Wendell Berry’s latest collection of essays is called “What Are People For?” and it’s a good question, it seems to me, one little discussed in our race to pay all of our bills, get health care, afford college, computers, cell phones, and plan for many years in a retirement or nursing home.

Sometimes, it seems in our culture that this is what people are for: to pay for all the stuff they make us think they need. On the radio, driving to the dentist, I heard a bunch of enterprising kids talk about the businesses they were starting, since they couldn’t get even those awful jobs that pay little and are miserable and temporal.

But, the host kept asking, you love your work and your freedom, but can you afford health care? One 24-year-old finally said, “no, I don’t have health care, and I don’t want. I’d rather live the life I want to live.” That is a hero.

I’m not sure what people are for in our culture, other than to serve as objects to frighten and squeeze money and taxes out of. People exist so that marketers can identify them, I think.

Berry points out that the economic system pushes people away from one another, and from all of their time-honored sources of community, and local food and support. Rural areas are dying all across America, so people’s children can rush to cities and suburbs and live lives they don’t like and can’t afford.

I think people are for this:

To find work that they love.

And people they love.

To work in dignity and security.

To exist in community.

To tell their stories, and free their trapped spirits.

To reject increasingly oppressive notions of security and obligation.

To live their lives.

To reconnect to the natural world.

To be fulfilled, not obligated.