Society

I have a beef with our society. Ok, I have many. I have worked hard for years trying to keep my life simple and uncluttered. I want to be the anti-soccer mom (or dad, in this case). A soccer mom never stops. She wakes up in the morning, gets the kids dressed, fed, and off to school. She cleans house all day and then, perhaps, goes to work a nine hour day at a big law firm. After her whirlwind workday, she jumps in her SUV and races to pick the kids up from school and deliver them to piano lessons, karate class, and, yes, soccer practice. She does it all with a double frappe latte in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Her schedule for the afternoon reads something like this:

3:00pm – pick up little Jimmy from school.
3:01pm – drop off little Jimmy at underage knitting group
3:01pm – stop at Mocha Escape for Triple Caf, Half Latte Frappe drink
3:01pm – pick up Wilamina from ballet.
3:01pm – drop off Wilamina at Thai boxing.
3:01pm – pick up little Jimmy from underage knitting group

lather, rinse, repeat.

I browse articles in National Geographic about life in Tibet and see people, sitting outside, smiling, talking, working with their hands in an unhurried manner, and it speaks to me. No, I don’t really want to go live in Tibet - I like running water. But, there’s something about an unhurried, uncomplicated life that appeals to me. It’s something we’ve lost as a society in the past twenty years. How? Why?


Communities

In the age of the internet, cell phones, text pagers and instant messaging, we are supposed to be more connected than ever before. While I grant that cell phones have a safety component to them (calling 911 as you careen down a hillside in your car), all of these communication technologies are supposed to bring us together. I would argue that they have isolated us and pushed the pace of our lives to unacceptable speeds. Why call someone at home? Why leave a message on their voicemail? We have instant access to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Have you heard people answer phones in restaurants? Restrooms? In our culture of instant gratification, we’re unable and unwilling to wait even a few hours for a response. We get angry when we can’t get hold of someone right now.

While these technologies are supposed to bring us together, they have all captured our attention. After all, they’re not just tools: they’re fascinating, shiny electronic gizmos that we covet. If ours is two years old, we are laughed at by our friends and neighbors. We are shamed into buying the newest, snazziest, smallest and shiniest. We are so fascinated by these devices that we forget to look up at the world and the people around us. We join MSN communities on the internet and forget that there are real communities right outside our computer room windows. Communities full of real people, real interactions and real social skills (another rapidly diminishing trait). We use emoticons and “LOL” as substitutes for the real thing, but they’re just that: substitutes. Why go to a library when we can be buried under an avalanche of four million hits on an internet search? Why go to a ball game when we can watch it in high-def? Why go to a friend’s house when you can IM them with smiley faces? Why build a tree fort or a snow fortress when you can shoot up evil Martian pixels on your PS2?

Choice

One of the wonders of a free market economy is choice. If we’re willing to pay for a product, then that product will be produced. Further, if two companies make the same product at the same price, then each must find some sort of edge – something different – to keep their product from being outsold by the competition. I was at the grocery store buying food (not ordering it online, paying by entering digits from a plastic card, and having it magically appear) when I discovered something startling. The soda aisle contained 13 different kinds of Coke.

In case I have readers from the south, allow me to clear something up: in the south, ‘soda’ or ‘pop’ is often referred to as ‘a coke’ no matter what it’s brand. If you can find Pepsi in or around Atlanta, you could get one by asking for ‘a coke’. That’s not what I’m talking about. Further, I’m not talking about all the labels that the Coca Cola company produces. I am not referring to Sprite, Dasani, Minute Maid, POWERade, Odwalla and so on. I mean there were 13 different types of Coca Cola.

Coca Cola
Diet Coke
Caffeine Free Diet Coke
Caffeine Free Coca Cola Classic
Diet Coke with Splenda
Diet Coke with Lime
Coke Zero
C2
Black Cherry Vanilla Coke
Black Cherry Vanilla Diet Coke
Vanilla Coke
Diet Vanilla Coke
Cherry Coke

Deciding what soda to purchase might not be such a big deal, but it’s just a symptom. Choice is wonderful until there are so many choices as to be a paralyzing overload of decisions to be made. If you have shopped for televisions lately, you are no doubt aware that it is naïve these days to show up at an electronics store and expect to purchase a tv based on whether you’d like the 19 inch or 21 inch version. You must now decide what technology you are interested in - CRT, LCD, DLP, plasma, LCoS. Gone are the days of regular old tv. You can watch the old 4:3 broadcast format, 16:9 widescreen or the 2.35:1 aspect ratio of some DVDs, and how you view each one on a 16:9 widescreen tv is handled differently by each manufacturer. Modern televisions also give you the choice of plugging in a dizzying array of devices. It is common to see new televisions have two co-ax inputs, two composite or S-video inputs, three component inputs, two HDMI inputs, 4-pin and 6-pin USB jacks and a host of audio connections as well. Your friendly salesman may convince you that not only are composite cables evil, but any component cable less than their top-of-the-line nickel iridium sulfate plated, platinum braided, UV-B shielded cables will cause your screen image to appear as though it was shot with a 1930s hand cranked camera wielded by a drunk midget. But, there are choices other than the top-of-the-line…

Once you get your television home, you must decide whether basic cable does it for you anymore. Of course you’ll want your cable company’s HD upgrade, but it only comes with a couple HD channels. For a few dollars more a month, you can purchase digital cable and do away with that bulky eyesore of a cable box. For a few dollars more, you can upgrade to Digital Classics and add DiscoveryHD, ClassicBlackAndWhiteMoviesHD and two channels of InHD, which as far as I can tell, exists solely to play various HD programs. Apparently, on InHD you never know what you might see. You could get relatively still images of the Serengeti, a Mariners game, or live childbirth. Of course, this is all without HBO, HBO2, Starz Superpack, Pay-Per-View or anything labeled ‘on demand’. I would advocate for cable al a carte (because I don’t want the Latvian Mud Wrestling channel), but that would involve more choice and I’m definitely against that.

I am not old enough to use our government’s new health care plan, nor do I have actual first hand knowledge of it, but my information comes from people I love and trust that recently had cause to wander into the blizzard of confusion on behalf of a family member. I am told that there are hundreds of options that need to be decided on. Each comes with benefits and drawbacks. Some cover certain medications at level ‘A’ and procedures at level ‘B’, while others cover some medications at level ‘Q’ and other at ‘R’, but some procedures at ‘Y’ and others at ‘M’. Furthermore, once you choose a plan, it is difficult or impossible to double back and chose something different that might suit your needs more completely. It is, the plan administrators’ prerogative, though, to change benefit coverage after you’ve signed on. The cacophony of choices would be confusing enough for someone healthy and mentally agile, but is simply cruelty to foist those – potentially life changing – choices on the elderly.

Entitlement

Why do we feel as though we are owed anything? Why do we – as a society – feel that if anything bad happens to us, such as a car crash or an honest medical mistake made, we are entitled to a lot of cash to cover both the actual amount we’re spending to clean up the mess and an additional sum for ‘pain and suffering’. Where is it written that we shouldn’t suffer once in a while? Don’t get me wrong – I’m not in favor of suffering, I just don’t think it’s a law that we can’t suffer without out-of-whack restitutions being made.

It’s not just courtroom entitlement, though. I see them all the time on airplanes: people who purchased a $49 round trip ticket and somehow manage to seem surprised and disgruntled when they discover that they will not be dining on a five-star in-flight meal. Passengers manage to get angry when their flight is delayed to fix the airplane they’re about to trust their life to.

Advertising plays off our sense of ‘me’ as well. I recently received an ad from United Airlines’ Ameniti program. For a few hundred dollars a year, you become entitled to extra peanuts and a free ticket and lots of frequent flier miles. What surprised me was the way the letter was worded. I was informed in a very personal fashion by the program’s director that he was recently reviewing the roster of Ameniti subscribers and was shocked to see that my name didn’t appear on their ‘nice’ list. He informed me that it surely must have been an oversight because a traveler of my status is always looking for the best.

Apparently, United has pretty low standards for ‘status’. I’ve flown on them only a few times in the last year, and have achieved no platinum, silver, bronze or peon status.

I guess I’m supposed to think “I am important. I deserve this!”

Not long afterwards, I opened an offer for an American Airlines AAdvantage credit card. I don’t want another credit card. My existing ones keep raising my credit beyond the point at which I could purchase a small third-world country. The generous offer read: “[my name], this certificate acknowledges that you are entitled to 20,000 AAdvantage bonus miles” if you sign up for our credit card. What shocked me wasn’t that it said I would be given frequent flier miles for signing up. It sounded more like a poorly written ego-stroke, agreeing that I am deserving of these miles – a resigned agreement that I am so important that I should be given stuff for no good reason.

Remedy?

Is there a way to live a simple, uncluttered life in our society? A life comprised of real social interaction without the desperate feeling of having to be three other places right now. A humble life in which we can accept that sometimes bad things happen and it’s no one’s fault – or a life in which we take ownership of something bad we did rather than coming up with excuses (‘this is society’s fault’, ‘my parents didn’t raise me right’).

I didn’t think so.