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I turned to walk away, but she called my name.

'You live close by?' she asked.

'Three blocks this way,' I said, pointing down the street.

'I tellin’ you,' she said, waving the scrap of paper under the street lamp.

'I’ll be there,' I said.

Two years of nine-to-five had tamed my undergraduate hope of changing the world. I had seen such disillusionment in the adults around me all my life—despising them for it, in fact—yet I tried to be amazed at how quickly my own idealism had been eroded by routine and a middling salary.

Unlike my colleagues at the office, however, I hadn’t let my privilege steel me against those who didn’t share it. The fact was, I had more or less blundered into my current position—the usual striver’s tale of desperation, luck, and a single useful connection. My memories of waiting in line with my mother at the town hall for a handout of government cheese were still nearly as real to me as my copyediting duties at The Wall—Adventures in Capitalism!—Street Journal.

Although my politics were vaguely socialist, I understood more clearly than ever the seduction of a philosophy of rational markets. The tentacles of the system had begun to fasten themselves on me. I now had a 401(k) account, and I could see how easy it would be to lose oneself inside a private reverie of corporate dividends and compound interest, mutual funds, bond prices, IPOs, and ten-year Treasury notes.

The Journal focused on titans of commerce and empire. I worked in the midst of intelligent and well-meaning adults who believed it was downright immoral to help people, because charity merely encouraged an unhealthy dependence. I read these sentiments in the editorial pages—read them more religiously than did the converted, believing that to ignore them was a supreme act of naïveté—and I stewed and fulminated privately. So privately, in fact, that when I was promoted from copy boy to editor on the arts page and took up residence in the same precinct as the editorial writers, it was assumed by many that I was a fellow-traveling reactionary. I quickly found it necessary to make a small but visible statement of dissent, so I tacked a poster of Ralph Nader to the wall of my cubicle. It seemed to create a dead zone around my desk. Those few of my colleagues who dared to make small talk with me did so in a conspiratorial whisper.

Still, a purely symbolic resistance would not, I concluded, suffice. Sure, I could surreptitiously publish book reviews in obscure leftist journals, but what difference would that make? I had long since admitted that I didn’t have the temperament for the theatrics of civil disobedience. I was not, by nature, an organizer or an activist. My zone of humane rebellion, I decided, would be that ill-defined borderland between the public and the private where so much of daily life plays out—especially for those of us who live amid the density of the world’s great teeming cities.

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