One
of the most interesting social phenomena today in modern technological society
is the tendency of people, particularly young people, to use their purchasing
power to buy experiences rather than things.
A lot of people today rather rent things and use things on a temporary
basis, rather than actually own things.
And there are various reasons that have been given for this. But for the purpose of this article, I am
going to focus on one stream of thought.
People need novel focused active experiences, in order to pull
themselves out of the ongoing numbness from all the frictionless mediated
experiences they encounter living in our technologically-transformed
world. In more traditional natural
environments, there is a lot of sensory variety and, therefore, a lot of
experiential variety to be had living in fixed spaces. In such environments, travel is nice, but it
is a bonus for most people (with the exception of nomads) and not such a
necessity as it is for people today.
Nowadays, people use the transformative shock of travel to pull
themselves out of their increasingly robotic work, study and general life
routines.
But
travel is not the only type of experience that is purchased today. Exercise classes, yoga classes, massage,
martial arts and all experiences that deal directly with physical
stimulation. Music is heard on You Tube,
Spotify and Pandora, and not from objects that are owned such as compact discs. Granted there is a revival in the purchases
of vinyl records, but this still does not touch the lives of most people
today. People don’t bother, in most
cases, to own hard copy photos anymore.
They just keep photos archived on their smartphones and computers. And, of course, why buy a car, when you can
take Uber and Lyft almost any place you could want to go locally.
The
key is to travel light on the journey of life today. A lot of possessions are experienced today as
a burden, something that holds a person down and prevents him from really
living. Translated into the language of
my philosophical model, people don’t want to have to bother with a lot of
defined discrete figures in their lives.
Extensive ownership of things requires an ongoing commitment to them and
an ongoing commitment to a defined discrete place to keep them, to store them. Traditionally, in our capitalist society,
accumulating a lot of possessions has not only been a sign of success, but a
demonstration of one’s capacity for commitment.
Having a place to store one’s things is an extension of one’s personal
gravity. One’s things demonstrate who one
is on an ongoing basis. Valued things
are not easily discarded and neither is one’s sense of self as emblemized by
what one owns. And having a predictable
source of stimulation of self, such as things over time, is itself an important
possession, defined discrete figures that allow one to determine one’s place in
society, so that one can have a productive occupational role and sustained
bonded relationships both in terms of family and friends. So possessions can be not only a result of
success, but also a sharpened signal to a person to indicate how to move along
a defined path of success.
Many
young people today travel light not only in terms of possessions but also in
terms of relationships. People float in
and out of sexual and romantic relationships.
People move a lot for work today, so that it becomes harder to sustain
strong family relationships and friendships.
Speaking of work, employees have no expectation of lifetime commitment
to jobs. When new experiences are the
goal, novelty and variety are what matters in sex, romance, friendship, family
and employment. Yes, even family. Look at all the blended families that are
being formed after divorce.
It
has been stated that one reason that young people have turned against ownership
is that modern capitalism has been seducing people to buy a lot of things they
don’t need to keep the economies humming and that a lot of the stuff is junk
anyway. Perhaps this has an element of
truth to it. Many people in their
parents’ generation had acquired so much stuff that they were drowning in their
possessions. That being said, I still
feel that on a deep level, the problem has really been a lack of organic
stimuli from more traditional more natural living environments. Organic experiences give people the flowing
blendable continual stimuli that they need, and when people can have such
experiences, they don’t need what becomes a tension-pocket of things to try and
connect with the external world..
And
yet having experiences divorced from the commitment of ownership can be
problematic. Experiences come and
go. They can make imprints on us, but
when we are simply the consumers, we are not making and preserving any
significant imprints on the surfaces of the fields of experience that surround
us. In recreational activities, when we
buy things to own, we are actually making an imprint, showing our taste both to
ourselves as well as to the people around us.
To the extent that it is a lasting possession, it becomes a preserved
imprint both on ourselves and on others.
When we buy a lot of similar items, we develop what would be called a
collection. Whether it is stylish clothes
or old books, stamps, coins or works of art, these collections reveal a lot
about ourselves both to ourselves and others.
On
another level, our possessions help to ground us in our fields of experience in
the external world. In a strange way,
they mirror and model for us, as we aspire to the mass, matter and substance in
the things that we hold. So that we
don’t end up floating through our numbing modern technological living
environments like ghosts. By imitating
the physicality of things, it allows us to make and preserve imprints in the
external world and then to help us make a surrogate immortality in preparation
for death.
Yes,
there is no doubt that too many things can crowd us, particularly if they are
junk. We call people with too many
things hoarders. They are people with an
addiction to things. Piles of possessions, lots of clutter that leads to the
creation of tension pockets, disjunctive juxtapositions of simply too many
things leading to visual abrasive friction. But a rejection of possessions as
manifested particularly among young people today can also be pathological. A desire for life experiences is
healthy. But experiences without
commitment in the form of possessions, similar to experiences without
relationships can lead in the end to a sense of emptiness. Meaningful possessions and meaningful
relationships are basically committed experiences. Experiences that give us grounding and
stability as we pass through the narrative of our lives.
(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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