Richard A. Swenson, in Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives, offers a description of living on the margin, or the edge (financially, emotionally, food-wise, time-wise, etc.), and suggests some solutions for people in that precarious situation. The author is a physician who sees people every day who are marginless physically, psychologically and emotionally, and sometimes financially and other ways as well. Basically, the condition of living a marginless life is the condition of being in a state of pain:
Seeing people in pain is my job. . . . I am continually surrounded by pain. . . . Helping hurting people is the part of medicine I most enjoy. . . . At the end of a long day it is a satisfying feeling to know that I have alleviated the pain burden of the world just a little. The trouble is, pain today seems to be in an inflationary cycle (15).
Swenson's book is an attempt to extend his medical approach to people in pain to other areas in which people are suffering as the result of being and living at the margin or marginless. This "inflationary cycle of pain" the author says is the result of modern progress. He analyzes the role of progress in the creation of marginless lives, concluding that we have increasingly lost our faith in technology as a remedy for all our ills. Progress has speeded up and compressed every area of our lives, and created the kind of trapped feeling so many people have today, even those whose wealth allows them to partake of the gifts of progress and technology.
However, Swenson does not focus his work on the historical or social or other causes of the pain of marginless living so much as he focuses on the pain itself and potential ways of dealing with it. He writes that
This book is dedicated to exposing and correcting the specific kind of pain that comes from marginless living. Why? Because we find ourselves in the midst of an unnamed epidem...