Tuesday, June 21, 2005

The Poverty of Plenty

After a long hiatus, I have to open the newest entry with an expression of the utter futility of human activity. I sit here now engaged in a commercial activity that while relaxing in a Zen sort of way I have to question the logic of. For over an hour tonight I have perched myself here entering items for sale into my beckett.com marketplace but logically speaking there’s no point to it whatsoever. At last count, I had 85,943 different items for sale there, all entered by hand over the course of a little over two years. The reasoning for all this effort is a straightforward one: Money. Everyone wants a little extra money in their life but in my case it’s become obvious that I spend so much time acquiring the money in question that I don’t really have any time left to enjoy it. My mindless hobby has become a slave driver as every night I find myself trudging upstairs to mail out someone’s order. I could make more money in less time working at McDonalds but would they let me watch Dr. Who while I was making cheeseburgers?

When I was younger, this was all much less contradictory. I had a piddling allowance and more importantly nowhere to shop. For most of my life, I had access to one bookshop (and by bookshop I mean a junk shop that had shelf upon shelf of old dusty books from the 30s and 40s) so when the freak coincidences of ‘having the money for’ and ‘actually finding something worth buying’ occurred it was a MAJOR event. Even more significant, however, was the fact that when this major event occurred I actually went home and READ the book in question. When I waded through the hundreds of ancient arithmetic books and finally found a good calculus book I actually sat down and learned calculus. In relative terms, I had next to nothing but somehow it counted for more.

Now I can freely convert free time into cash and almost every book ever published is at my fingertips but in most significant ways I have lost ground. Before, I concentrated on a topic out of necessity. If I had a Latin textbook then I was bound to it by the virtue of its uniqueness in my library. It was either study the new Latin textbook or something I’d already read so the choice was simple. Today, in the glut of availability I have too many distractions. Which subject do I choose for my purposeless studies? Spanish? Latin? French? Russian? Botany? Mathematics? Literature? Writing? And once I get involved in one thing or another, I start to feel guilty about neglecting the others and am invariably pulled away. Because I have access to so much, everything I have is without value. I have a huge library covering all manner of topics from the sciences to languages yet do I speak any of these languages? Have I acquired any new skills? Hell no. I’ve wasted a lot of time and money acquiring these possessions but be damned if anything positive has actually come of it.

The same applies to my larger work life. Why should I work at a job I find relatively dissatisfying just so my family can have a larger and more expensive house than they really absolutely need? Would they not be equally happy if I were working in a library or science lab somewhere at one third my current salary? One might even argue that they would in fact be happier with less. When one has more, one tends to need more. The more I do to satiate the needs of those around me the more necessary it becomes to increase the dosage to maintain the same level of happiness. In the long term, this is not maintainable. In an odd way, the more you have at the beginning the sooner you are doomed to feel dissatisfied with your existence.

Clearly, in the game of the human condition, less is more. People in poverty find joy in things that the rest of us take for granted. Long gone are the days when an orange was considered a delicacy. The whole world is oranges; bring on the cocaine.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nothing brings a smile to my face faster than reading one of your entries...bring on the cocaine is going to be my new mantra! HA!

Let me digest this a little; think on it. I run the risk of over-analyzing, but hey; that's alright I guess.

More to follow.

Anonymous said...

See, I knew this would be the problem with your zillion blogs. It took me 28 days just to stumble across this post! All this time I've been checking The Cow!

- Charlie

Anonymous said...

"When one has more, one tends to need more." Yes! That is "grasping" and this is why the topic you need to pick to read up on next is Buddhism! :-)

In the Sutta Nipata the Buddha said: "When you take things it is because of a thirst, a clinging, and a grasping. You should lose that and lose it altogether, above, below, around, and within. It makes no difference what it is you are grasping. When you grasp, you are losing your freedom. Realize this and grasp at nothing. Then you will cease being a creature of attachment, tied to the powers of death."

Or you could just throw a dart at your book shelf... ;-)

- Charlie

Anonymous said...

I just re-read this last post of yours. Reminded me of this quote.
- Charlie

There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But-and this is the point-who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
- Annie Dillard