After college graduation, I gave myself a break from intense reading–for a couple of months, I read nothing but light novels and graphic fiction. I love fiction and comics all the time, and don’t always see them as fluffy–but after writing my thesis and loading up on literary theory and cultural studies courses at the end, I consciously gave myself a break.

The first genuinely challenging thing I read that summer was How To Be Alone, a book of essays by Jonathan Franzen. It was the perfect thing to start understanding all that literary theory and cultural studies in the context of a 9-to-5 and life outside academia.

How To Be Alone is about the problem of individuality–all the arguments, from the perspectives of brain function and social construction, that what we think of as our personalities are less under our control than we hope–and then his struggles towards individuality anyway. (If you can imagine, for Jonathan Franzen, being an individual has a lot to do with reading literary fiction.)

The essays tackle everything from sex and Alzheimer’s to prison and the Postal Service. He talks some about work, and living painfully simply on a tiny amount of money, but as I’ve picked the book up again I sort of wish there was one more chapter–how to be alone with your money.

Earning, spending and investing are heavily socially regulated activities, and the more you free yourself from one the more you entangle yourself in another. Even if you don’t want to fall off the grid, and aren’t responsible for huge payments or debts, making ethical choices in spending and investment is convoluted and often contradictory.

On the one hand, spending and investing in accord with your values is one of the most powerful forms of activism. On the other, actually being controlling your money in a world of wants, needs and committed payments is really hard!

I’m pretty good at controlling mindless spending and criticizing consumer culture, but with so much of my income going to student debt it’s hard to say I’m really spending according to values or beliefs. Do you think that you are able to stand alone? How does the social power of finance pull you along?