When I was younger I was that person explaining compound interest to my friends and helping them set up IRAs (individual retirement accounts for those of you outside the US). I didn’t aspire to be successful in a fancy way, just in a way that would allow me to not be totally up a creek when I inevitably got laid off or got sick.
Which, in the US, is a level of security few achieve. The cost of medications, treatment, and personal care attendants contains a comical number of zeros.
The assessment of my financial security looked better once I immigrated to Canada. Catastrophic medical care was no longer something I would be billed for, even if there would still be plenty of health care that came with a price tag.
How does this factor into a retirement calculator? How much was the infinity of potential catastrophy reduced by when I moved to Canada?
During the pandemic I shifted from spending my time researching care work through hands-on experience and in academic libraries to a quest to understand the context of care work over the course of history. This was for practical reasons, of course, since the pandemic shut down libraries and my ability to be within six feet of people. Still, it seemed like a reasonable broadening of my work. The sparse historic data that exists about disability and care is easily misunderstood without a deep understanding of the context — the way terms have changed, the way daily lives have changed.
The things that create upheavals in patterns of care work are mostly dramatic and unpleasant. One thing tends to destabilize others. Epidemics, war, economic collapse, and natural disasters set off dramatic changes in social roles, employment, property rights, and distribution of power. These are the things that shift how we view disability, what care is provided, who provides the care, and the conditions surrounding care.
Over and over, people have discovered that today may not be like yesterday; that tomorrow is a great unknown.
The Bubonic Plague ravaged Europe for 300 years. Communities were torn apart periodically, destabilizing the social and economic structure of their lives.
Accusations were made during the Spanish Inquisition (or the Cold War or countless other repressive and cruel moments of history) and people lost their social standing, all their belongings, their health, and often their life.
World War II left Europe in ruins. Wages weren’t paid, homes were lost, pensions vanished, millions died and countless more were disabled. People in an array of social standings (and all sides of the conflict) spent months and years living in temporary camps before starting over, either in the ruins of their former home or in a new country.
It’s all too easy to lose everything. We’re told the safest investment is in ourselves, yet we know we can lose our physical or cognitive abilities in an instant. Reputations are so easily ruined. Inflation can render cash worthless. Businesses can collapse. Property can be confiscated or destroyed.
I wonder if the people with fall out bunkers stocked with supplies and weapons feel safe or if they’re the most frightened of us all. Did their ancestors living in castles feel safe?
I hear people exclaim that it can’t be possible that this is happening to them. They can’t be dying. They can’t be bankrupt by medical expenses. They can’t be totally screwed, because they did all the right things. They took care of their health. They saved for the future. They were responsible, upstanding members of society.
The thing is, the retirement calculator works on the assumption that the next 100 years will be like the last 100 years. It’s a bet. Everything we do to prepare for our future is a gamble.
There are no guarantees that following this course you saw advertised on Instagram will result in you building a million dollar real estate portfolio and enjoying a retirement of financial freedom. No amount of eating clean or exercising guarantees you’ll be hiking and doing zoomba at 95.
We love the idea that it could, though. How reassuring it is to imagine that there are correct answers to life’s questions. It’s so nice to think that there are steps we can follow and then everything will be alright. If we just follow the morning routine and the advice of this CEO, we’ll be safe, our family will be safe, everything will be okay.
I appreciate that when I’m reading about things that happened hundreds of years ago I know how it ends. They all die. Every time.
As for our future, that’s harder to predict. I feel pretty safe betting that we’re all still mortal, even if Silicon Valley keeps promising to end death.
The thing about humans is that we’re delicate creatures who can’t survive on our own. Kate Bowler writes:
"Even at my most durable, it took so many people to build my life, prop it up, and maintain it. But once I was sick, I came to realize that the most basic aspect of our shared humanity is our fragility. We all need shelter because we are soft and mushy and irritable in the elements—and we will need so much more than a bank loan because, sooner or later, we are left exposed. Time and chance, sayeth Ecclesiastes, happeneth to us all.”
The faith that doing the right thing means we deserve health and wealth implies that those who lack health and wealth have done the wrong things. That they don’t deserve it.
Think of the automatic responses people have to a diagnosis. When someone has lung cancer everyone wants to know if they smoked. If it’s another type of cancer the neighbors suggest it’s because of repressed emotions. When someone dies of covid it’s because they didn’t get boosted on the right schedule or weren’t careful enough. Everything is chalked up to being overweight.
This blame doesn’t have to be scientifically proven or even logical. It’s the story we tell ourselves to confirm that we understand the logic of the world. That our fate is wholly within our control. Nevermind the pandemics, the wars, the natural disasters, the rise and fall of civilizations. We’ve got this.
It’s no wonder that we struggle to ask for help when we’re raised with the idea that we’re supposed to be able to take care of ourselves. That we’re supposed to predict and plan for every potential thing that could happen to us, so we can afford to deal with it on our own. When we’re told that “Everything happens for a reason…” and we know they think the reason is that we’re irresponsible or have a lesson to learn or deserve it.
Bowler continues:
“Frankly, none of us can afford the lives we already have. We set out to build our own dreams, slay our own dragons, and pay our own taxes and find that we trip over our health and our marriages and the way our inboxes suck us into the void. We were promised that American individualism and a multi-billion-dollar self-help industry would set us on our feet. When North Americans look for answers to our dependence, we often turn to the easy promises of the gospel of self-help. “Try harder!” “Change your mindset.” “You are your greatest hope.” We bought cheap paperbacks in a frenzy to find a cure for being human. But soon our own limited resolve—and the relative weakness of our institutions—conjured up the atomism that Alexis de Tocqueville so feared. Our dreams turned out to be built from toothpicks, each person propped up to stand entirely alone."
There is no amount of money that will be enough to insulate me from anything that might go wrong in my life. No amount of planning will guarantee that things will go according to plan. There is no opting out of this world we share. There is no escaping the human condition.
During the pandemic I’ve discovered that the human condition isn’t so bad.
It became abundantly, undeniably clear that there were no correct answers. That things were not within my control. That planning was a way of trying to sooth my anxiety that caused as many problems as it prevented. No matter what I did to try to be responsible, to do the right thing, to be a good person, there were plenty of people ready to tell me that it was not enough and it was wrong anyway.
I had to loosen my white knuckle grip on the instructions other people had given me. I had to shrug and accept that everything is a gamble and plenty of things will go wrong. And I’ll deal with it. That other people will be there to help me deal with it.
It became a lot easier to deal with it when I stopped looking for someone or something to blame when things went wrong. Instead of obsessing over what should have happened or what I deserved, I could just deal with it.
Statistically we know things will always go wrong. It’s the predicting which things that’s the tricky bit.
I haven’t read The Certainty Myth yet, but I enjoyed the All in the Mind episode about it.
Denise Brown points out how absurd it is that family caregivers need to self-identify and reach out for help, since providers already know exactly who we are.
A Stanford researcher has some tips on asking for help. We’ve also got advice on asking for help from Caroline Sheppard, Allie Axel, and Donna Thomson.
Even giant government organizations rely on help. If you want to contribute to something totally unrelated to care work — to spark your curiosity and remind you just how mysterious the world is — check out NASA's citizen science page.
An argument in favor of ressurecting the lost art of friendship.