Giving It All Away

Peter Singer thinks that if you make more than enough money to satisfy your basic needs, you should give at least some portion of the rest away to keep children all over the world from starving to death or dying of preventable diseases. Preferably, he says in some of his writings, you should give everything you have above what you need to live. His argument for this claim is compelling, and if you are interested in seeing why, and making yourself squirm a bit in the process, try this exercise called "The Drowning Child". (The site this exercise is on -- philosophyexperiments.com -- has a lot of eye-opening exercises on it. I highly recommend it.)

Jobs

It drives me crazy to hear so much talk about jobs and how people need jobs. Just give us jobs. As the “Great Recession” drags on, and politicians continue to bloviate, I am completely up to my ears in bricks made up of “J”s, “O”s, “B”s, and “S”s. But what are jobs? They are opportunities, situations in which you trade your time, strength, and/or expertise for money. And what do you do with the money? You spend it, of course, so that other people, the ones who make the stuff you buy, can also have jobs. If you don’t spend, people won’t have jobs. So get a job so you can get money to spend so that other people can have jobs too. Oh, but don’t forget to put money aside for retirement because it’s your right, your entitlement, to someday not have to have a job, but you’ll still need money to spend so that other people can still have jobs even while you’re taking it easy. (And of course if they have jobs, they can continue paying your Social Security.)

Too Rich or Too Thin -- Part II

So we have established that yes, one can be too thin. The more difficult question is whether it is possible to be too rich. In the third person, the answer is clearly yes. The 99 percent, as most of us were characterized in the Occupy Wall Street protests, can easily see that those in the top 1 percent are too rich (as this video shows). Their wealth has grown; ours has shrunk, and it is easy to blame their growing wealth for our growing poverty and social problems. But when you are too thin, it does not just mean you’re an eyesore for others. It means your own health is compromised and you could die. Is there comparable danger to the person who is too rich? What are the perils of plenty?

Well, there’s the whole “money doesn’t buy happiness” theme, with Richard Cory going home and putting a bullet in his head. And there are the addictions – “sex addiction” not least among them. (Are there happy marriages among the very rich, or is the charismatic power of wealth to attract nubile young women just too much for any man to resist?)

Too Rich or Too Thin -- Part I

“You can never be too rich or too thin.” True or false? Well, we know you can be too thin, actually. As an American, my mind’s eye flashes to those grotesque pictures of anorexic actresses gleefully displayed on the cover of Us magazine. But anorexia is only a symptom of other problems – and lack of food is not usually one of them. In real life there are stick-thin Sudanese refugees, street junkies, cancer patients whose bodies waste away, inmates of Nazi death camps. Yes, you can be too thin.

You can also, obviously, be too fat. Bariatric surgery is becoming more popular as more and more bodies grow to the point where their own flesh becomes a disease. And there are diets and exercise plans all meant to thin us down. But not too much. There is a balance point. There is, despite the cliché, such a thing as “thin enough”.

"Where Hides Sleep"

Enough is not only about material things. The above is the title of a song by Alison Moyet. For the first 100 or so times I heard it, I actually thought it was about something called "hides" and where they slept. It took me a while to realize she was actually singing about me and my misery. My mind must have been muddled from lack of sleep.

I blame my insomnia on Ronald Reagan. I was 12 when he was elected. I lived 10 miles from the Indian Point nuclear power plant. It was the Cold War. I thought that any day, or night, the bomb would fall that would obliterate me and the rest of the planet. At night the thought became especially vivid. Just on the edge of sleep, I would imagine the flash and be suddenly awake. This happened over and over throughout the night.

On the Couch with Mildred Pierce

I am sitting on my very comfortable but inexpensive (aka cheap) couch, in the living room of my not-very-large house, having just completed watching the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. It aired in 2011, and we happened to be visiting my parents at the right time to watch the first two episodes (luckily, since we don’t have TV reception, cable or otherwise – a post for another day). The story was dark and intriguing, but unfortunately we had to come home before the other episodes were shown, and I was left wondering and haunted by the seeds of tragedy that had been planted.

Recently, though, I had the brilliant idea to order the discs from Netflix, and this cold, dark, rainy day was the perfect time to watch. The series opens with Mildred losing both her husband and his money in the Great Depression (his housing development has gone broke and he has taken up with another woman). She bounces back, starting her own business and making lots of money, buying a mansion, wearing furs, being chauffeured everywhere. But with regard to one daughter, she makes spectacularly stupid decisions, and between that and what happens to her other daughter, she spends

What Might "Enough" Look Like?

From up close, enough is getting home and opening the refrigerator. I see eggs, meat, yogurt, milk, cold cuts, fruit, vegetables, leftovers in various unwieldy containers. It is a beef stew that’s at least as much beef as stew. It is the warm floor under my feet when I walk around in my socks in the winter. It is each of us on our own computer, working or playing. It is listening to the rain beat on the roof but not feeling it on my head. It is driving to work, knowing my husband too has a car and I don’t have to worry about leaving him stranded. It is being able to donate money to others so that they, too, can have enough.

 

From far away, enough looks like a window glowing with light, many windows, as I rise above the ground and can see more and more of the landscape. It is a neat little town or a bustling city where everyone has an indoor space to shelter in, and the people out on the streets are there because they want to be and not because they’re begging. Outside of the cities and towns are big dark spaces,

Thermoeconomics, or the Birth of the Blog

When I took thermodynamics as a geology student at MIT, I knew I had found the key to the universe. It explained everything! I loved the fact that there was a word, an actual scientific term, derived from Greek, to describe why everything always goes to hell. Entropy explained much of what I saw around me -- including death. It explained why every one of my relationships ended and why albite crystals have so many planes of symmetry. What could it not explain?

I resolved that if I ever got rich, I would go back to MIT and just study thermodynamics, so that eventually I could understand everything. However, given that I majored in geology, and then went on to get a master’s degree in creative writing, getting rich was not a real possibility. So my thermodynamic education ended after one class, of which I remember almost nothing -- only the conviction that if I kept at it, I would eventually know all.