Squonk

I believe there's more to life than being successful in the materialistic meaning of the word. It seems to me that a very distinctive Western culture has developed and begun to undermine other traditional cultures and values. I personally feel entrenched in the ideal of American consumerism. I have multiple material possessions—when I went to Peru last summer, I went crazy with buying things because of the very low offering prices. I obsessed over buying presents for everyone back home, and when we ended up traveling to tourist cities I spent nearly all my time searching for alpaca sweaters and other less than meaningful gifts. It was the trip of a lifetime and I spent about the whole time thinking about souvenirs. When I came back to North Carolina, no one cared about the stories I had about haggling in the little shops.

It really does frustrate me that I live in a society that places such emphasis on consumerism. I feel that a side effect of this value is unhappiness. Possessions are prized far more than personal relationships, spirituality, and knowledge, for the most part. Money can be measured, and a person can be judged based on their clothes, house(s), jobs, and friends, who are judged using the same system of measurement. It's pretty pathetic when the celebrity who makes millions of dollars on pitiful excuses for movies, blows the money on a mansion in California, and parties all the time, gives nothing back to society except a bad role-model.

In my opinion gift-giving is a way for people to focus on themselves rather than others—it was (and is) used as a way to replace intangible things, such as lost parents or friends, love, and broken promises. The best presents are instead either extremely practical or useful or very meaningful to either the giver or the receiver. I think that most people recognize this, but not many know how to give gifts like that. There's the saying "it's the thought that counts," but seriously, most people don't put any thought into gifts they buy for others; At least not any affectionate thought.

I worked in a Hallmark store for a year and after a while it became extremely apparent that none of the people who came in to get cards ever wrote anything other than the word "love", a comma, and their name on the inside of the card, and then perhaps the name of the recipient on the outside. It's almost rude. Quite often when customers couldn't find the perfect card, I would suggest that they pick a nice blank one and write a message inside it. Not once did any of them take my advice. We also sold a huge number of worthless knickknacks in there. To see people buy them with the expectation that the poor soul receiving the useless item would actually like it, was almost more than I could take, other than seeing women spending hours in the store and walking out with near on a hundred dollars of merchandise (which was horrendously overpriced). I always worked with at least one other person, who was always female, and I can't even recall the number of times I ranted about my problems with the capitalist society and how much I hated working in retail. However, being hypocritical, I joined them in crowding around a calculator to see how much our 30% would take off on our frequent purchases of equally useless merchandise.

That first job really exposed me to the world—I learned what people really do with their time and money, which Western society finds so precious. I won't try to blame capitalism on America, because the economic system started far too long ago to account for. But materialism has become so prevalent in many people born today, and I feel that anything in the world that is more important and innately satisfying to people will be lost in the influx of consumerism worldwide.

Recently, my research on the Mbuti pygmy tribe of the Ituri rainforest in the Congo made me realize, through some very moving passages in a National Geographic article, just how unhappy the majority of Westerners are with their lives. The author, who spent some time in the rainforest itself, said "I was impressed with how happy and comfortable the Pygmies are in the forest. Sometimes I would hear one of them tell a story, and the others would start laughing so hard that they would have to hold each other up. By my estimate they are a lot more content than Western culture because they don't care about acquiring and maintaining material possessions. They live off the forest and take only what they need. Hopefully, we can let that survive." Indeed. I take the most pleasure in knowledge and learning. To me, the most important thing in life is learning—in my passions there seems to be a thread of the communication of information. I would write or make films (not the Hollywood kind, the Indies and documentaries that tell stories about real people or create a real-life story in a creative way), or maybe become a politician and try to change things in the world by studying issues and history in detail.

I envy the people who ignore the societal pressures to conform and be successful in the material meaning of the word. I'm stuck in the rut of pushing myself to follow inane orders from equally crazy teachers in a high school that is based on a very specific set of values and teaching/learning goals. My parents emphasize the importance of getting my applications into the admissions offices in time (I haven't started yet), and since I'm already focusing on schoolwork, the stress builds and builds. Mary, my psycho-therapist, has been telling me how the ability to function in this fast-paced society is necessary to survival. I can just see myself in ten years, with a perfectly good college degree, working in a boring sit-down office job for some dysfunctional company that just perpetuates this crazy consumer culture. If I'm lucky, I'll have lost all these beliefs about capitalism and Western society because then I'll be focused on the money I make, the car I have, and the house I can afford. I'll aspire to something that can be measured, and even if it all comes back to haunt me, I can just put up that mind-block and ignore the absurdity of it all. Just like everyone else.

posted by Sarah Ruiz  # 11:43 PM