Got a really nice gift for Christmas. A Christmas Shopping card. I am grateful to receive it but it is going to feel like the biggest lie. I have real cash money that can only be dispensed at a given department store. Though I would readily use it to buy groceries, I must spend the $ on apparel to enhance my individual image of prestige and overall health - which is a lie. I will be a stagnant being wrapped in finery which was designed by professionals. I am a walking billboard.
If I were to be born any time, it would have been the brief few decades after the American Civil War and before major movements of U.S. industrialization. At Christmas time I would cherish my homemade clothing or maybe the pair of store-bought overalls that I would wear to formal gatherings until about a year - then I would break them in during a day of hard work. Maybe we would own some land. I would know about animals and see death first hand and learn to be OK with it. My body would be in shape from modest but regular exercise. I would praise my own being, because the strength of my own body would have been adequate to inherit the riches of the earth. My tobacco would not contain rat poison. Corn would be for eating. I would hopefully worry less - you don't know what people worried about back then, that was before existentialism so I will say more confidently: I would be less worried. My mind would be healthier. I could make things, I could do things that I felt mattered. I would fix a fence because if I did not, the livestock would escape. I would know about things that involved the earth. I would be thrilled to hide from winter, praising the heat from a wood stove and the heat of my own body, underneath hides or under quilts filled with real goose feathers. I would have dirt under my fingernails. I would smell like dirt. I would smell flowers more often. I would grow things. I would live a shorter, more uncertain life. I would have much better conversations. Sex would be far more interesting and exciting. Life would demand creativity - but a different kind of creativity. It would be the original creativity that people still want. It is a type of creativity which is designed to enrich, not to sell. A creativity which adds mystery to what one already posses. It is art which brings a person to a still-point and curiosity, rather than an unsettled desire and dissatisfaction. Education would be relative. Maybe literary, maybe business, maybe wine. The objective of a family or community education would not be to make sense of the world, but to make sense of one's identity and connection with the earth. My identification papers might say that I was Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, but I would define myself and be innocent to an industrialized Church with its hierarchies and power structures. My idealized dream is a dream. I read the words of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson and I can clearly see what this dream looks like.
Coming out of the dream, I know that it is not possible anymore. I have been forced to make a great trade from what I originally wanted. Debt is my only uncertainty. There will be treatments in high-tech hospitals for previously deadly conditions. There are remedies for quick pain-relief which can conveniently be accessed in a variety of forms. I can eat seafood in Kansas. This is my new individualism. I define myself by the things I buy and eat. I enjoy many comforts (and is this ultimately what I want?). I have consolations of flushing toilets, air travel, automobiles, AC, furnaces and a stack of bills that come in the mail. My mind tries to imagine the world with so many millions of transactions and processes happening at once. The millions of pilots and bus drivers who painstakingly wake up early to transport ignorant students who are trying to find themselves. People suffer cramped, dirty existences in India. Knowledge is painful. Compare human lifestyles from centuries past to now. The great argument of Progress is whether the majority of humanity has benefited aside from the major benefactors. I feel guilty for not appreciating the careers of millions of scientists and businessman who gave me such opportunities and seem to erased others. To reject it means being open to accepting and unnecessarily early death, maybe the threat of missing out on relationships in the real world. I suppose if you really succeeded in the infamous "system" today, you could indeed buy anything you wanted... Including the closest thing to a 19th century life.
The challenge is to find a healthy way to embrace contemporary living that feels meaningful. Not easy but... interesting.
