Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. I was off last week, but you can read the first four here, here, here and here.
Even though we all have cell phones now, for some reason, there are still clocks in many of our offices. I’m sure you know the days I’m talking about, where you have to monitor how often you’re looking at the clock even though you have a phone, and you have to try to avoid looking at the time on your phone if someone texts you, because you don’t want to know how early it still is.
Sometimes you look at the clock on the wall at work, get a sense of the time, then do a bunch of tasks to try to burn more time, then you look back at the clock, and a lot less time has passed than you thought might’ve, and you get that sinking feeling.
There have been times where I looked at the clock, did 10 to 15 tasks just to keep myself going, returned to my desk, and I swear, when I looked back up at the clock, it was actually earlier than it was the last time I looked at it*.*
And I’m someone who likes my job.
A constantly repeated bit of folk wisdom holds that “people can get used to anything.”
In some ways, this is surely true. Look back at the historical record and you’ll find all sorts of horrifying practices that were so widely and thoroughly accepted as being how life works that it’s hard to find anyone in those societies who advocated doing things differently. And you can probably look back at the evidence of your own life and find examples of things that bothered you, maybe bothered you a lot, when you first encountered them that you did indeed manage to get used to.But Matthew Whalan argues in his Substack essay Life is Hard to Get Used To, Prisoners Remind Me that there’s a very real sense in which “people can get used to anything” is wildly misleading. It can be horrendously difficult for anyone to get used to any kind of human life at all. If an eight-hour shift at an office job can inspire the feelings Matt evokes in the quote at the beginning of this note, how much harder is it to get used to life in prison, or sleeping on a park bench, or sleeping in a tent in Gaza?
I also notice a gut-reaction in myself, which assumes people in the worst conditions for the longest must have an even better knack for “getting used to” things than the rest of us. It’s an understandable assumption: How else could people survive in the worst of circumstances for so long, especially when even circumstances that are not the worst in life become hard to get used to, or grow boring? When even a good life is pretty hard and slow going?
But this is, ultimately, a source of false comfort. Very often, the simple and awful truth is that what can be difficult even for the comparatively comfortable just gets harder as you adjust life’s dials downward.
Matt’s Substack is usually devoted to patient journalistic investigation of a subject most of us would prefer to look away from—the lives and conditions of the incarcerated. He focuses on a prison in Alabama where he’s developed relationships with a number of inmates, interviewing them, researching their cases, and writing about their conditions and their struggles. Usually, he tries to keep himself out of the frame. This particular essay is an exception, though, and it’s the kind of exception that makes me think he should make exceptions more often.
He lingers at length on the circumstances of one particular prisoner, Milton Jones, who’s quite likely the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of injustice. Jones was imprisoned as an illiterate teenager, for a crime that there are several reasons to think he didn’t commit, several decades ago. He learned to read in prison, but now he’s losing his eyesight due to poorly treated diabetes.
Over the years, any time I was working on a story about him, or information he gave me about a prison, or trying to reach out to people to get him help, he’d say, “Take your time with it,” “God will make it happen,” “Be patient,” “God will take care of it.”
Milton’s mother died young. He never knew his father well. He has a younger cousin he’s never met in person but who was moved by his case and gone out of her way to stay in touch with him in prison.A couple weeks before writing the essay, Milton was able to do a merged phone call with Matthew and the cousin.
Moments in, Milton begins to tell us how grateful he is to us, for our love and friendship for him, for the connection to the outside world, and for the hope. Through sudden, heavy tears, he tells us how badly he wants to get out, needs to get out, how he’s trying to hang in there and hold it together but it’s getting harder every day, how desperately he wants to walk out of that prison.
It’s clear in his voice and in his tears that he feels in his bones an immediate need to walk out of the prison today, like he can’t imagine another day, that even after 40-something years, right now, even one more day sometimes just feels like a whole extra lifetime.
In seven years of interviewing him on and off about his absolutely tragic life story and the inhumane conditions in which he’s been imprisoned, and becoming close friends with him and his family, I had never heard him cry until this. These were some of the most painful tears I’ve ever heard in my life.
I’ve experienced versions of this with other sources too. We are in touch for years. Our conversations are cordial, and similar each time. They’ve been in 10 or 20 or 30 years or more. They seem comfortable speaking to me from the environment they’re in, no matter how much they don’t like it.
Then one day they call and they’re angry. Not at me, but they’re angry at the state. They’re angry at other prisoners around them. Sometimes they’re angry at their family, or friends in the free world who have abandoned them. They feel they need to get out as soon as possible, that, for whatever reason, today is the day they just can’t fucking take it anymore. It’s often unclear to me what is so different about those days compared to all the other horrendous ones.
Some days, no matter how long you’ve been in it or how “used to it” you’ve gotten, you wake up and it feels like your first day, and you have to try to get used to it all over again.
Read the full essay here.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, I wrote an article for Jacobin on the end of the ICE surge in Minnesota and what would need to be done to bring accountability to the perpetrators and justice to the victims.
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