Choices, So Many Choices
Monday, May 15th, 2006I have my moments when all I want is simplicity. I don’t want anything overdone. I don’t want too much, just enough. I want something that works well. That’s all well and good, but this refinement can quickly slip into pretension.
This is so evident in the latest VW commercial. It has a couple who realize they’re not guilty of fronting while driving their Volkswagen. Yeah, right. Volkswagen drivers have about as much social capital as mac user. (Personal disclaimer: I’d really like to have a VW and an Apple IBook.) I’d be more likely to believe the commercial if they were driving this.
I got to thinking about all this when I came across an article in a magazine called Grist. The author, Elizabeth Chin, writes about the role that access to everyday resources like a grocery store. This is one indicator of a person’s wealth, or affluence, she writes. What I found most striking is her critique of the whole notion of Simplifying.
Simplifying, for the wealthy, has become a task, a burden, an end in itself. (When I say “the wealthy,” I mean nearly every citizen of every wealthy nation.) For so many people in wealthy worlds, simplifying has also become an industry which, ironically, turns out an array of alluring products: toxin-free paint so wholesome it’s known as “milk”; clothing woven from hemp fibers; even the fat, glossy magazine Real Simple. But conscious simplicity is not what it appears to be. After all, Thoreau’s idyll at Walden Pond was made possible by the fact that someone else did his laundry. Which is to say: for most people, living simply is a luxury, and one that still ends up consuming a great deal — whether new categories of goods, other people’s labor, or both.
You can find the full article here.
The article is hard hitting because there’s a part of me that says we’ve got too many damn choices and that’s our problem these days. She says no.
To combat an environment that gives me too many choices to count, I try to fight — not so much by changing all my choices, but by helping to make choices available to those who have too few.
This is counterintuitive to me. It is often the case that all I see are the crappy choices presented on tv, at Wally World and wherever else (say the school lunchroom). I don’t want anymore choices and how could giving more to somebody else help at all? But this despair runs up against her article again (jeeze).
I am keenly aware that my sense of too-muchness is itself a sign of my privilege and my wealth — even if, like many, I experience this wealth as loss and emptiness.
Choice, then, is not in and of itself a bad thing. The kinds of choices we have access to, however, are indicative of our social and economic standing. I still want to ask, is it enough to have decent choices? Is there more to life? I suppose it depends on what the choices are.
