Sunday, May 27, 2018

Do most people struggle?

The segment of society I grew up in struggled to overcome barriers to basic steps. We struggled to get out of bed, to make that phone call, to leave the house on time. It's a lifestyle defined by loose ends, unfinished starts, or just unstarted starts. I saw it in my mom, her friends, my cousins, and myself until I cultivated better habits. I wonder what it is that puts us in this state and keeps us there on so many counts, for years, and too often for whole lives.

I have seen the alternative. I saw it in more functional classmates in school, in neighbors, in people at shops and offices who took care of their affairs in a more organized, proactive, and timely manner. These people often were members of a different socioeconomic category — more affluent, more stable, with more resources and options. Was it a cause or an effect of their mode? More likely than not the relationship wasn't unidirectional.

A troubling aspect of my observations is that I don't think I've seen the same predicament in other parts of the world. Living in Ukraine and China — and traveling extensively through other parts of the world not exactly known for affording wealth or opportunities to ordinary citizens — I find the constraint is not the initiative of locals but the opportunities they have. There's probably sampling bias coming into play here. In my years abroad I taught English, and that standing lent itself to putting me in contact with the more proactive sort, those who took the initiative to acquire a foreign language. Outside of the classroom I saw taxi drivers, proprietors, and consumers vying for improved standing or the accumulation of wealth. Perhaps that segment that struggles remains disproportionately and significantly invisible to the public eye. They're not in evening classes or working a gig or running their errands. They're languishing behind closed doors, in dark spaces, working to muster the energy to engage their worlds toward their own benefit.

Could there be something singularly American about the struggles I saw intimately growing up, and that I still occasionally brush up against? One differentiating aspect of America is that for all of our wealth, our income distribution is pretty warped, leaving big segments of society feeling inferior to others. Could that account for the paralysis? Pop science articles have told me that this sort of perception has an adverse effect on well-being. Even in a place like Ukraine, where a small elite has an incredible amount of wealth, the rest of society is clustered closely together in poverty, establishing a sense of camaraderie among most citizens even, with the rich — oligarchs — operating as a uniting opponent in some ways.

Looking into the past I think about the trials of simpler societies, of hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, and pioneers. Of serfs and slaves. Accounting for infant mortality, I'm told life expectancy wasn't so terrible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still I'm not convinced that a typical life in cities, on farms, or on manors was beyond daily struggle. Plague, turmoil, war, famine, and other misfortunes were far more significant factors then than for the American lifestyles I'm familiar with today. My friend imagines that if he were a fourteenth-century peasant reflecting on his life, he'd likely recall big holidays, weddings, festivals and the like as the highlights, before struggles to make ends meet or navigate the vagaries of society. I think he's right. The hard work of earlier or less affluent times and places is taken as a given and fades into the background of consciousness. It's a constant. The highlights are the deviations.

Would the people I think of as struggling today have a comparable experience? I'm not so sure. Again, I think of the heterogeneity of society, and the unavoidable dissemination of media and information that draws their attention to their relative standing. I think a lot of people today understand themselves as marginalized have-nots. The operative word there is marginalized. When you see yourself as part of a community overcoming poverty more or less together, even allowing for the occasional exception — the duke, the lord, the chief, the mandarin — you're more likely to take comfort in the notion of a solidarity or at least a relative fairness in working toward well-being or livelihood in parallel with peers. I'm suggesting that in turn that comfort can strengthen someone against the sort of rut that can take down initiative.

1 comment:

  1. https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash/transcript?language=en some of this reminded me of this TED Talk.

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