So there’s this story about the novelists Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller
attending a party together, by the way good morning Hank it’s Tuesday.
The party’s an extremely lavish affair hosted by a billionaire and Vonnegut
says to Heller, “Joe isn’t it funny that our host makes more money in a day
than you ever made from your beloved bestselling novel Catch 22?” and
Heller is like “yeah that is funny, but I have something our host will
never have.” And Vonnegut says “what’s that?” and Heller says, “enough.”
I’ve used this story for years to remind myself that I have enough,
but also to remind me that most people on Earth do not have
enough. Many people do not have enough food, or enough clean water,
and most people do not have enough savings or enough to access
excellent medical care. But in my experience, even those of us who
do have enough, often feel as if we don’t. There’s always something missing,
more security, or power, or money that stands between us and true
enough-ness. For me it’s always been about security. The feeling I
am trying to avoid all the time is precarity, the feeling of being close
to the edge and not having a say in whether I go over it. But of course,
having adequate distance from precarity turns out to be, one,
impossible, and two, insofar as it is possible, actually a pretty
terrible idea. Let’s start with why it’s impossible.
Wealth and privilege insulate people from many kinds of precarity in
profoundly unjust ways and I think that is important to acknowledge,
but ultimately there is no getting around the big precarity which is that
I love and everyone I love will die. When I was young I thought I
could solve this problem by writing books that would last, books that
would survive even though I wouldn’t. But I eventually realized that is of
course a fool’s errand. Books also don’t live forever and anyway, that’s
not why books exist. They exist to be helpful to the people who find them.
And then my next idea was that even if my work couldn’t last, my legacy
could through philanthropy, like I would build up this huge charitable trust
and then once it was really big, it would start donating 5% of its
resources per year or whatever to create charities and then my impact would
stretch through the years. The problem with this strategy is that I was still
trying to maintain some kind of control or agency that would survive
even after my body didn’t, right? Also I was conveniently forgetting
the fact that if you donate money now, it’s true that it no longer grows under
your control, but it still grows. It grows in the form of more kids surviving
to adulthood, and more people having educational opportunities and so on.
And that growth is actually much more transformational and important
than like the appreciation of stocks. Now I want to be clear that I insulate
myself from precarity in as many ways as possible, like I quit smoking
20 years ago because it was making my life more precarious, I have
insurance to make life less precarious, and I have financial security which
makes a billion things less stressful and more possible from taking
professional risks, to getting my kids any support they need.
And of course it’s human, wonderfully human, to try to protect those we
love, there’s nothing wrong with that. But one thing I have noticed over
the years is that when rich people only spend time with other rich people,
they do not feel rich, they feel normal. And this arrives at what I really don’t
like about the people who have enough, it is so easy to forget that
we have enough. In fact, let me stop using “we” and start using “I.”
I forget that I have enough because in trying to insulate myself from precarity
I can also make myself distanced from the reality of suffering. And if I
was more proximal to that suffering, I would use more of my resources to
try and alleviate it. And too often trying to insulate myself and those I love from
the realities of suffering, I am also looking away from injustice and inequity
and impoverishment. And if having enough means having enough to not
have to face those realities, then enough is simply too much.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.