James' World 2

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For months now, we’ve been in a nationwide debate over whether we should cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for tens of millions of people. Next year, the U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake — and talking heads will debate, yet again, who is deserving of help in America.

The student debt cancellation program excludes people with especially high incomes. But hiding in plain sight is another federal program — 529 college savings plans — that offers the biggest benefits to wealthy families.

With the right accounting and legal moves — ones that have never been subject to the kind of scrutiny that debt cancellation has faced — people with hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare can create 529 accounts that will end up holding millions of dollars. With some careful planning, no taxes will come due for most people as long as future generations use the money to pay for college (say, $84,000 a year at a private university like Duke), graduate school (hello, half-a-million-dollar New York University dental school) and any other related educational costs, including high-rise dorms and Apple laptops.

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Robert Neubecker

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Well, that’s not entirely true. Having some money helps. But it’s certainly not the biggest contributor to our happiness and well-being. So what is? 

Before the big reveal, there are two things to consider. 

First, for some of us, we were dealt a good genetic hand. We are predisposed to being happier in life. Our temperamental “wiring” makes us less neurotic, more emotionally stable, and nicer people to be around.

Second, for some of us, we ended up in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time). German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls this “thrownness”, or Geworfen. This is the idea that our experience in life, from birth to death, is arbitrarily determined by where we’re thrown into the world. Born into a specific family in a particular culture or religion at a given moment in human history is a matter of pure dumb luck.

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Nestled in the Ring of Kerry, the sleepy town of Kenmare is shrouded in a mist that runs off its rolling hills. Home to just 1,563 people, it maintains a unique, Wes Anderson-style charm; in the modern world yet not entirely of it. It is a million miles away from the TikTok drama that surrounds one of its newest residents, Carrie Jade Williams.

Relatively unknown until November 2020, Williams’ status in the literary community grew after she won the Financial Times’ Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize, which is open to writers under the age of 35. The winning entry is published in the FT Weekend, the weekend edition of the British newspaper, although the competition does not appear to have been run for the last two years. Williams’ entry was a moving essay about her diagnosis with Huntington’s Disease, a debilitating, degenerative genetic condition that affects the brain. Written using a speech-to-text computer program, the essay won her a £1,000 prize. 

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Photo: TikTok / VICE

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Rumination leads to poor sleep

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The internet knows my age and home address. It knows how much I make and what I do for work. It knows when I last voted and who I voted for. Recently, I got married in a supposedly secret ceremony at city hall. The internet found out before my mother.

I didn’t willingly share this information, but I’m not at all surprised that it’s online. Personal data — the searches, photos, purchases, locations, and Facebook messages that populate digital identities and fuel the attention economy — is the internet’s favorite currency. It’s also becoming impossible to control.

That’s partly because the US lacks substantial data-privacy legislation. You’re not really protected against rampant data brokering on “background check” sites like Whitepages and BeenVerified, which scrape public records and compile information — like your home address and phone number — and make them painfully visible.

And yes, when we sign up for Instagram or order our dinners on Caviar, we might technically be voluntarily signing away our rights, but what other choice do we have? Privacy policies are tailor-made to obscure their murky contents, and few of us take the time to read the terms of service. Plus, “if you want complete control — if you want to opt-out, you’re going to lead a very limited life,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Photo by Zac Freeland/Vox

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