Typical Rube Goldberg device. (Rube Goldberg Inc.)

Or, the Architecture of our Lives

By this title I refer to the structures of the lives that we Americans, most of us, lead. Notwithstanding all the other things we all have going on in our lives, much of our lives as Americans is lived under a blizzard of mail of all sorts that comes into our mailboxes – digital and snail – almost every day.

Bills and junk are the two categories we have invented to deal with them. Both “bills” and “junk” come in many different forms. Junk consists of touts to get us to buy something in the commercial world. Bills try to get us to pay for what we have already purchased, be it from commercial establishments or from establishments governmental or institutional.

We get “this is not a bill” mail from institutions devoted to our health care, most of which we ignore and that pile up until we chuck them out. Some of this mail, a small proportion of it, is made up of actual bills, some quite hefty. We ignore those at our peril – but ignore them we do. We get mail from insurers, both health and otherwise, each consisting of letters that we can and those that we cannot ignore, including those that we ignore at our peril. Often this affects our dear spouses. Some of this mail contains bills that amount to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. After a while, we start to get bills from collection agencies hired by lawyers hired by firms that do not receive the payments we have not sent them.

For example, mail from the companies to which we pay our monthly mortgage. This includes our monthly mortgage statement, which we ignore, since these envelopes include messages that say the same thing every month – until we have paid off our mortgages. That is, unless our mortgage company is purchased by another mortgage company, which either goes unannounced or is announced or reported in some piece of mail that we typically ignore. This happened to me recently.

To what degree is this sort of nonpayment caused by companies entering the market because of factors that affect their normal profitability, which is affected by acts taken by the federal government – acts of Congress or agencies nominally (but not actually) controlled by Congress, or by judicial review that forces these agencies to change the parameters of what is or is not legal for, say, our mortgage company, to do with the monthly mortgage that we send to them (often by autopay) every month.

If you take these legal parameters that apply to the bill for your mortgage and consider how similar legislative or quasi-legislative/judicial actions affect what you owe but don’t know you owe because you don’t open most of your mail, that might account for a large percentage of the money you owe to institutions that control a huge segment of your debt.

Take, for example, people who write books. They may take quotations or other matter from books whose contents benefit from copyright protection. But the copyright laws are changed by Congress every now and then. A book published in 1909 might have material that has been protected since then – that is, a writer might need to ask its publisher for permission to quote from this book.

But suddenly, the publisher might learn that no books published later than 1870 are copyright protected, so that writers need no longer seek permission to use material from a book written in 1909. It may be that nobody informed either the publisher of that book or the writer who uses material from that book. The publisher probably has a publishers’ association that is paid (in monthly installments that are less likely to be ignored by the secretary who gets the publisher’s mail every morning. But the writer who uses the material may never be informed at all of his dereliction.

My point is that the structures of everyday life are built upon a foundation of sand that shifts unpredictably at unpredictable times – in ways that make life financially hazardous for every American. The next president, who takes office in five days, has pledged to cut the cost of government, part of which is devoted, every year, to promoting hazardous instability in the systems that trickle down from the interstices of our massive federal government.

But those of us who follow the news can already see how the next president’s commitment to budget-cutting is being undermined. They can see how recent rulings by the Supreme Court against growth in the federal bureaucracy are being attacked by the huge forces that protect the complexity of the federal government.

To quote Rule 7 of the rules of bureaucracy:

Anything that can be changed will be, until time runs out and a new change can be proposed restarting the cycle.

It looks like we have two paths forward:

Go bankrupt, or go off-grid.

Or we can spend the entirety of the rest of our natural lives opening, reading, digesting and responding to what we get in the mail. This is our freedom of choice. Have fun!