How Sugar Daddies and Vaginal Microbes Created the World’s Largest HIV Epidemic
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
She’s looking for a job as a housekeeper—a profession she likes because sometimes, her employers feed her. “Other jobs you have to bring your own food,” she said, “which is not gonna happen because sometimes we have just sleeping food, and in the morning there’s no food.”
She and the older man, the blesser, don’t use condoms, and she hasn’t told him that she’s HIV positive. Mostly, she’s just hoping to start making her own money soon. “Life is not good for someone who is not employed,” she said. “You sleep, watch TV, sleep, watch TV.”
“Sometimes,” she added, “I don’t live my life.”
At this, her eyes welled up with tears. A nurse standing nearby told me to stop my line of questioning."
Sometimes, I read articles like these, and I wonder if people are really happier now than they were during hunter-gatherer times. By every objective metric, their conditions have improved. They have more food, better shelter, access to medicine, and even luxuries like TV. But somehow, their spiritual pain seems so much greater.
Nothing but scraps of stories handed down and embellished over the millennia. We have no objective measures at all.
I don't know which is better, living and suffering, or not living and not suffering. It's a philosophical question I am not equipped to debate