For much of my life, I thought of suffering as something like weather. It arrived from somewhere outside me, often without much warning. There was not necessarily anything to do with it. You prepared as best you could, endured whatever came, and waited for the sky to clear. Anxiety could work this way. Depression could work this way. So could the obsessive replay of something that had happened already, or the anticipation of something that might happen and could not yet be influenced. The experience was not only painful in itself. Part of what made it painful was the sense that I was being acted upon. Suffering was a hurricane, and I was the house.
Over the last few years, though, something in that relationship has changed. The strange part is that the change has coincided with my deliberately introducing more pain into my life. I lift weights almost every day. I run a lot. Since getting rid of my car in late March, I have made walking, running, biking and public transit the machinery of ordinary mobility, sometimes adding a cargo wagon when I need to move more than my back can sensibly carry. There are now many more occasions on which my legs ache, my lungs burn, my muscles reach the point where they would strongly prefer that I stop, or I discover that the place I need to reach is inconveniently several miles away.
And yet I suffer less.
That sounds contradictory until I distinguish pain from suffering. The discomfort of a long run is perfectly real. So is the final repetition of a difficult set. There are moments when every physiological signal available to consciousness seems to be voting for rest. But those sensations do not feel anything like the old experience of psychological suffering. They can even feel life-giving while they are unpleasant. There is an odd simultaneity to strenuous exercise: I can want the hill to end while also being glad that I am climbing it. I can experience something that hurts without experiencing it as something bad.
I was born in September 1994, which means that some of my earliest years happened to coincide with one of the strangest fiscal periods in modern American history.
I obviously did not know this at the time. I was learning to read and riding a bicycle while the federal government was doing something it had almost forgotten how to do: bringing in more money than it spent. In fiscal year 1998, the United States recorded its first federal budget surplus since 1969. The surplus grew in 1999. Then, in fiscal year 2000, it reached $237 billion, or about 2.4 percent of the entire economy. Federal debt held by the public was actually being paid down.[1]
There was something almost futuristic about the mood surrounding the numbers. At the beginning of 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected that, if the laws then on the books remained in place, the federal government would accumulate $5.6 trillion in surpluses between 2002 and 2011.
Instead, it accumulated $6.1 trillion in deficits.
That is an $11.7 trillion difference between the fiscal future the country could see from January 2001 and the one that actually arrived.[2]
I have been trying to understand what happened in between.
The obvious place to look is September 11. The attacks transformed American foreign policy, created an enormous new security apparatus, led directly to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and began commitments whose financial consequences are still arriving decades later. It is tempting to draw a clean line from the balanced budgets of my early childhood to the War on Terror and then onward to the immense public debt of the present.
