An Experiment in Scotch

When his­to­ri­ans look back on the cur­rent time period, they will notice many things but I think the main thing they will find inter­est­ing and wor­thy of study is our pen­chant for debt. We, specif­i­cally Amer­i­cans but gen­er­ally all civ­i­lized peo­ple in this time period, thrive on debt of all kinds. It will be our even­tual down­fall and in fact, has prob­a­bly already con­tributed to the begin­ning unless our paths are dras­ti­cally altered. I typ­i­cally think of debt as finan­cial or mon­e­tary but as I was think­ing about how to help a trainee today, I real­ized that we have debt of all kinds, an afflic­tion that seems to run deep in our psy­ches. This has hap­pened blind­ingly fast in a his­tor­i­cal sense. Our grand­par­ents were not like this. Even our par­ents, the boomers, were not so enchanted with debt though the prob­lem cer­tainly started dur­ing their youth and young adulthood.

We are cer­tainly stricken by finan­cial debt. Even though the Amer­i­can con­sumer has ratch­eted down his spend­ing and increased his sav­ing over the past 18 months, we have such a crush­ing finan­cial debt load that it will be years before the ship is righted and in fact may never be because of the com­bined prob­lems of the amount of debt and our government’s desire to have us increase our debt in order to drive an increas­ingly frag­ile econ­omy through our spend­ing. Our gov­ern­ment builds a huge mon­e­tary debt by effec­tively cre­at­ing money out of thin air in a mis­guided attempt to save our econ­omy. This money isn’t even serv­ing the pur­pose of its intent as it sits on the books at the Fed­eral Reserve accu­mu­lat­ing inter­est instead of being lent out into the econ­omy where it might actu­ally have a pos­i­tive effect.

How­ever, we also have become addicted to phys­i­cal debt. The great major­ity of us treat our bod­ies and our minds as if they were our credit cards, run­ning up large bal­ances with lit­tle thought for the highly neg­a­tive effect this will have on our phys­i­cal future. We eat poorly, we do not exer­cise, we sit for long peri­ods, we sit nightly dumb­founded in front of the tele­vi­sion or com­puter. This phys­i­cal debt is a con­stant in many of our lives. We can do this because we have solved the phys­i­cal prob­lems of our grand­par­ents in that most work we do now is not phys­i­cal and does not force us to move in great amounts.

Once upon a time, all debt was hard, often­times embar­rass­ing. To be in debt was to be stamped with a social stigma. Now, debt of all kinds is easy. It is easy to get a credit card and live beyond our means. It is easy to eat what­ever we want and choose to never be in hunger. It is easy not to exer­cise to dis­com­fort. And yet, by doing each of these things, we mort­gage our future abil­ity to live in com­fort, either finan­cially or phys­i­cally. We look for easy ways out because we are unac­cus­tomed to things being hard. We see this con­stantly writ large in our gov­ern­ment where we are ruled by a polit­i­cal class focused on the short term, imme­di­ate return on sound bytes.

The great prob­lem with debt is that it is always eas­ier to get into it than it is to get out of it. The longer debt is car­ried, the harder it is to fight out of it. This is as true phys­i­cally as it is finan­cially. Once you choose to live beyond your means phys­i­cally, it will become eas­ier and eas­ier to stay on a path of poor diet and no exer­cise. Phys­i­cal debt is slightly more insid­i­ous than finan­cial debt in that it is eas­ier to ignore over the short and medium term. Of course, finan­cially, you can declare bank­ruptcy and after some time, start over with a clean slate. Phys­i­cal debt has no such pos­si­bil­ity save death. Get­ting out of phys­i­cal debt is always a dif­fi­cult, painful struggle.

In the end, debt is the eas­i­est way out in our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. It is hard to live within ones means finan­cially because of the illu­sion of what being mid­dle class means. It is hard to live within one’s means phys­i­cally because it requires time and effort to eat well as a habit and to exer­cise at all, much less at the level required to avoid phys­i­cal debt. Because of our phys­i­cal debt as a nation, we can’t have an hon­est dis­cus­sion about health care since there is lit­tle per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity to stay debt free.

Even­tu­ally, debt will be what ends Amer­ica as a power in the civ­i­lized world. It will likely be finan­cial and mon­e­tary debt, debt run up by our gov­ern­ment almost entirely with­out our con­sent. But our phys­i­cal debt will likely play a part as our politi­cians race to cre­ate a new world order where every­one, deserv­ing or not, has health care insur­ance. As with all debt, the respon­si­ble among us will pay the great­est toll.