“Life in the 21st Century has become a factory of living.”
The window was open and the noise from the city seemed to drift into my room and manipulate the sentence as I stared at the screen. The words took on various meanings and the letters twisted like the limbs of the Devil’s Tree.
“Modernity is a balloon made of paradox.”
Yes. Yes. Yes! I trilled.
But what does that mean?
I’m no economist. In fact the first thing a dollar does when meeting me is melt. But the problem I see with how we function economically is that it is all predicated on so much shit. Literally. The endless production, marketing, and transfer of crap is what fuels the world market. Remove the basics: food, shelter, water, clothing (although I don’t think we need runways and Tyra Bank’s Top Model) and what you have left is everything. 99.9999%.
Personally, everyday I haul a bag of trash out to the dumpster. Everyday I buy something I don’t really need. Although tonight’s pinot is certainly an exception. I believe I even write it off as a business expense – what writer doesn’t drink?
I came across an article in alternet that shined some light on what I have been feeling as of late. This idea that the modern world is a drag and everybody is running around feeling much heavier than we should. Why in a world of such plenty are people constantly disappointed?
The environmentalist Alan Durning found that in 1991 the average American family owned twice as many cars as it did in 1950, drove 2.5 times as far, used 21 times as much plastic, and traveled 25 times farther by air. Gross national product per capita tripled during that period. Our houses are bigger than ever and stuffed to the rafters with belongings (which is why the storage-locker industry has doubled in size in the past decade). We have all sorts of other new delights and powers — we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels, consume food from every corner of the world. Some people have taken much more than their share, but on average, all of us in the West are living lives materially more abundant than most people a generation ago.
What’s odd is, none of it appears to have made us happier. Throughout the postwar years, even as the gnp curve has steadily climbed, the “life satisfaction” index has stayed exactly the same. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center has surveyed Americans on the question: “Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” (This must be a somewhat unsettling interview.) The “very happy” number peaked at 38 percent in the 1974 poll, amid oil shock and economic malaise; it now hovers right around 33 percent.
Could it be that capitalism needs a sisyphean population to continue, one intent on creating and accepting ever more unreachable wants and desires? In other words, consumers that will perpetually chase the American dream till they’re in debt and overworked and enslaved to their creditors.
Yet, year by year people are realizing the futileness of such consumption and are growing tired of pushing that boulder up the hill.
The most poignant statement of all is that of our president, shortly after 9-11, when he told us all to go shopping again.
It shows who is really in charge around here.
At the Mall of America, you can rent walkie-talkies when you enter so you don’t get lost. There’s a water park in the middle of it. Bars and movie theaters on the top floor. It has its own post office.
Even as someone who tries to live by a small code of minimalism I find myself itching to shop when I have an extra bit of cash sitting in my pocket. It’s one of the quickest (legal) things we can do in this country to make ourselves feel instantly better. A new shirt. New lamp. New sneakers. A new you. You hope.
Problem is, all this economic activity comes at a cost. The environment has been quietly taking the abuse for a while now but old mother earth is cranky and she’s hot and she’s letting us know that she won’t put up with our shennanigans much longer.
The median predictions of the world’s climatologists — by no means the worst-case scenario — show that unless we take truly enormous steps to rein in our use of fossil fuels, we can expect average temperatures to rise another four or five degrees before the century is out, making the globe warmer than it’s been since long before primates appeared. We might as well stop calling it earth and have a contest to pick some new name, because it will be a different planet. Humans have never done anything more profound, not even when we invented nuclear weapons.
So not only are we overworked, disconnected, and overall unsatisfied with our lives, turns out we’re making the earth inhospitable for mankind’s survival.
Ain’t that just a kick in the pants!
It’s no wonder people are bummed. And no surprise when up to a couple of years ago Radiohead was arguably the biggest band on the planet. Increasingly we are a society of scream paintings driving long commutes to the suburbs and exurbs, to plop down with the family for a night of Deal or No Deal and Middle East bombings. We are robots complete with identification numbers, branding on our clothes, and the ability to communicate on the telephone and the Internet with other robots.
We bottle water from thousands of miles away and ship them here, burning barrels and barrels of oil, so that a company can basically sell you a plastic bottle with a label – because it’s essentially the same as tap water. You’re paying for transportation and packaging.
To step back is to see the insanity. What is the difference if you drink water from North America or Fiji? Just because a company can make money from the absurdity, and people will buy it, doesn’t make it right. A free market is not always a wise market.
Just as a rich country is not necessarily a happy one.
In fact, once basic needs are met, the “satisfaction” data scrambles in mindlblowing ways. A sampling of Forbes magazine’s “richest Americans” have identical happiness scores with Pennsylvania Amish, and are only a whisker above Swedes taken as a whole, not to mention the Masai. The “life satisfaction” of pavement dwellers — homeless people — in Calcutta is among the lowest recorded, but it almost doubles when they move into a slum, at which point they are basically as satisfied with their lives as a sample of college students drawn from 47 nations. And so on.
Next time you hear someone in college moan about how tough it is for them feel free to inform of this this fact. Calcutta slum dwellers are as pleased with their lives as them. Sad fact is most working Americans look back fondly on their college days as the most carefree and enriching time of their life.
Again. What does this mean?
You can’t reverse time, you can’t make us go back to the ox and plow.
We won’t go back.
We’re stuck with insanity. With modernity. With paradox. We’re stuck with the balloon and the uneasy hope, as it drifts over our heads like the blimp at the Rose Bowl, that it doesn’t burst into flames.
So what can we do?
What do I do?
I try to find happiness in smaller places. My plants growing on the balcony. An interesting article. Walking instead of driving to the store. My wife making me laugh.
I heard once: Happiness is the Absence of Misery.
It’s a pretty glum proposal, but accurate. That’s why I try to spend my time loving everything in my universe, because then when you do encounter misery you don’t feel it so much.
