When I am irked by the excesses of mainstream culture and the pernicious beliefs that corrupt shared life, my wife likes to say in jest: why don’t you get back on your mountain so you can look down on everyone else? So up to the summit I shall go.
The view from this lofty peak is grand; the rarified air makes vision keen and speech incisive. However, it would be dishonest of me to condemn the masses without acknowledging the mire that engrosses me. Ensconced in the middle-class, I have many nice things to my name, and I am not immune to affluenza. At the same time, one need not be unreproachable in the virtues of thrift in order to see clearly the dangers of excess, nor must one live in saintly poverty to recognize the emptiness of wealth. So let me leave the mountain top and walk the grimy streets in order to speak frankly about the rotten underside of abundance. If words land punches, I count myself among the battered.
I once had a friend who had completed a master’s degree in chemistry before turning towards law. She completed law school and started as an attorney in a firm. A handsome salary compensated for sixteen hour days and a grueling schedule. Servitude to the firm fattened her wallet. On her days off, she bought exclusive handbags, boutique footwear from European designers. These luxury goods were the recompense for her youth, those precious years that would never return. Because she traded her days for an enviable salary, she had little left of her hours except to spend the money she earned. On the rare holiday, she reaped the rewards of her labour with a credit card in hand.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote[1]. To this end, we might serve ourselves by asking whether we have aptly priced our lives through the employment of our labour and hours. Norman Fischer, a writer, poet and Zen priest, once worked for a nursery. He was sorely disappointed when he received his first cheque[2]. He then asked himself a searching question: what would be adequate compensation for his time? Similarly, you might ask yourself: what would be adequate compensation for your time? $50 per hour? $250? $1000? If you have a number in mind, perhaps you have not yet appreciated the rarity of your wild and precious life. Norman Fischer came to a surprising but sensible conclusion: no one could possibly pay him enough money for his time, for each hour that would not come again. If no one could offer a sufficient wage, his time was more dear than what the market can afford, and therefore he was already indescribably wealthy. Being wealthy, he could afford to give his time away for free. He then applied himself to his work without scruples regarding its meagre pay. Thus, he unfettered himself from the bonds of economic thinking.
Fischer’s conclusion appears absurd, but his logic reaffirms the humanity of his work. His job at the nursery did not totalize his time, nor did his employment stand as a proxy for his status and worth. He was under no illusion that his job signified of his value, nor did he collapse his identity to a salary. When our precious, fleeting lives are claimed by wealth, we reduce our lives to a number. Our creativity, imagination, character are thus confined to a sempiternal transaction. Lost time is paid for in cold cash, which buys shiny goods and expensive vacations, but none of which serve as adequate replacements for the scarce hours of a fleeting life. Shiny wares might dazzle the eye and signal status in a class-conscious culture; but none of these items can equal the cultivation of character, the sweetness of connection, the joy of service, communion with nature, and intimacy with the sacred. Even the most lavish goods lose their lustre with time, not because the materials change but because we do. Busyness in exchange of goods that cannot ultimately satisfy only weighs us down and saps our vitality in the pursuit of that which cannot deepen our humanity.
There are critics who will balk at my proposition. Value is relative, they will say. A European hand-bag is worth the price to one person, while a hand-crafted guitar is worthwhile to another. Let the hermit live a life of simplicity, let the tycoon procure a collection of cars. To each their own. This relativist position is not the model of tolerance that it purports. The relativist view circumvents a critical scrutiny of consumption and avoids the uncomfortable implication that some lifestyles are more ethical, more wholesome, and better for collective well-being than others. Without wishing to single out others or ourselves, the relativist view implicates no one, puts no one on the defensive, and therefore maintains an artifice of agreeableness upon which polite conversation depends. In deference to social harmony, the status quo remains unchallenged.
18K Gold Toilet. When price is severed from value, we undermine our ability to discern the difference between excess and necessity, the significant and the trivial.
However, value is not relative. Clean air is indispensable. Water is sacred. Sustenance is absolute. Planetary vitality, the precondition for all life, supervenes the sordid inventions of value conjured by human fictions. Luxurious goods are moot when the air is choked with smoke, the rivers with detritus. Exclusive, limited edition pieces that fetch handsome prices are the more absurd when the world is burning. Unbridled consumerism denudes forests and clogs landfills. Industry has an interest in maintaining a blindness to its ecological impacts in the construction of its own myth. Those reluctant to, or refuse to recognize the collective impact of industrial consumerism only condone the establishment by their indifference, often rationalized through appeals to mental wellness and psychological fragility. Thus, wilful blindness forestalls the painful recognition of complicity. When value is thus warped, there is little left to say in defence of life itself.
Let me return to Thoreau: “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.”[3] However, the trouble lies in wealth’s tendency to erode our powers of discernment and warp the reference points from which judgements of value are derived. When Michelin-star meals and 5-star hotels become the norm, our benchmarks of price and value start to drift. Excess and waste become less apparent. The definition of expensive is upended when every item, no matter how exorbitant, meets with no constraint in a surfeit of money. Before consumer capitalism possesses our appetites, it steals our basic power to judge between necessity and superfluity, such that the notion of excess becomes irrelevant. The price of something is justified merely by what the market will afford. If someone is willing to pay for it, then it is worth the price. The result is a collapse in the ability to ascertain the correlation between goods and their effect on human wellbeing. We are enamoured of that which has a price, but squander that which is essential and priceless.
That we cannot establish without controversy the ultimate benchmarks of price and value, or reliably arbitrate the line between moderation and excess, does not make the project futile. The ongoing reflection of how we use our dollars, how our spending shapes our dispositions and character, is itself a formative exercise that sharpens judgement and calibrates our habits. There may never be a perfect state of moderation, but we live temperance by practicing temperance; we actualize contentment by practicing contentment. It is the practice, rather than the attainment, that burnishes the skill and livens the faculty. The ongoing investigation of desire, impulse and craving, the frequent discussion of what constitutes necessaries and superfluities, the observation of deeper psychologies that surround consumption, are part of that larger project of living an examined life.
Affluenza has been parcel to material progress and economic development. Most people do not believe themselves afflicted. It’s easy to condemn the outrageous spending habits documented in The Queen of Versailles[4]. However, extreme cases only crystalize what is already pervasive in the culture. So long as we believe wealth to be an unalloyed good, that there are no limits to growth, that riches equal personal worth and happiness, we are all acolytes after the Queen of Versailles.
[1] Henry D. Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York, NY: Random House, 2000).
[2] Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places (Place of publication not identified: HarperOne, 2016).
[3] Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings.
[4] Lauren Greenfield, The Queen of Versailles (Magnolia Pictures, 2012), https://www.magpictures.com/thequeenofversailles/.