It's a Big Club

 I have a two-year-old so watching the 2023 SuperBowl wasn't necessarily in the cards for me. When I popped online the following day to see who won so I could make the obligatory small talk at work, I instead got caught up n the drama regarding Elon Musk sitting next to Rupert Murdoch to watch the game. 

Much has been made of the two men sitting in the stands. Musk the eccentric automobile entrepreneur who recently bought Twitter citing concerns over a biased media that runs rampant on the site and Rupurt Murdoch who has singlehandedly turned the brains of countless Americans to right-wing infused mush with his Fox News Network franchise. 

The image strikes at the heart of Musk's many contradictions; how can you feel concerned about media bias when you're enjoying the company of a guy who created the most profitable bias machine in the world? There is also something visually repellent about seeing two billionaire hucksters existing so casually together. These people, Murdoch especially, should be relegated to the shadows to do their dealings not brazenly at one of the nation's most viewed sporting events. 

The reactions probably seem too visceral, it reminds me of the reaction many had to seeing Michelle Obama warmly hugging George W Bush. I was always confused about what the expectation was exactly, is she supposed to stab him and stand atop his corpse shrieking "Death to American Empire"? Would snubbing him as a war criminal, however pleasing that would be to see, have made anyone feel any semblance of justice?

George Carlin once quipped "it's a big club and you ain't in it", referring to a section of society that exists on a sphere above us all. Like anyone whose interests and lives contain similarities, these people gravitate toward each other and form social cells. This hardly seems extraordinary. 

Yet Carlin is right that seeing these social cells in public is alienating and serves as a reminder that there is a group of people whose consumption and influence impact your life. A reminder that the conceptual democracy we live in seems a hollow promise when a seemingly literal cabal exists to pull the levers of American power. 

The anger is justifiable, if it seems misplaced at simply the notion of people with a lot in common just hanging out together it's important to consider what that "in common" entails. Billions of dollars, unbridled influence over the government, and a level of consumption that jeopardizes the planet to name a few things. 

It's bad enough we have to live under their thumb, let us look upon their club with anger.

US Healthcare Finance System Explainer

 It bears repeating; all healthcare should be free at the point of service. In many, many countries this is the case. It is unfortunately not the case here in the United States. The way we pay for health insurance here is through a user fee at the point of service, not unlike how you pay for other services like a haircut or a prepared meal at a restaurant. But healthcare is also very different than those things; it is expensive to administer for a variety of factors; like the technical expertise of those administering the care or the liabilities incurred from it. It is also more difficult to calculate the cost; things can come up mid-diagnosis that require special procedures or medications, providers don't have consistent rates for cost or quality, and often times doctors aren't sure of the costs of medications or technologies they use, and many times it wouldn't matter as there isn't much of a choice in whether or not to use them.

These are only a few of the reasons we have to have health insurance to pay for the healthcare user fees in this country, but rather than providing an efficient solution to these problems it ushers in all new complications. The insurance itself is often wildly expensive, we almost always need either our employers or the government to subsidize the majority of the costs. This creates problems such as gaps in coverage should you lose your job or eligibility, many people don't have insurance at all because they don't qualify for either employer-sponsored insurance or government programs. There is also the problem of underinsurance; the insurance that you have is inadequate in what it is able to subsidize as far as the care you receive which can cause exorbitant medical debt or denial of needed care. 

The result of these complications is a health financing system that oftentimes devastates people regardless of the quality of care they receive. The US is unique in that 40% of new cancer patients lose their entire life savings, over half the population reports difficulty affording care, a third are skipping out on care or rationing medicine citing cost as a primary concern, US Medical debt has topped $195 billion with a disproportionate amount being held by black americans, which alone costs financial stability, long-term health, and lives. But the lack of insurance also makes healthcare more expensive as people don't pay for the care they receive in, say, the emergency room, the providers then need to wrap that cost up in care for individuals with insurance. The whole problem compounds itself over and over again.

All of this is just a scratch at the surface of the problems with the US health financing system. The people most serious about fixing this problem understand that you have to remove the fee-for-service model that requires insurance altogether. Both Medicaid and Medicare accomplish this already in the US for people who are elderly or below a certain income threshold respectively. In these programs, the government fields the bill - or most of the bill  - for the care you receive so you either receive no fee or a very little fee. This is different than the fee-for-service model; imagine you could walk into a barber or a restaurant and receive whatever you needed and it was paid for by a tab that is wholly funded by the government. This is similar to how other countries set up their health finance system. Some, like Canada or Taiwan, finance care for their entire population this way. Others, like Germany or Sweden, have a combination of a government program and a heavily regulated employer program.

There is a lot of debate about which model would work best for the US. Medicare for All is a policy that would have a single-payer, the US Government funded by taxpayers, which essentially improves Medicare and extends it to every citizen regardless of age, income, etc. Medicare for America or the ACA 2.0 would be the combination model in which Medicare is shored up to prevent uninsurance and the rest of the US is covered by a more heavily regulated version of their employer-sponsored insurance which would prevent underinsurance. Both models would represent a dramatic improvement on the current healthcare financing model.

Those in favor of Medicare for All - the single-payer program - say it most efficiently removes the problems of our health financing system by decoupling health insurance from employment, ending the risk of insurance churn (where you lose your job and subsequently your coverage), allows the single-payer system to more powerfully negotiate care costs as a monopoly, and can deliver better cost efficiencies as everyone is in one risk pool. Those who favor Medicare for America (ACA 2.0) often cede these points, but their concern is that such a plan couldn't pass given heavy polling that suggests Americans covered by their employer-provided insurance prefer to keep that plan and would oppose anything that would eliminate it. Also that the insurance companies propped up by employer-provided insurance plans would more heavily oppose a single-payer plan that would unilaterally end their existence. Which says nothing of the workers who are employed at those companies.

Of course, the reason that we aren't even on the road to attaining either model in the US is that the private health insurance industry is very powerful. There is also a non-insignificant number of people who believe that the government should have no part in the administering of healthcare financing and, although they are very wrong, they represent a substantial enough voting block in this country. 

The Taller They Are

 Review of The Overstory by Richard Powers

I mean holy shit.

In Richard Powers' twelfth novel The Overstory, one of the characters has just written a book around the concept that trees are actually social beings when her literary agent calls her to tell her "you wouldn't believe what you have me seeing on the way into the office". The Overstory itself has this power; after reading it I can't even look at my backyard the same way. 

Told through the perspective of 9 individuals whose lives constantly cross paths - less in cheesy one domino toppling the other way like the movie Crash or something, but more like an everyone and everything is interconnected type of way - The Overstory tells a story about trees. Powers' prose style, which before now I had been unfamiliar with, seems to be just laying out stunning sentence after stunning sentence. One can forgive the sort of rigidness of his familiarly archetypal characters if only because he can describe a tree with so much poetic, philosophical, and beautifully scientific language it becomes a genuinely emotional thing to behold.

I'm not exaggerating, I have yet to find a writer in my short life as an avid reader who has inspired in me such an appreciation for things I have lived in proximity with my entire life. Moby Dick has always been a favorite book of mine because Melville could take a mundane object like a cup of clam chowder and blow it up to a massive philosophical stand-in for concepts you would think would be far-fetched, and he does it with poetic prowess alone. The Overstory does the same, but more singularly; it's just trees baby. And maybe this is because I don't live in Herman Melville's world, but The Overstory is more intimate. Powers lives in our world too, when he prompts you to look around, it feels more real, less like just a fun literary exercise.

Which of course makes the actual story of The Overstory all the more crushing. If the novel is about anything other than trees it is about the complete and utter failure of society to protect and cherish them. Unlike other fictional books about climate change (cough cough Ministry for the Future), The Overstory has stories of mass movements. We watch fictionalized accounts of real efforts (like the Lumber Wars in the 90s) across many decades to protect forests and the environment at large. Massive peaceful demonstrations, civil disobedience, and violence toward property all fail. There are more cultural, "thinkfluencing" attempts like writing books, making video games, and scientists committing suicide in the name of awareness. There are even the small personal struggles of someone who simply does not want to mow their lawn in a suburb to give their plot of land back to the earth. They all fail.

And none of this is a spoiler. It can't be a spoiler because we know what happens already, we know what happens because we're living through this exact narrative right now. While the depiction of the Lumber Wars of the 90s was fictionalized, we saw its failures in real life. There are real people sitting in federal prison for property crimes in the defense of trees, charged as domestic terrorists. Climate scientists are literally committing suicide right now in brutal ways. Nothing has changed; the consumption is insatiable. 

So while Powers builds in you an intense appreciation for forests, endears you to what we can only now see as an essential partner for sustaining life on earth, and asks you to look around, you're also forced to see the fire. This could make The Overstory an incredibly important text, one that asks people to slow down and appreciate and take action to protect what is around them. But as we see in the novel itself, even when you're inspired to action the forces against you are awful and immovable. Maybe we are just looking at another literary exercise, except this one is not fun. 

It is, however, incredibly good.

They Call Us Murderers: On Violence Pt III

 The United States government is shockingly tolerant of violence against the state. It has long encouraged violent insurrections against the government on just about every continent on earth. It has also condemned the violence and institutional political oppression deployed by world governments against their citizens, most recently in Iran for its recent crackdown on protestors and China’s dealing with citizens protesting Covid Zero policies.

As with anything regarding the United States, the contradictions are endless. In a statement by President Biden, the United States condemns Iran’s violence against peaceful protestors, but of course, the United States has both a long and recent history of doing just that. The US operates a political prisoner and torture facility in Guantanamo Bay yet they condemn Iran for imprisonment and torture, the United States has indicted citizens as terrorists for committing politically motivated property crimes, they decry China’s treatment of Uigyer Muslims yet they have the highest concentration of prisoners in the world despite having only a fraction of the world’s population - a disproportionate number of which are black and Hispanic.

The US is not wrong to condemn violence and oppression by the state, and of course, there is all sorts of justifiable violence against an oppressive government. It’s clear however that the US government is not centering violence in the context of ethics. What would logical consistency look like then? It would look a lot like amnesty for Assata Shakur.

Assata Shakur is a black revolutionary currently living out her days in political asylum in Cuba after escaping a prison facility in the 1970s. The autobiography Assata documents much of her life as a young black woman in America, her revolutionary activities, and her life as what can only be described as a political prisoner.

The United States of Assata Shakur’s youth was as racist and violent a country as you’d see being accused of such today. Preserving segregation, Jim Crow, and white supremacy with blood. The stories of her youth are rife with white mobs terrorizing her grandparent’s business, being thrown out of amusement parks for white children only, and watching a never-ending deluge of television where “black people were harassed and attacked”. Detailing what she saw happen on the news; “Martin Luther King’s house was bombed. Then came Little Rock. I can still remember those ugly terrifying white mobs attacking those little children who were close to my own age…And each year I would sit in front of that box, watching my people being attacked by white mobs, being bitten by dogs, beaten and water-hosed by police, arrested and murdered.”

The death and destruction wrought on people simply for looking the way she did, something Shakur describes as “the most primitive, reactionary, ignorant violence that exists”, created an extremism and revolutionary resistance movement that opposed the government. In one of her many sham trials, Shakur gave a speech to the jury so they might better understand the Black Liberation Army to which she belonged;

“The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the women in this country’s prisons are black and third world. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of black people in this country. And where is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement.

While big corporations make huge, tax free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I don not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.”

Throughout Assata, it’s clear that Shakur truly struggles with the more violent tendencies of this resistance movement. It took her a long time to join the Black Panther Party for this reason, but in the end, saw it was the only group adequately defending against the active brutality deployed by the United States government; “I was sick and tired of us being the only victims, and I didn’t care who knew it. As far as I was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but I despise it even more when it’s one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.”

It’s clear that whatever violence she condones is of a defensive nature, not as an agent for the change she hopes to see. She’s clear that a revolutionary strategy must focus on mass movements, not military ones; “armed struggle, by itself, can never bring about a revolution…it must be part of an overall strategy for winning, and the strategy must be political as well as military.” Self-defense is the most justifiable of the whole spectrum of violence, yet simply embracing these tactics and beliefs made the entire organization a massive threat.

This is what ultimately made her and many other black revolutionaries a target of the United States government; Shakur did believe violence against a repressive state to be an inevitability. The sentiment that “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them” was often shared in her circle. And while she felt that “a war between the races would help nobody and free nobody and should be avoided at all costs”, she also knew “ a one-sided race war with Black people as the targets and white people shooting the guns is worse. We will be criminally negligent if we do not deal with racism and racist violence, and if we do not prepare to defend ourselves against it.”

Sentiments like these made Shakur the target of the United States COINTELRPO program. She began to be viciously harassed and surveilled by the FBI and law enforcement. A common practice was to surveil a revolutionary, gather enough faulty “intel” to accuse them of a number of crimes, recklessly pursue and arrest them (ideally killing them in the process as they did to Fred Hampton), and then bank on racist courts and juries to pin them to a crime and get them locked in high-security prisons.

One might be inclined to think it stops there, however as Shakur notes; “in prisons, it is not at all uncommon to find a prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell. No matter how suspicious the circumstances, these deaths are always ruled suicides. They are usually black inmates…among the most politically aware and socially conscious inmates in the prison”. If the arrest didn’t kill you, there was a good chance you could be taken out once in prison. A number of prisoners both notable and not have been killed this way. It’s a way to deploy the justice system as a more discrete instrument of murder since if the public sees someone in the process of the courts they’re less concerned than seeing them gunned down in the streets in cold blood.

Shakur herself was almost the victim of such a garish plot. She recounts that she would stack cups in front of the door of any prison cell she was stationed in when; “one night, in the middle of the night, the cups came crashing down. I immediately awoke to find four or five male guards standing in the doorway of my cell”. She was able to scream loud enough to dissuade the guards from doing anything. This was not the only time that police and guards tried to kill her. It’s worth noting here Shakur was never even convicted of a crime, she was simply being processed.

If it wasn’t an outright murder attempt, the prison conditions themselves were horrific. Solitary confinement was leveraged against Shakur without reason. International jurists from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights who were investigating prison conditions in the United States said “one of the worst cases is that of Assata Shakur, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men’s prisons subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner.” From Shakur’s own words:

“If I wrote a hundred pages describing the basement of the Middlesex county jail, it would be impossible for you to visualize it. It was a big, grayish, pukey greenish cell. The ceiling was covered with all kinds of pipes, some small, some huge, some dry, some leaky. There was no natural light, and the jailers refused to open the small windows located near the ceiling. The average temperature was 95 degrees. It was infested with ants and centipedes.”

Assata Shakur was arrested on charges she was never guilty of, an arrest that almost killed her. She was then brutalized and stuck in solitary confinement for over a year of her life. She was deprived of her child and her loved ones were constantly being harassed. She is just one radical, there are countless others that suffered the same fate and whose stories may never be told. Hers is a crucial story told from beneath the hooves of the high horse upon which the United States rides around the world stage.

Remember the treatment of Assata Shakur and thousands of innocent black inmates at the hands of the US government, remember recent torture victims never accused of a crime, remember the sponsored bombing campaigns being undertaken against civilian populations the next time The United States Government seeks to condemn other nations for the same. The Declaration of Independence declares that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive…it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government”. The United States has justified many violent uprisings under this exact premise.

So considering this, if Assata Shakur’s only crime was opposing a government engaged in destructive behavior and escaping what was surely political imprisonment and torture, the United States can forgive these transgressions and issue a pardon to Shakur. Violence against the state is after all a hardened American value.

“I am about life…I’m gonna live as hard as I can and as full as I can until I die. And I’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind before they are even born. I’m going to live and I’m going to love, and if a child comes from that union I’m going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures and I believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our struggle.” - Assata Shakur

COVID is Simultaneously Terrifying and No Big Deal

 

It's been two years since COVID-19 struck the United States and it has since killed over a million people in that time. Before reaction to the disease was politically polarized, back when we were uselessly wiping our groceries down before we brought them into the house, we made a series of decisions that have become a focal point in the midterm elections. Schools were closed down, offices were closed down, companies were given payroll relief, and things like unemployment benefits were expanded. 

Fast forward a year and one COVID vaccine later and schools have resumed but, along with airlines, have mask mandates in place, unemployment benefits are coming to an end, workplaces are hybrid to the extent they can be, and our supply chains are in shambles. Controversial vaccine requirements crop up to do anything from attending a concert to working at your job. COVID continues to kill thousands of people a day.

Today, schools are in full swing, mask mandates and masks themselves are almost wholly gone, vaccine mandates are minimal if existing at all, and expanded benefits programs are practically forgotten (mostly because no one wants to admit they were wrong when they pinned the blame for the workforce shortages on them). Now that our societal COVID defense measures have largely come to an end and we're trying to politically litigate what was necessary and what was damaging to the economy and society as a whole, I can honestly say I feel just as in the dark as I ever was. 

While I'm more certain of the effectiveness of some actions I can take - like wiping down my groceries is useless, getting boosted is not useless, wearing a mask on an airplane might be useless but I'm going to do it anyway - I'm not entirely sure how terrified or angry I need to be. The effectiveness of cloth masks has been challenged, some believe masks do nothing, although it seems the data leans into other types of masks being very effective, yet when there are mask mandates cloth masks are accepted. However, this doesn't seem to matter as there are effectively no mask mandates and almost no one wears them anymore. Is wearing a mask useful if I'm the only one doing it? Should we demand a return of the mandate or a more extreme one that requires KN95/N95 masks? Should we be fighting this battle?

Even the vaccine and the boosters are a cluster of conflicting information. First, the vaccine was supposed to be the end of Covid, which turned out to be false as you could still be infected and transmit the disease while vaccinated. The narrative shifted to say it lessens the likelihood of infection, this too seems to be wrong. Now the narrative is cornered into the likelihood of severe illness and death, which seems to be technically true but not valuably true. It is unsurprising then that so many Americans have opted not to get the final round of boosters.

The questions are endless. Did remote learning cause the severe suffering of public education or did the death and destruction wrought by the pandemic cause this? Are public schools even suffering as a whole or is it mostly just vulnerable populations suffering more? Did shutdowns cause our current inflation and supply chain issues or was it something else? Was expanded unemployment responsible for restaurant closures or was it workforce exploitation? 

It's even impossible to assess the risk to yourself or your loved ones as you try to weigh these various decisions. The rate of death is lower than it was, but the disease is still killing hundreds, sometimes thousands a day, and many say it could spike again. The probability of Covid killing you if you're young is low, even lower if you're a child. However, deaths of young people have trended up and down. Deaths of vaccinated people have also jumped lately, although vaccination remains the best variable against death or severe illness. Long covid is apparently a thing even if you don't get severely ill. Or maybe it isn't...a thing...at all. 

The point is the internet is so flush with quick and accessible information that essentially any sentiment, thought, or fear can be justified with data or expert opinions. I don't want to die or get very sick, I don't want my loved ones to die or become disabled from illness, especially if it was preventable. I am terrified that this could happen at any moment, worst case scenario is it happens because of something I did or didn't do. And yet it's not even clear I can do anything at all. Everything to lose with inaction, yet all action is useless. Total paralysis.

A Warm Welcome to the World

 

Ever since I discovered a love of the outdoors, environmental issues have been on my radar. Yet when I became a father last year I can't stop thinking about the long-term sustainability of our planet. It's put me in a really dark place as a result. Climate change has gotten worse, environmental degradation has gotten worse, ecological collapse is a possibility in the next century. 

To be clear, it isn't that I think the climate apocalypse is going to occur in my lifetime, I don't imagine myself fighting through a wasteland with my daughter in a shopping cart like we're in the Road or something. Instead, I have to imagine her future in an abused natural world, one that she loves now. She loves animals, and rivers, and trees, and lakes. She loves to be outside. We'll watch these things change for the worse, sometimes go away altogether. While this is an immense privilege compared to what will happen to the rest of the world in the coming years, our environment doesn't just sustain life, it's one major part of what makes it worth living. 

So now when I see the real-time destruction of our planet in the name of nothing more than profit, it sickens me like never before. Giant climate change-induced problems across the country and the world are haunting enough, but what's more immediately heartbreaking is the destruction in our own backyard. 

Sometimes literally in our backyard; our neighbor recently cut down a perfectly healthy tree because she didn't like raking leaves. Sometimes it's the change taking place in our community; dozens of acres of greenspace being bulldozed to build McMansions that won't even house over half a dozen families. 

Most recently I've noticed the beautiful Norwegian pines that border our yard have started to die. These trees have given our yard a private, densely wooded feel. I can look out my bedroom window and see nothing but pine. It makes our yard a great animal crossing to skunks, raccoons, coyotes, and deer (all of which I've seen rest in our pine thicket). They, along with every other exotic pine in our neighborhood, have been struck with a pine wilt disease that seems to be rapidly spreading thru Michigan since 2011. Many studies suggest it's exacerbated by climate change. 

Some trees in my neighborhood with pine wilt disease

Some arguments crop up, my own house sits on a plot of land that was once forest; people have to live. I obviously understand this and that we all have to reconcile our need to live and balance our quality of life against preserving our ecosystem. I would certainly be more tolerant of this argument if I felt that the destruction, extraction, and consumption of the natural world was being done with a balance in mind. If I felt humanity was taking seriously alternatives to lifestyles and methods. We are clearly not. It's unfortunate to see a forest get bulldozed to build anything, it's extra frustrating to see it's only for a few massive homes or a strip mall, it's simply unacceptable that many of these homes were for people who had perfectly fine homes to begin with or unnecessary strip malls, it's horrific when these homes and strip malls sit empty for years.

It's hard to say whether things feel extra bad now because they are actually that bad, or because I am now responsible for and profoundly invested in the life of my child the normal things just feel extra bad. Possibly some combination of both. All I can do is engage in the work of making this life more valuable for myself and others, commit to the institutions of change, and spend what time I have left making my daughter's memory of her lived experience an unequivocally positive one. 

The Passion of the Career

 Some thoughts on trying to do what you love for work.

Working in the talent acquisition space I think a lot about the nature of working for a living. I work closely with a lot of young professionals just starting out in their careers, whether they work for me directly or I work with them in their job search. I often witness this crisis - or rather I recognize it as the same one I went through at their age - where these former students watch their free time completely disappear at the same time they're devoting themselves to the very sterile, bottom-line-driven mission of their employer.

It's with this massive hit to free time and values that I watch these young people go into panic mode. Shortly into their career, they decide to "hack" this system by taking something they love doing or are passionate about and making it their full-time job. The logic being if you have to do something for 40 hours a week that's going to cut into your free time with some boring, unimportant mission you should try to transform at least the latter half of those variables. 

There are a lot of people who talk about this; doing what you love has become almost a famous platitude. Nevermind the fact that it would be impossible for everyone to follow their dreams - not many people have longed to be an HVAC technician or a logistics coordinator and yet these are essential jobs in our modern world - the conversation lacks the nuances of the sacrifices you're making when you try to make your passion your career. 

The exploitative nature of the American work life is going to be present everywhere you look. Non-profits notoriously pay awful and have terrible work/life balance, the same can be said of creative jobs. Is helping people your passion? It doesn't take much reading to find that nurses and social workers have been (especially lately) horrifically exploited. Are you passionate about education? The nation's teachers are under attack and people are flocking out of the position faster than they're going in, academia is harder and harder to break into without enduring an endless barrage of shit. Even if you love technology or learning a trade, tech workers are not immune from employer exploitation despite being one of the most lucrative types of workers in the market.

This is not to disparage any of these jobs or discourage entering any of these fields. The issue at heart is the nature of work can be oppressive across any field and there is no avoiding it. Rather than finding a job, you love, finding a job that allows you maximum free time while balancing adequate compensation is an alternative some don't consider. Which of course is only a short-term fix. The larger, more systemic change needs to be increased worker power. This can take many forms; legislative fixes like a four-day work week or federally subsidized leave programs, more worker representation in the form of unions and worker co-determination, and a great re-imagining of what work means in this country.