In defense of opting out
Posted By Admin on December 30, 2011
Last Tuesday, I became an instant fan of Adam Frank — an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester — after hearing his commentary on NPR. (That is he to your right)
Titled “Pepper-Spraying The Holidays: Time And The Ethic Of Consumption,” it begins by reminding us — my words — how sick we are to trample each other trying to get into big box stores in what used to be called the middle of the night but is now when stores open on Black Friday. He refers to the woman who used pepper spray on shoppers clamoring for XBOX consoles.
“These events mark the extreme of a pathology we are all part of,” he said. “As we head into the holiday season, this might be a good moment to reflect on the roots of our collective consumer delusion.”
His is more than an essay about how screwed up we have become as voluntary victims of the holday gift-giving rat race. It goes deeper into the way the modern conception of time has come to tyrannize us. He calls it “modern culture’s dysfunctional time-logic,” a product of the whole consumer-driven economic scheme.
You can read the entire essay or listen to it here.
In his piece from October, which I just found, he gives examples of time-logic. “Walking down the street while talking to someone across the country” is a new form, just as “punching in for work was a new form of time-logic 100 years ago.” He writes further: If, for example, gas costs $20 a gallon, then quick trips to the convenience store will come to represent a time-logic whose logic has been exhausted.
“In tracking the way human beings have organized their societies around collective conceptions of time, he said, I was struck by how our ‘modern’ time-logic originated with conceptions of efficiency in production.”
The industrial imperative that you can make more stuff if you cut the time each step takes “spread to every aspect of modern culture” and that led to “convenience consumerism,” he said.
Many of us would love to pull the plug on the insanity of running around buying gifts for people who don’t need stuff and, by the way, we only have a couple weeks left. Even better would be to resist the Economy of the Suits and start replacing it with an economy of the small.
This year, I’m recontemplating this whole gift business. When possible, Im doing small stores if stores at all. Stuff is nice if it’s going to be put to good use and is really well made, but where do you find things that are really well made without a time machine to get there?
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