you want! Eat anything you want! What a country!
But in our quietest moments, these very choices become so bewilderingly superficial that they bring with them insurmountable gloom. The fact is, by the time we are old enough to comprehend the magic and bounty offered by the wider world, we are so indebted to institutions, financially, spiritually, and otherwise, that we have no real choices.
Listen,
the internal memo bellows from our soul's central office:
You have no options. You wont start that business, you won't open that café, you wont live in Costa Rica, you wont come out of the closet, you wont write that novel, and you wont ever have a threesome.
And this is the epiphany, the realization that makes us so alarmingly unhappy. I am not the first to editorialize about my generation's abundant choices, or its accompanying debt, but few people, if any, have expounded on this troubling irony: throughout our lives we will have many choices but little by
We are, at our heart, a nation of rugged individualists. Not in the absurd, capitalistic manner of an Ayn Rand protagonist or a blue-blooded intern at the American Enterprise Institute, but certainly in the manner of our philosophical forefathers—Emerson, Thoreau, Jefferson, Paine. These men all advocated a nation, a way of living, where men and women are free to march to the beat of their own drummer, empowered by self-reliance, by an abundance of practical skills, and by an economic and political system that champions pluck and innovation over size and institution.
How quickly has such an American ideal faded! Now, we are all slaves to institutions. Educated in them from the age of five, or younger, and often imprisoned within them, accumulating piles of debt, until we are pushing thirty. At the end of our educational process, we know what? How to plant a garden? Build a home? Repair and maintain machines? Hunt? Fish? Camp?
Hardly. Rather, we leave these institutions with only one small skill—trading commodities, analyzing prose, ceramics, welding widget A to widget B—and we immediately need to find another institution to take us in: General Motors, Yale, the Federal Reserve, the UAW, Target, any place that will allow us to put food on the table.
Once food is on the table, we must find shelter, often for a growing family, and instead of having any idea of how to build a shelter, we must buy a shelter, and because the costs of shelter are so absurdly prohibitive in comparison with actual wages, we must move immediately into the debtor system Thoreau likened to slavery. We must move into a home that is owned by an institution—Bank of America, Countrywide, CitiFinancial—and we must make ourselves adhere to a payment schedule. We must then secure health care coverage from a large institution, finance transportation through a large institution, deficit-spend based on the leverage of a large institution, worship the Lord at an approved institution, and then, one morning, our children enter a federally mandated pre-K program or a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year private preschool. And the cycle begins again. You can almost hear the tiny hearts of America's children breaking as they gather around the story circle or line up for a carton of milk. Slaves!
Thus, for most Americans, life becomes a series of debts and dependencies on entities much larger, and much more powerful, than ourselves.
The paradox is this: in the middle of such indebtedness and dependence, we are bombarded with an apparent array of choices, are we not? Walk into a Walmart, surf Amazon, pull off at the Des Plaines Oasis, and you instantly are given the illusion of freedom. You can buy anything you want! Read anything you want! Eat anything you want! What a country!
But in our quietest moments, these very choices become so bewilderingly superficial that they bring with them insurmountable gloom. The fact is, by the time we are old enough to comprehend the magic and bounty offered by the wider world, we are so indebted to institutions, financially, spiritually, and otherwise, that we have no real choices.
Listen,
the internal memo bellows from our soul's central office:
You have no options. You wont start that business, you won't open that café, you wont live in Costa Rica, you wont come out of the closet, you wont write that novel, and you wont ever have a threesome.
And this is the epiphany, the realization that makes us so alarmingly unhappy. I am not the first to editorialize about my generation's abundant choices, or its accompanying debt, but few people, if any, have expounded on this troubling irony: throughout our lives we will have many choices but little by
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