David Cain on materialism. If you feel like you have too much shit and most of it really isn’t very good shit, take a few minute to understand why. A few excerpts:
When a friend of mine inspected the damage from a fender-bender, what upset him most was the discovery that his bumper was nothing but a brittle plastic husk supported by three pieces of styrofoam. The vehicle was new and probably cost about $35,000.
If we were things-lovers we’d have better things, and few things we don’t use. […] Something happened at some point that left us preferring more things over better things, and acquiring over using or owning.
Marketers began to sell products in a way that suggests you are buying something deeper and more abstract than a material thing: a sense of freedom, belonging, security, virility, popularity—any of the non-material qualities we perpetually seek and never have enough of. They sell us what we want to be, not what we want to have.
Our desire for self-actualization is bottomless, and so when we try to buy it, we buy endlessly.
The hallmark of stress and unease is rumination—unconscious, uncontrolled thinking about things you aren’t really doing and conversations you aren’t really having.
You know that feeling where you say a word so often that it stops — for a few seconds — having any meaning? It’s just a sound your lips and tongue make? I’ll bet there’s a word for that but I don’t know what it is.
During the early days of what we then called the “World Wide Web,” there was a mood of “digital entrepreneurism.” Anybody with a minimum of technical skills could create a website. Later, when blogs became a thing, it got even easier. You could start your own newspaper or magazine or — when the bandwidth got better and the tools easier — audio and video. Anyone could create their own “content” and do so for fun or profit. That was the dream and a few made it a reality.
“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. . . I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”
I’m ten weeks in on my TV news fast and I’ve dropped 50 pounds in psychic weight. No, I’m not living in a cave. I check the New York Times a couple of times a week (I even have a paid subscription), and I visit the BBC World News page for a more global perspective. Turns out there’s important stuff happening in other pars of the world. So I do get some news about American politics but now I’m controlling the spigot.