Saved

by Ben Hewitt

  Through the lens of contemporary American culture, it’s easy to view Erik Gillard as an outcast, or perhaps a relic. And in the context of the false prosperity of the past decades, that may be true. But this country was not built on monetized prosperity; it was built on toil, thrift, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and simple grit (it’s worth noting that it was also built on violence and the displacement of native peoples, but the two are not mutually exclusive).

  But think about it for a minute: Like America, Erik is pretty much broke. And like America, he possesses an enviable degree of intellect, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and grit. In this regard, and surely without realizing it, Erik is a true patriot, a man who personifies the best of traditional American values, even when doing so is inconvenient or uncomfortable. And he does so at the precise time when our nation needs to embrace those values more tightly than it has for many, many years.

  It is probably worth noting that this is not how Erik views himself. Erik’s view, if he’s asked to articulate it (and if he’s not, he won’t; he’s not a proselytizer), is at once simpler and more complex. The simple version is not that America has abandoned the virtues mentioned above, but that it has applied them in ways that are detrimental to its people, its environment, its spirit, and its psyche. It has taken these virtues and used them to build systems of great complexity and, it increasingly appears, vulnerability. In doing so, it has concentrated money in the hands of the few. The way Erik sees things, the most effective antidote to this predatory arrangement is to apply those selfsame virtues in pursuit of an opposite outcome.

  This may be obvious, but Erik does not believe our country is headed in a promising direction. In this regard, at least (and rather depressingly), he is in the majority. He sees the ills propagated by the misapplication of our so American virtues. He sees the physical degeneration caused by junk food, stress, car culture, and the nearly three dozen hours of television we watch each week. He sees the high unemployment, and the outsourced jobs that leave his fellow countrymen and women with empty days and sleepless nights. He sees the almost utter disconnect between us and nature and the almost absolute disregard for the eternal rhythms that we might ignore, but which we cannot escape. He sees people trapped in their 4,000-square-foot homes, fooling themselves into believing they are free, when in fact they are imprisoned. By a mortgage, by the two jobs necessary to service that mortgage, perhaps even by the house itself.

  He sees all this, and he is determined not to be a part of it. And then, along with a growing contingent of his fellow Americans, he thinks: It can’t last. It won’t last. And even: It shouldn’t last.

  There is an inevitable conclusion to all of this. What if Erik Gillard is the norm, and the rest of us are the outcasts, fooled by our majority presence into believing that we embody something deeply historical? If ever we desire validation that our decision to inhabit a big house and to work 60-hour weeks in order to pay for it is a sound decision, we need only turn on the television (if it wasn’t already on), or look around us. And we hardly question the widespread assumption that wealth and security are defined by numbers in a bank account. We are told to save for retirement, to save for our children’s college education, to work and hoard and invest for a future that will otherwise be one of impoverishment and fear.

  Of course, the economic and social arrangements we know today have scant historical precedence, and it was not long ago that our investments were not primarily fiscal in nature. We invested in property, to be sure, but also in less tangible assets, like trust and community. We understood that we could not stand separate from others in our communities, nor from the natural world that provided the foundational essentials for day-to-day survival. Often, we coaxed those essentials from the land with our own hands, and we knew this to be its own sort of wealth: the knowledge and physical capacity to provide for ourselves and others. We lived modestly, perhaps even poorly by today’s standards, but rarely felt bereft. Our consumptive expectations had not yet been set by the rush to capitalize on the productive capacity of the early 1900s.

  All of which is to say, our current understanding of wealth-as-money is a foundling thing, and the historical precedence regarding both affluence and expectations tilts steeply in Erik’s favor. We have lived through something of an aberration, whereby rapid extraction of natural resources and expansion of credit have perverted our collective definition of wealth. But in recent years, we have entered an era of declining natural resources, ever more costly energy, and credit deflation; as such, our adulterated definition of wealth will by necessity change. To which there is only one conclusion: Perhaps Erik Gillard does not merely represent an evolved sense of prosperity and contentment. Perhaps he represents something that is both profound and affecting to us all. Perhaps he represents our future.

  If this seems rather far-fetched and generally unlikely, please understand that I am not suggesting that someday soon we will all inhabit 96-square-foot homes. I am not here to argue that Erik Gillard, with his bucket toilet and four-figure salary, is the literal embodiment of our future. Rather, what intrigues me is how Erik’s version of affluence might inform a more connected and ultimately richer society. To do that, of course, it must inform us individually, and if I’m to be honest (and at the risk of sounding selfish), this is what intrigues me most: What might I learn from Erik? How might he help me better understand what is real wealth and what is illusory? And how might this understanding help me feel more secure about my family’s future, and also the future of those around me? Finally, will this security enable me to inhabit the moments of my life more fully and with greater satisfaction?

  In short, what I hope to understand by studying Erik Gillard is not a sense of what we stand to lose by downsizing our expectations and recasting our definition of wealth, but a sense of what is possible to gain. Naturally, the particulars of this are different for each of us, but what can be gleaned from Erik’s story is, I believe, universal.

  On that first afternoon visit to Erik Gillard’s new home, toward the end of daylight’s brief battle with dark, I pointed to his inadequate footwear, which by then was soaked through. “Nice shoes,” I said, but my tone was sarcastic, for even in my insulated boots, my toes were curled against the cold. Surely Erik had noticed my warm boots; surely he’d silently compared them to the ragged, wet sneakers he wore and then found his own foot protection lacking.

  Erik glanced down at his shoes, as if truly seeing them for the first time. Then he looked back up at me. “Yeah,” he said, his face beaming. “I found them in the trash. Aren’t they great?” If he’d noticed the sarcasm in my comment, he gave no indication. He lifted a foot out of the gathering snow, so that I might better admire his score.

  This, I believe, is the most compelling thing about Erik. He makes every discovery, no matter how modest, how lacking, how downright cheap, feel like the most wonderful, promising goddamn thing in the world. When I’m with him, I find myself infected by the same view, and my sense of optimism seems suddenly boundless and unconquerable. I feel fully immersed in the moment, in a way that is too often lacking in my life. What is it that pulls me out of the moment over and over again? Often, it is anxiety over the future. Sometimes acute, but more frequently lingering and hardly acknowledged, the almost ubiquitous low-grade anxiety of preparing for the days, years, and decades that we all hope stretch out before us. We need money, we think. We need this and we need that. We must accumulate these things so that someday, we can exist free of the need to accumulate these things. So that someday, we can occupy our lives to the extent we know is possible, but cannot afford just yet.

  I probably do not need to point out that this is a trap.

  When I take leave of Erik, I am able to hold on to this optimism and sense of security for a time. But slowly, inevitably, it fades. Slowly, inevitably, I am pulled back into the eddy of my life. Mine is not a bad life; indeed, it is a very good life and I am happy. But I am not inherently blessed with the gift of Erik’s modest exp
ectations, and I often sense that I am lacking the resourcefulness and grit that enable him to thrive on so little. I feel that my expectations are too high, and my happiness too dependent upon them being met. I worry about the future, and I think about accumulating money to protect myself from this worry. And I resolve to change this.

  In the doorless doorway of Erik’s house, we stood for a moment, regarding his feet as the dark gathered around us. The snow had stopped falling, and the air was still and softer than earlier. Before long, it would snow again. But for now, the storm was over. I looked up, past Erik, toward his house. Its lines had faded into the backdrop of the night, and it no longer looked small or comical. It just looked like a home.

  [ CHAPTER TWO ]

  IN WHICH I BEGIN TO CONSIDER MY RELATIONSHIP TO WEALTH AND HOW MONETARY CONCERNS HAVE COME TO DOMINATE 21ST-CENTURY AMERICAN LIFE.

  IN 2010, the year I started writing this book, I made $35,145, before taxes. This is just a bit more than half the median household income in my home state of Vermont, which for that year was $66,598. I am married; my wife’s name is Penny, and we have two sons, Finlay and Rye. We all live in the same house. We compose, by any reasonable measure, a household.

  In 21st-century America, $35,000 is not considered a particularly generous sum on which to support a family of four, although of course it is far above the poverty level ($22,350) and it is enormously more money than many of the world’s households will see not just in a year, but a lifetime. In the context of our financial well-being, I must admit it was a pretty good year for me; although there have been a handful of years in which I’ve done somewhat better, there have been many more in which I’ve made quite a bit less. Still, I struggle to recall with any degree of accuracy which years were flush, and which were not, and I can only conclude that this failure suggests my good years were not really that good, and my bad years, not that bad. Either that, or my memory is going.

  And what did I do to earn my 35 grand? Mostly, I wrote, as I am a self-employed writer and run a small farm on 40 acres in northern Vermont. While there is much to recommend about this particular career path, stability of income and abundance of monetary recompense do not generally make the list. I am no Bill Bryson or Jonathan Franzen. When folks hint about my capacity to earn a full-time living from the written word (as they inevitably do, with barely concealed suspicion that my “writing career” is a front for either a trust fund or something more nefarious), I liken my career to that of the touring bar band, playing gig after gig, collecting the meager proceeds as a squirrel collects nuts. Always on the proverbial road, always hustling, always shushing the keening voices in my head, telling me that each gig might be my last. The farm, I assure you, provides little in the way of financial remuneration, although its value to me usurps traditional metrics of money and profit (and it saves a heck of a lot of money that would otherwise be spent at the grocery store). I will have more to say about this later.

  The point, really, is that my 2010 earnings represent an average or even slightly better than average year’s wages for me and, as such, provide a convenient starting point from which to begin examining my relationship to monetary wealth. In pragmatic terms, it is enough to ensure that my family remains well provisioned in the day-in, day-out essentials of 21st–century American life. It even allows for the occasional frivolity. But it is also a modest enough sum to ensure that finances remain an almost-constant consideration, and this is despite the fact that for most of our adult lives, Penny and I have worked diligently to reduce our dependence on money.

  Sociologically speaking, it is roughly the correct amount of income for our community, which is to say, it is an amount that allows us to feel a certain kinship with our working-class friends and neighbors in rural Vermont, most (but sadly, not all) of whom, like us, are free from immediate concerns of hunger and shelter, but not from longer-term monetary worries. There are few here who have entered the hallowed realm in which one’s money does the earning for them. In these parts, folks largely depend on their physicality to pay the bills, and it is often evident in the way they move: a limp, a hitch, a stoop, a barely concealed wince upon rising from a chair. They’ve given more than time and perspiration in pursuit of money.

  In short, we do not stand apart from our neighbors in either poverty or wealth, and for this I am grateful. In a small community like ours, income disparity and wealth accumulation are particularly evident, as are the social dichotomies they create. I’m not suggesting I live amidst a firestorm of ongoing class warfare, only that subtle classism exists in my hometown, as it does in most communities. To be among the majority class is of no small benefit, even if that entails subsisting on a modest income.

  It will be helpful to us both, I think, if I am entirely candid at this early stage: I do not even like money. Except, that is not quite true, because it’s not money I mind so much, as the suffocating sense that like most human beings in the modern world, I am obliged to spend so much of my life in pursuit of it. And that this pursuit is going to in large part define the particulars of my adult years, and not merely the 100,000 or so hours I’ll devote to earning, but also so much of what revolves around those hours: where I live, who I know, even what I know. All of these are defined at least in part by career choices that are very often made for strictly financial reasons.

  I do not mean to suggest that one must dislike one’s work (although, depressingly, the majority of working Americans do), or feel enslaved by one’s career. In fact, I know that just the opposite is true, because I truly love my job. Most days, I even manage approach it with a reservoir of gratitude, although of course some days that reservoir is deeper than others. Nonetheless, I am grateful for my work, and not just for its earning potential. I realize how lucky I am to be able to say that.

  Yet I cannot deny a certain degree of resentment that money—or a lack thereof—commands so much of my attention and generates the overwhelming majority of the strife I experience. I cannot help feeling somewhat bitter that, no matter how hard we try, no matter what deprivations we endure (and there have been plenty, I assure you), Penny and I remain beholden to the monetary realm. I am bothered by the fact that for the majority of my adult life, I have fretted over money. And then, ridiculously, I fret over my fretting: Why have I allowed myself to worry so much? I have never gone hungry, or spent a night unsheltered from the elements. I have never even been at risk of these things. Most of my worry, I have come to realize, has emerged from a place of uncertainty and fear. Not over the present, mind you, or even the medium-term future, but over the belief that I should be accumulating monetary wealth in preparation for an unknown future. Why? Because it’s what I’ve been told I must do; it’s what we all have been told we must do. And so we collect the nuts, trading our time—which is to say, our life—for them, and squirreling them away and then worrying about whether or not they’re squirreled in the right place, at high enough return, to enable us to live the life we someday hope to live.

  Finally, I cannot but resent the fact that our economic and monetary systems have evolved to a place that divides our nation’s people into the haves and have-nots, and that the latter comprise the overwhelming majority of us. We are the 99 percent, as the saying goes, and if it’s true—if there really are 99 of “us” to every 1 of “them”—it is a dispiriting indictment of the arrangements that have given risen to such disparity. Because with such resounding strength in numbers, wouldn’t you think change would come quickly, if not easily? I contend that the fact that it does not says more about our country’s health than the fact that such a division has arisen in the first place.

  It is instructive to consider income inequality in an historical context. In 1928, immediately preceding the Great Depression, the richest 1 percent of Americans pulled down 24 percent of the country’s total income. The Depression and its resultant policies had a leveling effect, and by 1976, the richest 1 percent earned “only” 9 percent of total income. But the past 30 years have been particular
ly good for the one-percenters, who again command a disturbingly familiar portion of our nation’s income pie: 24 percent.

  Still, I wish for you to not think this is an “us versus them” book. I have no interest in fomenting conflict or fueling a cultural divide that does not lack for tinder. So yes, I admit to the aforementioned simmering resentments, but I chose to focus that resentment on the study of how I—and by extension, others—might refocus our attention. Instead of clamoring for more of our share of wealth within the context of a system that seems entirely uninterested in redistribution, might it behoove us to imagine how we might become less dependent on such things? What if we could liberate ourselves from that suffocating sense of being chained to a financial system that we know is preying on us, and yet that we feel powerless to escape?

  I am not preaching the prosperity gospel, or if I am, it’s not a prosperity that can be measured solely in numbers. In fact, much of my interest lies in exploring what an evolved version of prosperity might look like and what might enable us to realize such a thing. Over the past few years, as the financial divisions in our nation have become ever starker, and the burdens of propping up a deeply and intractably flawed system shifted ever more onto the backs of those least able to shoulder the load, I have come to believe that reimagining wealth is not only beneficial, but inevitable. It will happen, whether we choose it or not. It occurs to me that to proactively usher in this transition is a far better thing than to have it imposed upon us, either by mandate or natural order.

  To be clear, I am not suggesting that money should not and will not be a constituent part of this prosperity, and so I am also interested in how our monetary system has evolved and how it might evolve further. I am intrigued by my relationship to money, and how it informs my relationships to others and to the natural world. I sense that these relationships do not always benefit from my use of money, and in fact might be outright damaged by it, but as of yet, I’m not sure exactly how this could be.