On navigating systems that feel inhuman and the necessary role inhuman systems play in our world
December 13, 2018
Dear Sarah,
Hello! My mind’s been all over the place this past week, and I’m not sure what that’ll mean for this letter. One thing I know is that it is a treat to start writing to you and see what flows out. This is an odd time in my life mixed in with a nice time of year — busy work days, busy life days, looking forward to the busy holidays, wanting them to come but not wanting them to end. After a decade-plus in San Francisco we’re in Minneapolis and thinking about buying a place to live instead of renting, and it’s opened up all kinds of rusty cans of worms for me.
I’ve never owned a home and I’ve lived in apartments ever since I was small, and I can’t shake a fear that owning something means you’re left alone to deal with the bad things that may come up, and it’s all your responsibility. I think one thread of this is that I’ve had to be quite responsible for myself for a long time, and there’s something about renting where it feels good to leave some part of my life as someone else’s responsibility. And then I think of all the ways we’re supposed to focus on building wealth in this country — you’re supposed to own a home and make money on it and take out a loan and have the best interest rate and it all feels daunting, coming from a family where no one owned their home, and no one was passing along that specific information about how to build wealth by owning things. There was a message in my family about saving, and building credit, and I have finally been able to save in these recent years, and I have built credit, and now I’m a bit fearful of spending what I saved. You can read all kinds of things online about how much debt to take on and how to find the right kind of loan and rate and so on, and it feels exhausting to search around and talk to lots of people about this.
There are a number of cases where I get overwhelmed because I’m not confident the systems we have in place are intended to be the best for individual humans. Why are there so many banks and why do I need to talk to lots of different people to sleuth out something that will be good for me and my future? (I suppose it’s like having options at the grocery store for my milks and toothpaste, but the physical scale and the long-term effects of bigger decisions like this make me briefly go tharn.) Why does it feel so chancey, why does it feel like I need to know a new language to own a home, why does it feel like the good things are secrets you have to unlock? It feels like the health insurance system in some ways, which I’ve talked about before. Individual people in these systems seem to mean well enough, but the system as a whole feels clunky and disconnected and inconsistent and inhuman. If I have never gotten a home loan before, how do I know how to do it right? I’m afraid of making a big mistake on a big thing that would have big repercussions.
I tread cautiously as a rule and I’m lucky that M likes to figure things like this out, and we’re doing it together, but I’m still frustrated with the complexity of systems where I can’t wrap my head around who is the intended beneficiary — it can feel like someone is waiting around a corner to benefit from my lack of expertise in this area. And I actually think I am fairly well protected from certain kinds of preying and bad happenings because I have people I’m connected to in my life who have ideas and suggestions and insights about handling these kinds of things, people at different stages of life with different life experiences. But there are people who are alone or not connected to the group in some way, or they over-trust, and they are preyed upon, and it is depressing that people are preying on others and making money and, in my mind, sleeping peacefully at night, though who really knows how they sleep? (Maybe they’re sporting pricey sleep rings.)
And even if no one is preying upon you there is no infinite security, there are fires that rage and turn solid homes into powder, and earthquakes that break what seems stable into shattered parts, and water that soaks every object that held memories or cost money, and turns things moldy or fetid and ruined.
I’m scared! I’m scared to commit with my hard-earned money to something that could disappear someday. There are so many things we do every day that involve planning for the future, trusting that there will be a future, trusting that somehow we’ll be working together instead of against each other, and I’m scared to be attached and relying on outside things to help ensure my stability. But my whole life is woven up in things outside of myself. I know that if things go wrong somehow I will just do my best to weather those happenings, and I can’t avoid all the bad things, but I still don’t want bad things to happen. I worry that when we rely on big systems to care about us then we may end up disappointed. Some humans (most?) seem to care about other humans, and some systems seem to want to care about humans, and it all feels so fragile. Maybe I need to turn to the reclusive hermit lifestyle. But I like humans too! It all feels like a lot lately. Usually I feel optimistic, and lately I would say I feel optimistic but skittish. Honestly, maybe I need a snack right now. Let’s start there and see what happens. How are you faring? Are you feeling good and just the right amount whelmed? I hope so!
Talk soon,
Your friend,
Eva
P.S. I concluded this letter with a grand off-the-page freak-out, ate a snack, and got out of the apartment, and I’m feeling better! Please still consider the above a representation of my thoughts and feelings this week, perhaps with the treble turned down just a scoche.
Dear Eva,
Until reading your letter last week, I had forgotten about that experience of playing piano from memory and suddenly getting tripped up when my brain turned its attention to what was happening. This phenomenon of the brain getting in the way is something I am all too familiar with in so many contexts. Sometimes I wonder — if I could silence that internal voice whispering its fretful analysis as the backdrop of my life, what all I could do? This reminds me of something I heard the writer Pico Iyer say recently, that the definition of happiness is absorption, forgetting yourself. I love this.
It is funny to recall that I spent a good chunk of time in this life priding myself on valuing the brain above all else. When my emotions would overcome my logic, I viewed it as weakness. There is always an allure to simple rules like this. Logic trumps emotion. Check. But of course this is silly. Emotions / feelings / connections are the guts of life. Without them, we would just be a stack of bones. Over time, the pendulum swung as it does, and I started thinking the human, the personal, was always the right lens instead. Human heart trumps logic. Check.
Nope.
Sometimes humanizing people and viewing things at the personal level leads us astray. The cop who shot the unarmed black man, the man who abused the woman. They always have a story. There was always pain. There are always people who love them, people who they have loved. They are always humans. I suppose it is never a bad thing to recognize humanity, but it is a bad thing to let it dilute our judgment of their actions. Yes, they are human. And.
While there is usually a little built-in wiggle room, laws and rules and principles are intentionally impersonal. This idea is one I still struggle with. Bright-line rules can create absurd results. By design, they ignore a fair amount of nuance. But this rigidity — this rejection of ends over means — is essential to equality, justice, and other ideals we hold dear.
Not quite the same but related, I think about how this idea plays out in politics. A politician strikes a deal to trade one policy outcome for another, a compromise of one value in pursuit of another one, a choice of one harm to avoid another, greater harm. This feels like an area where it gets messy. Often, the political calculus is right. But sometimes this feels like another situation where the personal can lead us astray. If everything is context-specific, the ends always justify the means. Eventually, the personal can swallow the true, the right, the real.
I am left marveling at how the ways we find to sort concepts in our minds are always incomplete if we keep digging. I guess this makes life more interesting. This brings me back to my very first letter on this journey, where I wrote about complementarity. “You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth,” Frank Wilzcek wrote.
I can think of no deeper truth.
Yours,
Sarah