Survival-distraction aside, to be able to treat politics as optional, as background, as someone else’s preoccupation, is usually a quiet signal that the arrangement of power already fits the shape of your life. You can afford to ignore the system because, for you, it is working.

To live in a healthy society would be to live in a society of abundance[—] an abundance of security and peace, personal safety, confidence about the future, and an abundance of time to do those things essential to mental and physical health and social connectedness, whether it’s planting a food garden or tending friendships or spending time in nature or in spiritual or creative activity (or pure glorious idleness with no virtue attached).

To say that is a reminder of where we are, in a society of scarcity that generates conflict, of poverty of time and hope and connection. Not absolute scarcity, but distorted distribution that results in radical economic inequality, waste, excess, desperation and precarity, and all the chronic stress that comes from those on the losing end of the arrangement[.]