Wretched Inequality

Extreme, growing inequality is both the cause and outcome of the of growing inequality. Being in the middle tends to become a worse and worse experience, and being below a ever-rising bar becomes outright tough, precarious and worse existence.

It takes 20 years of absolutely zero negative incidents happening to you for you to stay out of poverty in America. Even in India it takes very little to sink right back into a really horrible state.

If access to the basics — stuff like food, water, decent accommodation, clean air, public/basic transportation, education, healthcare, legal recourse and justice , and then community spaces, leisure, art— are in a big way a function of your economic status, then the experience of being outside of the ever-shrinking rich set becomes outright wretched.

You fight to escape this. Through privilege and creating moats around it if you can. Through ingenuity if you can. Through muscle, or political power if you can. The stakes and the bar gets higher all the time. Empathy, community and a shared imagination of better commons all take a beating as you are more consumed by primarily, somehow, escaping into the top 1% if you can, or at least the next 7–8% in support roles.

If the access to these basics were easy and available at scale, it would be less vicious, and less wretched to be in the middle. We might have had more time to imagine better for us all.

Ironically, access to these basics requires us to imagine better for us all.

Can we?

More soon…