Published: 2/16/2021 7:11:08 AM
The front lines of human globalization, in the Amazon, in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, are driven by consumer choices, here at home. The government can’t stop it. Biden can’t do much. So the overwhelming responsibility of the consumer today is to recognize their power and to own it.
The problem with this topic is that we can’t tell anyone how to spend their money, or suggest what personal choices are best for anyone other than ourselves. So my attempt is to empower the individual consumer by emphasizing human management of time. We manage time, and experience time, through ritual and habit. The great many products afforded by free market consumerism threaten a confusion of ritual and a mismanagement of time.
I gained a lot of satisfaction the other day, trying to track the movement of a shadow from the setting sun. By my eye, the movement was almost imperceptible. That movement is the pace of the Earth’s rotation: an idea that motivated me to slow my awareness of time and almost grasp it. I came away feeling both satisfied and frustrated, and decided there was no end to the depth of that pursuit.
I think a lot of human happiness owes itself to the telling of time, to achieving a certain synchronicity with time. And time is more complicated than the ticking of a clock. When you look at a clock, you learn the time not from the position of its arms, but the performance of your act, and the question you ask yourself ... “2 p.m. on a Thursday, what am I doing?”
Not only can we tell time, or “ask the question,” we can also create time, through ritual. So when I brush my teeth at night, I begin to create bedtime.
As I get older I realize I have more time for activities I can repeat weekly or monthly. A good investment is one that sets a precedent I can follow, a habit I can get used to. It’s the definition of what I can afford; so I afford a way of life.
When I look at the global impact of aggregate human interests, I see a threat to our experience of time in two ways: generally and individually.
Generally, although the rotation of the Earth is not yet threatened, the rhythms that stem from that — the tides, the seasons, the migrations of birds following the seasons, the swarms of bugs following pockets of air — these minutiae are extensions of Earth time. Despite our best efforts, humans still depend on Earth time. Our minds tick to it, our bodies pulse to it. And Earth time is undergoing widespread disruption.
Individually, besides the ecology of Earth time itself, the great many products afforded by the consumer-driven market threaten my rituals and way of life. The best example is the smartphone. My smartphone replaces a lot of the products I use to order my life: the alarm clock, the newspaper, the radio, the television, the pocket compass, etc. Although it supports applications for these tools, it doesn’t support their corresponding rituals. No matter which app I use, my behavior looks and feels the same: a downward glance and a moving finger.
This blending of rituals makes it harder to order my day around those activities. By some amusing blip, I sometimes open, close, and reopen the same app multiple times for no reason. There are other examples of confusing products. Air conditioning confuses the transition of seasons. Refrigerators confuse the trajectory of Earthly sustenance. Vehicles confuse the duration of human travel.
The way of life I can afford, the habits I get used to, the rituals I perform to create time, are important to my own life, but ultimately extend further. The management of my time becomes management of intergenerational time: to live in a way that ancestors breathe through me; to live in a way that descendants can follow me. And the same principle of affordability applies. Is a smartphone a good investment? Can I, in the fullest sense of the word, afford one?
The catch-22 of free market consumerism is that human purchases represent human interests. A giant inflatable dinosaur is in the human interest by fact of my purchasing one. This is a justification nobody can argue with, because of our respect for individuality.
In a college ethics course, I came to the conclusion that the definition of injustice is an action that cannot be repeated; for whatever reason, it cannot stand the test of time.
Sullivan Fraser, who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, grew up in South Deerfield and Montague. He writes, “My father reads the My Turns every morning and this one’s for him.”
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