Sunday, October 16, 2022

The Prosperity Ratchet

A luxury soon becomes a necessity.
Example number twelve zillion: I just drove five minutes to the Guatemalan deli for soup. Halfway there, I realized I'd gone out without my preciousssssssss. No iPhone. Well, no biggie. It's just soup! Back in a minute!

The deli was playing the coolest Mexican banda I'd ever heard (I'm a superfan of the genre). And the Guatemalans - who know nothing about Mexico, and for whom the source of the omnipresent music is as mysterious as water or electricity - couldn't help me.

My hand kept reaching into my empty pocket, but the band would remain forever unknown to me. This shocks me, as a modern human entitled to know stuff. I couldn't even jot down a to-do note to try to figure it out!


And there you have it. The central (and almost entirely unrecognized) dilemma of our era. A luxury soon becomes a necessity.

Here we all are, ensconced in unimaginable safety, comfort and freedom, enjoying such vast discretionary wealth that among our gravest problems - even among our "poor" - are the overabundance of food and of personal possessions. Yet we sulk and complain far more than our forebears.

Those ancestors worked and sacrificed to elevate us to this position of heady delight, but the joke's on them: we fuckin hate it. Because the more delightful it gets, the more delight we feel entitled to, and the more irritated we are by petty irritations. We are princesses constantly scanning for smaller and smaller mattress peas.

After 300,000 years, home sapiens has hacked the reward/punishment system, but, as the driving force for all biological life, that process never stops. We wearily accept the heady rewards, which have come to feel like entitlement ("a luxury soon becomes a necessity"), but, in the absence of any real punishment, we fabricate it.

We fabricate grievance and victimhood, even while we wryly recognize “rich people problems,” hahaha. We pour ourselves into sad songs and stories, violent films and video games, and endless rumination over the failure of a given perfect moment to be perfect in every parameter we can dream up.

A friend recently threw a perfect party for the perfect marriage of her perfect daughter, but all she could do was tearfully weep over HOW AWFUL IT WAS THAT HER FATHER COULDN'T SEE IT. I pointed out that this same line could be used to ruin absolutely any delightful moment (remember how we all ballast our happiness?). "I love the cherry pie...but HOW AWFUL THAT MY FATHER CAN'T TASTE IT!"

My observation did nothing to lighten her load; her entitled grievance; her weighty self-encumbrance. Yes, she nodded solemnly, it's true. This imperfection - this unimaginably tragic rupture in her unsullied perfection - has ruined positively everything.

All-purpose self-punishment for the gal who has it all!


If you think I'm A MONSTER because GRIEVING IS HARD and the flamboyantly aggrieved deserve special treatment and solicitous soothing, read this and then read this.

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