I wonder when it all started that we turned into such suckers that we fall for almost every piece of marketing and herd thinking going around.
Let’s start with the basic over consumption, needing the latest gizmo epidemic we’ve attached ourselves to.
You only have to go for a walk around the neighbourhood to see the electronic equipment dumped on verges and nature strips (presumable waiting to rise to the skies in some sort of resurrection). Bulky TV sets, computer equipment, printers, stereos all come to rest on the grass. Am I the only one who wonders how many of them actually no longer work?
Put aside the gobsmacking dumb thinking of just plopping the equipment out on the verge because the owners are too bone lazy to take to the tip or to an eWaste collection point. The thing that concerns me is have we really turned into a society where we buy things now based on wanting to have the latest rather than need? Our parents and grandparents would be astounded to think that we would replace something before it conked out and fork out good, hard earned money (or worse stick it on the plastic) for something that is absolutely unnecessary except for our sense of worth.
So what of this sense of worth? We seem to feel something ‘less’ if we don’t have what ‘everyone’ else has, if our iPad can’t make coffee or our TV only broadcasts TV shows for heavens sake. And now a car is simply
tres ordinaire if it doesn’t parallel park automatically – good grief. Our sense of worth is tied into a sense of belonging BUT that belonging is based on what we own and how well we can converse with each other about technology. And this is all about marketing and a deliberate cultural shift that has given us appliance envy.
So where does this lead us? If you can’t afford the latest or don’t have the sort of living quarters that accommodate an in home theatre how does it all impact on your sense of self worth, belonging to the tribe, in old terms ‘with it’?
The big items are bad enough but we have coffee machines that need ‘pods’ to whip up a coffee and those pods are environment vandals using coffee at a rate that means one pays per kg a price far outreaching a barrel of oil. Disposable razors that ‘tell us’ when they are blunt although how a piece of plastic can do that is beyond any scientific explanation. Printers which are poorly designed (they don’t need to be so bulky) use ink cartridges that cost a fortune to replace. Bottled water which is a simple redundancy in a country that has the healthiest and cheapest tap water in the world. Mobile Phones which cost $35 to produce and are sold ‘on a plan for free’ which in real terms means they cost you about $300. And then there are the telecommunications and computer equipment which is redundant the day it is sold because the companies making them will almost certainly be starting testing on the next model (which of course we MUST then buy).
It’s hideous and we keep falling for it and I simply do not where this came from and why.
How about going another step and thinking about where a lot of products are produced and how equitably the supply chain is distributed. It is a bitter irony that a person making a TV probably can’t afford to buy them, mainly because the price of a TV in, say, India or Bangladesh, sells for the same mark up as it does in the higher waged countries. We think it is attractive that other countries would want to be the same as ‘us’ and as well off as us but turn a blind eye to the exploitation of the workers and the inequities that produces. We use language of the slave traders (‘colored folk wouldn’t know what to do with wages’) or the generations who kept women down socially and economically (‘you start paying women the same as men and they’ll expect to run the company’). It is so easy to apply an argument from our comfortable perspective without consideration of the logical conclusion to them. I get the effect on the world economy if a factory worker in China making clothing was suddenly paid the same as a clothing working in Sydney but isn’t that just being fair if we do? Why is that person in China not worth the same as the one in Sydney? Why wasn’t a woman who canned fruit in Shepparton entitled to be paid the same as a man doing the same job at the same cannery in the 60’s? Why was a slave in America ploughing a field paid nothing when a white man working in a bank in Boston was?
And why were people in a Bangladesh factory making shirts for a British department store a week or so back not worth being safe from death in a fire?
The next time you pop on a nice shirt made in India, or switch on your flash TV while enjoying your movie star coffee, resting your feet on some fine furniture that replaced what was all working very well, take a moment to consider the circle of connection and the part you are playing in the way the world is today.
And wonder why it is like this.
When it all started.
Where it will all end.
And weep with me…
