Eula Biss - Having and Being Had

Here's the background of this book. Over a relatively brief period, the author had (a) got employed in a secure job (b) got married (c) had a child (d) bought a house. All the middle-class power moves, basically. She felt uncomfortable adjusting to her new life, so - knowing that this initial discomfort was likely to dissolve into smug contentment - kept a diary of the discomfort, which turned into this book.

There are clear parallels to my life. Over a span of a few years - from 2017 to 2022 - I (a) got a series of quite high-paying jobs (b) accumulated a lot of money (c) got married (d) bought a house (e) got pets (f) quit working full-time.

From the outside it sounds like a success story. But, like Biss, I feel deeply uneasy about my new life. At times it feels like a cosmic joke. Why do I, of all people, get to have a life like this? At other times I try to pressure myself into enjoying it - after all, I was the one who engineered it.

But I cannot possibly claim credit for this "success". It's built entirely upon layers and layers of good fortune. There's my parents, who paid for my (over-)education and don't need financial support. My pampered upbringing, which made me feel superior to every authority and entitled to every pay raise I ever got. My being part of the Chinese majority race. My husband also being Chinese and an over-educated smart-ass. The list goes on!

I have neither suffered nor hustled for what I have. Meritocracy had nothing to do with it. I would probably feel morally better about my life - more deserving of its comforts - if I had worked hard for it.

If this weren't a library book I would underline a paragraph from the part about precarity being the "condition of our time," per anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 

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.

Okay, enough navel-gazing. But I'd recommend this book if you're in an uneasy sort of mood, caught in between the demands of modernity/capitalism/economics and values like art/kindness/equality. 

It is, however, the antithesis of self-help. ("The Capitalist Antidote: Why Modern Life Gives Us So Much Angst & How to Fix It") It leaves you with zero answers and a whole lot of questions. Also: a LOT of material to follow up on. Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Danica Phelps, John Berger, David Graeber, John Kenneth Galbraith, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Chin among others.