Consumption

17 April 2020 – day 25

Yesterday was a beautiful day, and it looks like today will be the same, sadly.

I wouldn’t normally be angry about a nice day but all that the sunshine and temperate weather dis was bring out the people. I was no different. I was once again, unwittingly, that guy who goes out into public and says “LOOK AT ALL THESE FOOLS IN PUBLIC!”

I “needed” supplies. We were out of flour and the chickens needed bedding. But in retrospect, I probably could have waited a few more days, maybe even a week. I have plenty of food, the flour isn’t completely gone, and I am in no way near starvation. Truth be told, these were wants.

So, I say without judgement that I was there in public with all the other fools who were probably motivated by the sunshine to get some essentials. Costco (where I get the flour plus fruit and nearly all of my bulk supplies) had a line waiting to get in. Inside, it was more crowded than usual. I got flour, limes, avocados, fruit, cashews, and an air purifier. To the last thing, Avie and I both have asthma which has been exacerbated by the high pollen count this spring.

From there I zipped over to the local feed store where I had pre-ordered some shavings for the hens. I say this again without setting myself up as some morally superior being – I arranged for curbside pickup but when I got there the place was crawling with shoppers: every parking place was full and there were tons of people buying plants.

I suppose the signs were there. On my morning constitutional with the dog we were met by dozens of people. Some with and some without animals. I do not fault people for going for a walk in a park. Lord knows we need a bit of nature and there’s ample evidence that even a few hours a week in nature boosts the immune system.

The point of all this is just to show how utterly predictable we are. The first nice day of the year and tons of people are going to put on their shorts and go jogging. Meanwhile, a lot of Americans want to go shopping. There are even some rather ghoulish protests where people in the midwest are demanding that we “open things back up” at the cost of “2-3%” of their fellow citizens.

I feel like I have a demon on one shoulder and an angel on the other. If I don’t think about it I find it easy to condemn people for wanting to open up the economy so they can get their jalapeno poppers for $4 during happy hour at Applebees while simultaneously pretending that I really “needed” that air purifier I bought at Costco with my government winnings.

Maybe they are both demons. Maybe it’s just the demon Crowley in two forms, after all, was he even really evil, was he good?

And the reality is that yesterday’s little orgy is going to cost someone their life and possibly even the life of someone next to them. And we won’t know for two weeks who it’s going to be.

Which is the crazy problem with humanity. The fundamental flaw in our makeup is that we can see the future but we are drawn like moths to the flame toward the present. Our unique minds can ascertain the future but millions of years of biology ties us to the present. Like I quoted from Wenger the other day, “the only possible moment of happiness is the present.”

Perhaps this is encoded into our genome. For example we all know that climate change will eventually result in human extinction. And yet, we have built a system around consumption – which prizes hoarding the power of consumption (wealth) and which rewards good consumers with more consumption. It has no other internal logic.

The economy in the USA has collapsed because it was built around one thing: consumption. We do not need to go to Applebees. We do not need to buy some nice plants for gardening. But if the people cannot go shopping, if they can’t buy air purifiers, or get their limes in bulk, the whole system collapses. And it happens over night.

But ironically, if we keep this whole system going, the whole system collapses because we are a virus literally consuming our host. Just like the coronavirus, humanity is stealing the breath from our host – cutting down the rainforests and polluting the air with carbon. If a virus could think, be rational, it would keep its host alive.

I think all species which reach a certain level of intelligence face this dilemma. This could be a moment of great change. A moment where we could revolutionize as a species.

What we demonstrably need are exactly the kinds of restrictions on consumption that we are seeing here, right now. We need to shift away from consuming the planet’s resources and toward something else, something sustainable.

Unfortunately, we are benighted and burdened with greedy charlatans and I fear we have lost the grace that past generations had, the ability to sacrifice a few moments of immediate happiness to help secure an uncertain future.

Qq

8 comments

  1. A poignant post with a clever title, Consumption as a social malady:
    Conspicuous consumption is visible, excess consumerism. Footballers driving flash cars and wearing $500 sneakers, monied examples of a culture that’s been conditioned to buy the latest and greatest even if you have no money and go into debt. Sales of smartphones are finally flattening. A maxed out iPhone 11 Pro with an Apple Care warranty costs well over in my country $2,000 in my country.
    Consumption as it was known in the 14th century to describe any potentially fatal wasting disease–that is, any condition that “consumed” the body. Later it came to be most associated with tuberculosis. It could now be applied to viral pandemics.
    We are hard-wired to see and react most and best to what’s immediately in front of us. That’s 400 million years old. That’s the lizard brain part of us.
    The prefrontal cortex – that which figures stuff out and thinks ahead is much, much more recent. We’re newbies at this which is why we f&%k up so much.

  2. It’s so sad that this virus is being politicized, as it is in America, especially.

    In the past few days, I’ve been more open to hearing from people who may not have the privilege of being ‘left’ on the issue, because it’s increasingly obvious that some on the left are telling everyone (in effect) that they are murderers for being in public, and some on the right are telling everyone (in effect) that we should just go back to normal because death is part of life, etc. Where’s the truth?

    It can’t be one or the other, can it?

    As you suggest, Tim, defining as morally opprobrious people who can’t stay away from ‘$4 poppers at Applebees’ is unfair and misses the point. The left has many ways of avoiding caring about socio-economic inequality, and this is one of them. Brush the folks who want to get back to work as ignorant and brash consumers instead of people who need to survive, who have children to feed, who need the heat on. Honestly, it’s been fascinating seeing people on the left excoriate the “back-to-work” / “back-to-normal” folks. Sure, there’s a point there, but guess who criticizes this? Privilege, that’s who. People like me who are getting their paychecks, who have work, despite all this chaos. It’s so very, very easy to throw people under the bus when so little of the consequences of a continued shut-down affect me materially, at least in terms of paying your rent and food bill.

    Nobody wants healthcare personnel to be overwhelmed. But asking for or demanding another year or extended period of folks not working jobs involving social contact? Holding a “vaccine” as the only acceptable bar for contact? Etc. You don’t need those measures to help the healthcare personnel, and good luck telling the poor to be poorer (and ever more desperate) all because this virus–apart from outlying examples–won’t really affect the healthy and under-70’s in any catastrophic way numerically.

    People aren’t stupid. They know the stats, and they are acutely aware of their needs. I’ve found it true that the people who find it somehow inevitable (in a normative way) the idea that we should burn it all down, that societal breakdown is here, and that everything is going to be radically different, are speaking from a position of privilege with no discernible care for the people who would be most adversely affected by such scenarios.

    It’s sad, isn’t it, that “consumerism” as a slur is one that sticks–in our current discourse–closer to the down-and-out and/or middling sort–the people you may not see cavorting in public right now but who might have worked as a bartender or day laborer, for example–than it does to the rich and privileged who exploit them and/or to the folks who are ‘weathering’ (scare quotes in full effect) this pandemic with the luxury of a regular paycheck. I’m one of them. At least for now. But you won’t find me judging people who want to go back to normal, in particular the socio-economically vulnerable who have, with great sacrifice, been forced to suspend their income for weeks now.

    It’s true that corporations will make this case out of their own interests. But who loses when you shut it all down? (Hint: not the rich. Let’s not lose sight of that.)

    1. Just a wonderful case in point right now: The Guardian is ridiculing the right for wanting to go back to work; on the same page, they demand justice for the down-and-out who are adversely affected, economically, by the virus. The minute that somebody comes up with a solution whereby an economy can pay its workers without an economy…MAGIC! Again, let’s ask: who suffers?

      1. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive Bun.
        I didn’t see the Guardian piece but the fact is a lot of the covid-19 relief money went out to companies needing it least.
        Small businesses are classified as businesses employing from 1 to 500 people.
        Most hedge funds -just one example- qualify , and these are the businesses that employ lawyers and tax attorneys to file the necessary applications the very minute these loans became available( it helps to have a banker friend)unlike the mom and pop true small businesses.
        My wife, for example, was forced to close her doors ( salon and spa) even though her clients were more than willing to take their chances , and she gave each of her employees two weeks wages to help them out with bills and in hope they come back when it’s back to normal.
        On April 1st she paid her rent and on 15th the quarterly taxes ( two other requirements for a small businesses loan she applied for)
        Over 12grand in total .

        Myself, the cynical bastard that I am, I told her to skip the rent payment , or at least part of it, and taxes for now because these can be paid later with penalties or whatever, and just continue paying the employees on the off chance she gets the loan, but don’t hold your breath.
        She got nothing of course.
        We are financially ok but there are thousands of other businesses that won’t be back, and millions unemployed who still haven’t gotten anything from the relief money and are strapped for cash, while many people who are well off got theirs.

    2. There are more options than either “go back to work” or “not” and characterizing my position as “let them starve” is ridiculous.

      People who are out of work can and are collecting unemployment, including checks that are larger than normal. Why not UBI?

      As for me being the problem, and my privilege, thats a load of fucking hooey. These protests are taking place in front of Baskin Robins, dude. Alabama and Georgia are opening fucking Gyms. GYMS. Barbers and bars as well.

      The problem isn’t us “liberal elites”. It’s that capitalism is broken in the USA. What you’re seeing is that there are a ton of bullshit jobs and that they all prop up a false economy.

      Anyway, this “conversation” is pointless because The South is opening up and there will be tons of deaths. Washington State will probably have people going back to school soon and hopefully we can keep the infection rates controlled until a vaccine arrives. And when that happens, if it happens, we will see things mostly return to normal. People will start flying again, Americans will get their jalepeno poppers, “the economy” will recover, the rich will still hoard (probably most of them will relocate to some place like New Zealand), and within 20 years guys like me and my privilege probably won’t have much of an atmosphere left to breathe anyway.

      I guess I’m an old fool. I was actually hopeful that we could shift away from a bullshit economy and on to something more meaningful and sustainable but looks like we can’t or won’t so, I’m giving up. I think I’m going to be a bird guy now: just cataloging whatever birds are left in the world. That is if the forests don’t all burn up this summer or next.

      I expect to work until I die, probably from this virus or another one one day. In a sense the lucky ones will be the first to go. People hanging on as we finish off the biosphere will not have much in terms of quality of life.

      Anyway, bud, see you around.

  3. I haven’t much to say about consumption. It is what it is and makes the world go round. The real problem is excess which is more an issue of greed or vanity. Aspects of the human condition since man began.

    A couple of things I learned this week:

    – The UK Health Minister confirmed that asymptomatic COVID may account for as many as 50% of cases.
    – One of the top dogs at WHO stated yesterday that there is no proven evidence YET that if you’ve had COVID you have immunity and can’t get it again.
    – There are four common Coronavirus which already exist of which the common cold is one. Apparently we have no immunisation vaccine for any of them.

    So when I see fevered opinions regarding do we all stop or do we get back to where we were as quickly as possible it genuinely does feel like the blind leading the blind.

  4. Superb piece, sir. This virus is a huge challenge that must make us change our behaviour in many ways. It may be here to stay and we may have to learn to live with it and its effects as our ancestors did with the infectious organisms that caused their ‘plagues’. It may be a long time before many among us can again delude themselves that they are unchallengeable masters of the universe. Though I guess there will always be some.

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