comfort

The nature of comfort has been on my mind a lot lately. Sometimes I wonder what it is I really want in life. On one hand, I really enjoy all of my toys...so much so that I'm continually pining after the next best thing. Not the coolest gadget necessarily, but something that really changes the way I look at the world. "I work hard for this," I tell myself..."I need something to reward myself. I like computers, and Hi-Def TV, and my iPhone.

On the other hand, I read articles like this:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125798440&ft=1&f=1001

and I ask myself "What are the costs associated with the way I live my life?" I'm not sure if it's a stretch to connect the dots between the victims of arguably the worst natural disaster in American history and a consumerist lifestyle. I think the dotted line goes something like:

[I work hard to make money and spend it on stuff] -> [I like buying stuff made in China] -> [Manufacturers in China are making a middle class by creating millions of jobs and operating huge companies on razor thin margins] -> [China keeps exports cheap by tightly controlling those companies, their margins, and their currency policy] -> [Undervalued currency helps China buy American treasuries and fund American spending] -> [American deficit spending is accounting for over 700,000 census jobs alone, an odd uptick in jobs created in an awful economic climate] -> [The state of the American economy is contributing to the suffering of a lot of people, mostly those who can't afford to suffer any more] -> [I wonder what percentage of this nation's poor live around New Orleans?]

Okay, it's a bit of a stretch.... But still, how do we really know what the costs are of the things we buy? We know what we pay at the cash register. But what are the indirect costs? How many irresponsible decisions are foreign manufacturing companies making (where, presumably, workers rights are much more easily trodden upon) to save me $100 on my TV? Can one reasonably claim that the ability of foreign manufacturers to attract business by maintaining a cheap labor force takes that job away from an American worker? Would this cause that American worker to have to accept a job that keeps them in poverty? Does my lifestyle in some way indirectly lead to the suffering of others due to the ebb and flow of socio-economic forces?

Back to an earlier point, the price of things seems to drive a lot of my desire to succeed in my career, so that I can earn more money and buy more things. Or things more frequently. Whatever. But is that really what it means to be comfortable? What if I lost my job and could only find work that paid 1/2 of my current salary? What would I give up? Would I still be comfortable? Would I redefine comfort?

So if none of the things I strive for now would make the cut, and the things I strive for may be causing American society to deteriorate*...am I focusing on the wrong things? Would I be happier if I adjusted my priorities now and took control of an apparently insatiable appetite for toys? What would such a fundamental life change look like? I wonder if I'll ever have the guts.....


* - I believe that the concentration of American wealth over the last 25 years into 5% of the American populace is the single biggest contributer to social deterioration and generally bad stuff happening in our cities. Probably more on this another time. Interesting read:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

stunnah

I'm continually astonished that my über-liberal representative to the federal congress manages to walk a rhetorical tightrope that combines peace-loving activism and a populist anti-bourgeois message, while progressing absolutely no practical legislative agenda. How do these people keep getting elected? How have they lost so much sense of accountability to their constituencies?

In the last year I've written at least four letters to this guy (I'm pretty sure it's been more), and not a single one of them has received a reply. I should take an informal poll to see how many of my acquaintances in my district have written him and the percentage of letters that his office has acknowledged receiving. If quantity of correspondence can be taken as a measure of involvement with one's elected representatives, I'd roughly guess that I'm in the top 80% of "involved" constituents. If our representatives don't even have the decency to answer an engaged populace, god help save our democracy....

The First

I'll bet if you took a poll of the first post of every blog ever written, the overwhelming majority would have some form of, "...so I decided to try this blogging thing out...", or, "...I can't believe I'm writing this blog..." accompanying some description of what led the author to spill his or her guts to the world. Regardless of the cliche, I'll dive right in with my own form of I can't believe I'm writing a blog.....the movie Avatar made me do it. Weird, right?

I'm not an avid writer and I've never kept a journal. I certainly never anticipated publishing my random thoughts to the whole wide Internet to read. I suppose that this is my own way of putting form to a lot of things that have been troubling me lately.

I follow politics, and I'm a self-confessed news junkie. More, I consider myself something of an amateur sociologist, though I'm sure a "real" sociologist would scoff at this bit of hubris. It's probably more accurate to say that I enjoy observing people and how they interact with one another. At any rate, I find myself continuously fascinated by the human condition and this world that we live in. I'm especially stunned by how our societies seems to glorify some of our worst traits. It makes me wonder if this is a modern condition or if ages past each had their own warts. What lenses distort our perceptions of our collective past?

Hopefully this leads me back to my point...the movie Avatar and why I decided to write. I had heard from somebody that there were people who, after seeing that movie, were so dissatisfied with their own lives they had actually considered committing suicide on the off chance that in the afterlife they might be reborn in some similar realm. After going to see the movie, which I have to admit really changed my mind about what cinema could be (more on this in another post maybe), it made me wonder what aspects of that fantasy land those people envied. I would ask in a hypothetical interview with one of these hearsay subjects...[SPOILER ALERT!]...was it the simpler lifestyle of the natives? Was it the fantastic and pristine landscape? Was it the highly-advanced ability for all life on that planet to commune and coexist (see symbiosis)? Was it the willingness for that small and seemingly out-gunned populace to stand up to a superior force in defense of their homes and traditions?

As a follow-up to an affirmative answer to any of these, I would pose another question. Why do people not find similar satisfactions in their own lives? Most people have the capacity to live simply, we just choose not to. It is certainly within our powers to inhabit a pristine landscape, but it is harder and harder to remain isolated from the modern world that responsible inhabitance of that landscape seems to demand. While we may not have evolved advanced physical interfaces that allow us to commune with our world and other creatures inhabiting our planet (assuming of course that you buy into the Gaia theory), who's to say that had the native westerners defeated the invading Europeans in the early 1400's things wouldn't have turned out differently? The Native American cultural reverence for life and almost mythical ability to live in harmony with their surroundings seems to support at least some sort of species capability. I'm sure everybody can think of some present personal situation, large or small, where the little guy is getting it stuck to them by The Man. Doesn't everybody root for the underdog?

Perhaps this is an unfair question, since it seems that no matter what one's tendencies, the inertia of society dictates a lot of our direction. I envy a simpler lifestyle, but I'm a professional and a consumer. I excuse my behavior by saying that I love electronics and toys, but I often question whether these things make me genuinely happier or burden me with stuff and invoices to be paid. It's pretty apparent that humanity has past the point of no return with this world. Planet Earth will never again be a complete wilderness as long as humans abide here. But why has it been so difficult for society to accept fundamental behavioral change that is required to stop killing the planet? Why are we still addicted to fossil fuels? Why is deforestation still a problem?

I don't pretend to have answers or even present coherent thought here. This is a channel tuned to the part of my brain that thinks about the wide world; I make leaps of logic that confound in hopes of finding insight and understanding. Regardless, I invite anybody who runs across this to leave behind your own thoughts, criticisms and questions....hopefully by listening to one another and engaging in some discourse, we can all gain a little better understanding and improve our own conditions.

Namaste.