After a trip to town today, running a couple of errands, I found myself once again thinking about the cornucopia of cheap crap we are being bombarded with as we approach the holiday season.
Whereas I understand that we all want to get the most for our money, sometimes I fail to understand the mindset that interprets "the most" as quantity of things rather than quality of things.
Earlier today, I was fixing/rebalancing a hinge on our laundry room door, and it occurred to me that I was using a hammer and a screwdriver thar were probably more than 60 years old. AS part of the fix I had to go to the garage and cut a very thin sliver of wood, which I did with the handsaw that has also been around probably since the 1930s.
My point here is that I don't need a new saw, and I don't need a new hammer and I don't need a new screwdriver. Nor do I need ”a 99 piece tool set for just $19.95” because I already have perfectly functional tools, and it's very unlikely that I would ever use 80 of those 99 tools, to begin with!
I suppose the thing that troubles me is that we justify a huge amount of consumption in the name of the idea that ”it was cheap,” not giving a moment's thought to the fact that these cheap things are also extremely low quality, will likely not work as desired or will break very quickly, and then will be thrown away in the garbage into a landfill that likely is already overflowing.
Just to clarify, I'm not some hippie-dippie environmental protection nut, but I am somebody who likes to be out in nature or on the beach and not have the experience tainted by the fact that there is garbage everywhere!
I should back up for a moment and point out that the 60 year old tools I was using earlier we're all made entirely out of wood and metal, materials that will naturally break down and be reabsorbed into the ecosystem if they are thrown away or left to rot somewhere.
Sometimes I can't help but think that so many of these purchases people make of all these inexpensive gadgets and products — that seem to have no real function aside from being a ”clever gimmick” — have very little to do with actual need to use the products and a lot to do with satisfying some psychological need to simply ”acquire” things.
Meanwhile, people justify that they can afford things because they are cheap... as a result of which they spend a bunch of money on "cheap things," with the end result that they are eternally trapped in poverty, spending all their money. It's a spending addiction!
It made me think about people I have known in the past who had no interest in going with me to "gallery night" on the 1st Thursday of the month here in our town, because they saw no purpose in going out and looking at art if they couldn't buy it.
I'm open to the possibility that this is simply the fundamental psychological profile of a capitalistic consumer society.
On some level, it reminds me of science fiction writer Frederick Pohl’s 1950’s story ”The Midas Plague” which seems to have become oddly prophetic. The story is set in a far future in which energy is cheap and robots produce everything, and it is the duty of citizens to consume and consume and consume, and now the ultimate upper class status symbol has become living a minimalistic life in which you don't have to consume!
Maybe I'm just being too cynical here, but somehow humanity seems to be on that trajectory some 70 years after the story was written!
I'm also reminded of a favorite bumper sticker I see from time to time which reads: ”he best things in life are not THINGS.”
Like, for example, a purring cat in your lap!
Till the next one... Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!
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