What’s In Your Hand? Besides a Credit Card, I mean
As children we learned that 'you are what you eat,' as our parents and teachers tried to teach us helping eating habits. As an adult, I've come to see that often 'you are what you believe,' and like the old Garbage In, Garbage Out saying, it's important to be careful what ideas you give houseroom in your head. Most of what I believe is based on scraps I picked up from books, One Book in particular, but we pick up ideas like our lungs pick up oxygen molecules- by the by, just as part of living and breathing. One idea we as a culture seem to have picked up is that we are what we buy. We would say we do not believe this, of course, but our actions belie us.
Over the last two hundred years in particular we have filled our homes and lives with time-saving appliances, ready-made products, and convenience foods and other items. At first we did this to save time. We welcomed the brave new world where we no longer needed to cook from scratch, sew our own clothes, grow and preserve our own food, or provide our own home-grown entertainment. But we went beyond the point of having those conveniences available as substitutes and go-to helps for life's little crises. All our days became one long series of little crises crying out for convenience, and gradually we forgot how to do those things as they became less and less common.
My great-grandparents bought a house in a small town in the forties, and they also bought two empty lots in town specifically for gardening in the middle of town- and their background wasn't rural. My great-grandfather was a former teacher, and then a foreman at a steel mill (it paid better). Nobody thought that was weird or remarkable at the time. My grandparents owned a cow that they boarded at a house near the edge of town, and they would go over to milk the cow in the evenings when my grandfather got done with his job- he was also a teacher, and then a school administrator. People might have thought they were fortunate, but nobody thought that was strange. I've had young wives in my home who thought it was remarkable that I could bake a cake and frost it without a boxed mix or a ready made canister of frosting. I've had a couple young wives in my home who thought the very idea of a compost bucket was disgusting and they could hardly stop themselves from curling their noses.
As convenience and labor saving devices freed up time once spent on domestic arts, agrarian pursuits, and providing our own entertainment, people had a new commodity- spare time, leisure time. People began to fill that time with two related activities- watching television and shopping, neither of which were available as recreational activities until the last century. According to this review of Jan Whittaker's book Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class
Today, Americans shop for necessities, shop for status, shop to socialize, shop to escape, shop to people-watch, shop to educate, and shop as therapy. But it was not always a foregone conclusion that a nation of hardscrabble pioneers would become a nation of shopaholics.
Old fashioned department stores once weren't old fashioned at all. They were the newest thing in parting consumers from their cash. Those who imagine Walmart as a relative newcomer and an evil empire may be surprised to read that:
In 1897, Scribner’s lamented the big stores’ tawdry sales events; banal and homogenous goods; and appeals to customers as crowds, rather than as selective individuals. Mark Twain found maddening the stores’ practice of heaping goods of no practical relation on adjacent tables for customers to simply rummage through.
Myrna Blyth, who edited many women's magazines in the course of her career, wrote Spin Sisters and explains more about how we've been trained to see shopping, buying something, as the solution to what ails us. Most magazines, but it seems women's magazines in particular, promote and encourage a victim mentality. They tell us we're 'frazzled, frumpy, fearful' and in danger. In danger from our boyfriends, husbands, doctors, salesmen of every sort, from our paint, our celery, our cell phones, and our snacks- and we have to buy solutions for those fears, from bubble bath and aromatherapy candles to cosmetics, the latest in storage, child safety gadgets, gimcracks and doodads that will transform our kitchens, living rooms, yards- and lives.
As Blyth says:
"...journalists and editors don't just transmit the facts.... They select and shape it and make facts fit into emotional stories that tug at our heartstrings or send a chill up our spines. I've done it myself. That's because news is most effective when it tells a story that confirms our deep-seated beliefs and stokes our deep-seated fears. As psychology professor Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon says, 'We trust people who tell us we're in danger more than people who tell us we're not in danger.' [see The Perception of Risk] And when we hear someone is harmed we want a simple explanation for her pain. A very simple explanation."
We also want quick and easy solutions and explanations- we want stories with easy and happy endings- "You can keep this from happening to you with this hand-dandy item you can buy for only 9.99 from our favorite advertisers."
Day after day- in magazines, newspapers, on blogs, on the television, on the internet, on the radio, on billboards, we are subjected to a barrage of messages that appeal to our inner Ms or Mr Malcontent. My favorite, and I use that word in the sense that it is one for which I have a particularly strong sense of disdain, is the one about how we, in this age of convenience, have no time for ourselves, as though we have somehow divorced ourselves from ourselves, as though we have nothing to do with us and how we got where we are. Myrna Blyth points that out in one area- where we complain that we have no time for ourselves- as though the choices we made to work, to have children, to marry, to live the sort of live we live, have nothing to do with us. That woman who is a mother, she's not us, so all those mothering things we do are somebody else, and we have no time for us. That job we work at, if we work outside the home, that's apparently some other woman, not ourselves, and so the working woman 'has no time for herself,' as though she had no say in what job she chose, as though she's not related to the self at work, the self at home, the self commuting to work, the self who does anything, apparently, other than pedicures, bubble baths, and recreational shopping. The only thing we do for 'ourselves' that counts, it seems, is buying us a treat.
We can, and mostly do, blame Big Business, advertisers, the evil corporations, the greedy businessmen, the store owners, the media, those 'others' who 'commercialize' everything. It's always easier to blame others. But who is that at the store, credit card in hand, buying the new and better you, improving the kitchen, making the living room cool and hip, fixing this or that personal problem with the latest product in Personal Problem Fixing? Why.... that looks like US!
All those commercial interests are and should be free to get out their message, to persuade us. But we don't have to listen. We don't have to absorb that message aimed at our Inner Whiny Brat or Insecure Sad Sack. We don't have to go to the store or bring up the website that now accepts paypal. We can rethink our attitude, take control of ourselves, recognize that *we* took ourselves to the store- whether a brick and mortar store or an online store- and we can take ourselves out again and go right back home. We can rethink our homes as places where something deeper than consumption takes place. They can be places of production- producing nourishing foods, wholesome entertainment, learning, and happy, contented people who know how to live the interested, even examined, life- countercultural oases in a desert of joyless consumption.
And the more we practice this, the easier we find it to be creative about using what's in our hands.
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16 Responses to “What’s In Your Hand? Besides a Credit Card, I mean”
April 22nd, 2011 at 5:44 am
This post is an excellent analysis of our culture! As always your encouragement to think carefully about our choices is so appreciated!
April 22nd, 2011 at 5:45 am
Yes, thank you for this! I have no insightful comment to post, but I agree with your post completely!
And a comment about the boxed cake mixes… I make just about everything from scratch (I have to because of our circumstances) but recently I used a boxed angel food cake mix that I had bought for a “special occasion” (I have a very hard time baking an angel food cake successfully at our altitude.) My 5-year-old daughter was helping me, and she expressed surprise that we could make a cake from a box, adding just water. “Where’s all the ingredients?” she wanted to know!
April 22nd, 2011 at 7:27 am
“Inner Whiny Brat” I love it! You have such a way with words! And this post, the message of this post is spot on. Just the kick in the pants we all need. We are so spoiled, and so fooled. It’s not difficult or complicated to do stuff ourselves, like baking cakes or biscuits, but we’ve let ourselves be fooled into thinking it’s next to impossible without help from boxed goods. Now I’m gonna go bake a cake from scratch. I’m fired up for the day ahead. Thanks, DHM!
April 22nd, 2011 at 7:48 am
Fantastic post – well put and well said.
Thank you for sharing this – I’m linking to it this week for my readers.
April 22nd, 2011 at 7:50 am
Very well put! Also, it is difficult to escape this…even when your post came up in my reader, it had an ad attached to it at the bottom: “Earn free Amazon points with Swagbucks!”
I found that ironic.
But your post was spot-on and such a good reminder. Thank you!
April 22nd, 2011 at 7:51 am
Very smartly said! Also, it is difficult to escape this…even when your post came up in my reader, it had an ad attached to it at the bottom: “Earn free Amazon points with Swagbucks!”
I found that ironic.
But your post was spot-on and such a good reminder. Thank you!
April 22nd, 2011 at 8:41 am
You make great points. I couldn’t agree more that the responsibility lies with us and that we can’t blame anyone else for our choices.
-Ravi Gupta
April 22nd, 2011 at 10:12 am
I understand that when I comment, I should not just write “Great post”.
But sorry, that was just a great post! Thank you so much.
And I’ll betcha that didn’t come from a box:-)
April 22nd, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Good post as always–I’ve linked.
(What was that product that used to advertise “this I do for me?” Hair colouring, I think?)
April 23rd, 2011 at 10:18 am
Thanks, all. Junglewife- your daughter cracks me up. How precious! And what an excellent question she asks!
Also, I don’t want too much credit- I do bake cakes from mixes sometimes, and angel-food is certainly one that seems to me to be one that makes more sense to use a mix.
April 23rd, 2011 at 10:36 am
I am a child care provider. I have seen children look at me and ask very strange questions about some of the frugal things I do.
An example…waffles. Children are amazed that they do not have to come in a box frozen. That I can and do make them fresh when they walk in the door..
One little boy asked me why I hang my panties like a flag on the clothes line. He did not understand that the clothes were drying on the line.
I think it is a shame the kids do not know some of these things. I try to teach the children in my care and hope they take it with them when they go.
April 23rd, 2011 at 11:31 am
Excellent thoughts. Thanks.
April 23rd, 2011 at 1:27 pm
This is one reason why I don’t read women’s mags anymore.
April 23rd, 2011 at 2:49 pm
One thing that I seem to have in my hand a lot is either food, a drink, or candy
April 24th, 2011 at 7:26 pm
FANTASTIC. I’m facebooking and emailing this one around. So TRUE. Thanks!
April 26th, 2011 at 12:08 pm
Excellent!
Love the comments about how women, “have no time for themselves.” If I never hear about “me time” again it will be too soon. People seem to think it odd that I can enjoy life with out getting weekly pedicures and going to lunch and shopping with friends on the weekends. Goodness, I take a nap every single day, and have 2 hours to myself after the kids go to bed. How much more “me time” do I need?
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