The Cultural Contradictions of Convenience
Modern commercial life can make such a bizarre carnival of reality. I don’t mean this in a totally derogatory way. Last month, for example, I had a bike stolen from my porch and, within 30 minutes of making the discovery that some scofflaw had burglarized my wheels, I had, thanks to Craigslist, a new (old) bike. When I read and come across a book reference that sounds interesting, I can have it on my i-thing within 45 seconds. I recently made a grocery list that included nutritional yeast, dulse, a thai pepper, toasted but unsalted cashews, almond milk, and a can of Spam. I was able to hop on my new (old) bike and, within 40 minutes, have in my politically correct shopping bag every single one of these items. Minus the Spam. I was just kidding about the Spam.
Modern commercial life is about convenience. It’s about scratching every little itch quickly and, preferably, with a consumer experience enhanced by tasteful lighting and beautiful people (I went to Whole Foods). The downside of this convenience, though, is that it reinforces our basest and most insidious acquisitive tendencies. Books, bikes, and a really good Indian meal aren’t exactly what I have in mind here, but something far more general. The scratch-my-itch culture we reinforce on a daily basis drives home the fundamental axiom that, as disposable-income-blessed humans zooming through modern life, we’re entitled to have what we want, can (sort of) afford, and deserve. This might all sound lovely. But my fear is that it reflects a pervasive mentality that—reified and democratized if not created by capitalism—informs the perception of meaningful change while, in fact, inhibiting anything of the sort.
Before delving into a concrete example of this ironic (and destructive) phenomenon, allow me to clarify what I mean by change. Needless to say, my mindset is largely centered on veganism as a positive manifestation of cultural change. But one could identify many other manifestations of a tectonic shift in the larger cultural mindset. The point is this: change as I understand the term demands a basic and collective reorientation in thought about our place in what Murray Bookchin calls “the normal, balanced, and manageable rhythms of human life [in] an environment that meets our requirements as individuals and biological beings.” In other words, a change in mentality about the very substructure and biology of existence, not to mention a change in what a “need” really is. When that creaky utopian wheel in my own mind spins, this change in mentality would result in a cohesive society in which vegan people living in small houses laid around a lot reading books and talking about them rather than running around like crazy-people either trying to invent shit* or working in the employ of somebody who’s trying to invent shit. But that’s just me.
Now to the concrete example, the example that initiated this line of thought to begin with. I was recently running with a friend who’s a professor in a business school. We were talking about innovation and he told me about a Boston-based research project that led to a massive uptick in morning milkshake sales. (I’m guessing he was talking about Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s insane, but if you’ve been to Boston you’ll know what I’m talking about. It can be 13 below and Bostonians will huddle in a line that stretches to the next block to procure various versions of Dunkin’ Donuts happiness, many of them cold.) Anyway, my friend explained that milkshake sales went up not because savvy marketers had determined that humans were just dying to slurp another frothy drink, but because they were flat-out bored. Modern life had lulled them into such a coma of consciousness that, with the average Bostonian commute being an hour, the huddled proletariat decided it needed a distraction for a good portion of that time. The milkshake, being thick and typically enjoyed in short, hard-earned sucks, fit the bill. Ka-boom and ka-ching. Milkshake sales skyrocketed.
My friend’s story hit me like news of the armageddon: the milkshake makers have got us by the hypothalamuses! And that’s an uncomfortable position to be in. Because when meaningful change becomes a new milkshake at Dunkin’ Donuts to keep us from pondering our inner misery, the prospect of substructural cultural change resulting in a book-reading, vegan-eating, small-is-beautiful thinking collective is about as likely as me buying a can of Spam.
*Eating Plants, a family-oriented venture, generally avoids the use of profanity but, in this instance, I’m making a rare exception. It just seemed to be the perfect word choice. Let it not be taken as anything but an anomaly.
Sometimes, inventing “shit” is necessary, though we may not know it at that time. I used to work on the hardware portion of something called the Internet in the 90s and I remember an engineer from a small outfit called Cisco complaining about the unreliable 100 Megabit Ethernet links that they had to work with. When I said that we can actually specify a 10X faster link, 1 Gigabit Ethernet, over the same cable and make it work reliably, he was incredulous.
The rest is history.
The rest IS history. It’s just unfortunate that the wise few who lay about reading books never seem to make it into the story.
True, but Life is about action, reflected in the choices we make. It is action that leaves a mark and hopefully, it was influenced by the reading of books to make it noteworthy.
A lot of people have a lot of problems. They do not live in a world with the luxury of going vegan, having flexible hours so they can avoid the daily commute, and so many other things. If a milkshake helps them get through the day, it beats those who choose violence, substance abuse, unkindness, and other undesireable behaviors.
The choice many of us here make to be vegan or vegetarian or just meatless on Mondays is the first step in the journey of 1,000 miles. let’s not let milkshakes distract anyone from the bigger picture — just keep inspiring others.
Obviously, most people’s New Year’s resolutions seem to fall away the first week of February. As the year progresses and the year-end approaches, consumer demand and thoughtlessness increases. Any opportunity for self-reflection is lost unless there is a conflict of consciousness, whether internal or external.
In our day-to-day existence, people want what they want when they want it and nothing else, no thinking required when it comes to “needs”. There is an app for Domino’s pizza, video-on-demand, etc. The job of most marketing is to deliver goods and services without requiring the consumer to think too much about that purchase, particularly with items that are quick to consume such as junk food and entertainment. Technology accelerates this marketing cycle. The faster the cycle, the more money can be made and the more mindless eating and consumerism involved.
And I believe that most people do have the ability (and time) to change their behaviors. Veganism is not expensive. It is just their awareness and focus of direction that needs to change. They need help stepping outside of zombie land. People who don’t have a lot of money can watch the Superbowl (because they have time) and presumably access to the internet when they comment on it to their friends. They just choose not to use that time in self-reflection, reading or whatever else might make them aware to make behavioral changes. If they think that veganism is expensive because you have to shop at Whole Foods, then they will not even consider it.
In thinking about the increasingly short consumer cycles, I think that a lot of people want off that wheel. It stresses you out. That is why I think that words like Paleo, primal, clean eating, clean start, oxygen (name of a magazine) and experience life are used to make people think that they are “re-setting” themselves.