(Warning: there is a swear word in this
post. Skip the first sentence of
the second paragraph if swear words offend you.)
Books tend to lead to more
books. (I am tempted to quote
Bilbo Baggins’s song about the dangers of stepping outside one’s front door
because roads do the same thing…)
One of the books I read recently led me to Courtney E. Martin’s new book
The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream. No, there are no exercises in it, no
recipes or tips for lowering our cholesterol and increasing our cardiovascular
fitness, and yet it is a book deeply speaking to the larger questions of
fitness. What are we fit for? How do we
fit? How do we make our world a
fit place to live?
Martin examines the traditional
ideas we hold about being “better off” and concludes that those ideas, “left uninterrogated,
can be fucking dangerous.” She
posits that there is something, or many somethings, better than making more
money, having more stuff, working more hours. She examines many possible threads that can be woven into a
more humane, truly better life.
Short version: invest in community. We are fit because we fit
together. Alone, we are toast.
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