Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader mission. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“The Lives Politics Doesn’t Touch”
In this strikingly candid opinion piece for The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh addresses an important yet often overlooked topic: the nearly complete sheltering of certain demographic groups from the consequences of politics. The subtitle says it all:
Ganesh elaborates: “Friends, I seem to have exited History. Outside of the obvious and eternal themes of taxation and law and order, the issues of the day impinge little on me. I find it stimulating to observe politics, as a zoologist does a wombat colony, and I certainly have preferences. But something about the atomisation of the modern world has spared me personal exposure to political decisions.”
“U.S. Leads the World in Solitary Confinement that Destroys Prisoners’ Mental Health”
On the other end of the spectrum of political decisions and their effects, John Kiriakou documents the disturbing realities of solitary confinement in America for CovertAction Magazine. Despite widespread discourse about “mental health” in mainstream American media and elite institutions, Kiriakou’s article demonstrates how much regard the state actually has for the mental health of its citizens: “Most countries around the world limit the time that a prisoner can spend in solitary to 15 days. The United States doesn’t. There are scores of prisoners across the U.S. who have been in solitary for years and, in some cases, for decades.” He continues: “There is a growing body of research that shows that solitary confinement as it is used today can cause a variety of severe psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, and suicidal thoughts. These problems can be so severe that they can lead to long-term disability or even death. A true account of the number of mentally-ill prisoners held in solitary confinement in the United States could fill a library. But the stories are generally consistent. The longer a person is held in solitary, the worse his mental state becomes.” No stranger to solitary confinement himself, George Jackson analyzed the politics of psycho-physiological warfare in a passage featured in the August 2023 Monthly Muse.
“An Epidemic of Chronic Illness Is Killing Americans in Their Prime”
While American prisons may provide the harshest example of state neglect and torture, the “free” population has not been spared from a more general assault on health and well-being. The Washington Post offers an in-depth report on just how severe the crisis of chronic disease has become in the United States, especially among the poor and working class: “The best barometer of rising inequality in America is no longer income. It is life itself. Wealth inequality in America is growing, but The Post found that the death gap — the difference in life expectancy between affluent and impoverished communities — has been widening many times faster. In the early 1980s, people in the poorest communities were 9 percent more likely to die each year, but the gap grew to 49 percent in the past decade and widened to 61 percent when covid struck.” The following graph helps visualize this data:
The remainder of this extended report—which focuses on anecdotes from the Louisville area—makes for a harrowing but incredibly important read.
“On General Futility of Political Discussions with People”
I don’t usually like to showcase the same author in back-to-back Weekly Groundings, but this piece by
at was too good not to share even after featuring his work in last week’s Grounding. Drawing on his experience of political discussions with “Stalinists, nationalists, and liberals,” Milanovic observes how all three camps engage in similar argumentative tactics: “To any strong argument from the interlocutor they would produce either a denial (such and such event never occurred; there is no evidence; it was somebody else’s propaganda etc.), or they would accept that the uncomfortable fact occurred, but will justify it by an even greater perfidy of the other side.” He concludes that “if one believes in a certain point of view and yet has a limited amount of mental energy, it is entirely wasteful to use it in trying to convince others in direct discussions. It is much more effective to write and read and listen than to have Socratic or any other dialogues.” This is one of the reasons, I believe, that platforms like Substack (where reading, writing, and listening reign supreme) are indispensable in contemporary politics.
“Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster”
- explores why “the stories we hear about tech are so rife with cognitive dissonance” at : “Marketers and futurists first place themselves in the position of our proverbial villager - hyping the convenience of AI - but if you say you don’t need it they fast-forward their minds into the future and issue dire warnings that if don’t adopt it you’ll be left behind. What they’re trying to say, in their convoluted and euphemistic way, is this: the global capitalist system doesn’t care whether or not you want to use the technology, or whether you believe it should be used to save your time. You will have to use it, and you’re not in charge of how it will be used systemically. In fact, nobody is really in charge. Our personal desires will always play second fiddle to the systemic logic of a large-scale economy that is blind to anything except the profit motive. In the absence of us being able to get together and demand something different, our system will always just default towards increasingly speed and growth. It only has one gear.”
“The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval”
On the topic of technology,
of and of ask the question: “What is the turn in the road that—if we make it—could spare us from the negative impact of technology, keep us rooted in reality, and deepen what it means to be human?” They ambitiously argue that “this turn should be so fundamental that it can be followed by anyone, irrespective of whether they live in a condo tower in Toronto, or deep in the northern forests, and span the ‘ecumenical trenches’ of religious belief, or even non-belief.” If the following figure interests you, please do take the time to read this magisterial essay:
“Do We Need a Movement from Wowism to Enoughism?”
Peco and Gaskovski’s essay observes that “We avoid dull moments, boredom, the tedium of life” through digital technologies. On a similar note,
of asks: “So how do we make the practice of ‘enoughism’ as attractive as wowism? How do we show that ‘enough’ does not mean compromising on life, but rather, a deep seated, grounded sense of wonderment and awe with the smaller moments, the slower times. Stepping out each day with a deep respect for the crises of our time and our role in addressing these.” I’ve been preoccupied with the question of what it means to be “enough” in my essay, “Telos or Transhumanism?,” and am heartened to see this issue being taken up by writers elsewhere on Substack.
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Thank you for the great acknowledgement of 'enoughism'. It is indeed comforting to come across writers navigating the same questions and concepts. This morning I came across an article in Wired titled 'The Defector' an interview with Doug Rushkoff who seems to be living his life towards a movement of enoughism.
Thanks for the generous shoutout Vincent! I agree that it sounds like an ambitious argument; yet because it is so fundamental, the guideposts also present a simple starting point that help to reorient us toward embodied reality.