They just don't make it like they used to. Or how the saying goes for when we encounter some product that we remember from a previous day that seemed to last forever. Like refrigerators that ran for 30 years or the television your grandparents still watch that they bought new when you were a small child. Vacuum cleaners that are as old as you are and still pick up the dust.
For the exception of a couple of things such as my car and our house that I can honestly see myself still using in 5 years let alone 10 or longer. And absolutely nothing that I see as passing on to my children and my grandchildren. It will all be dust by then.
Some time in the mid 20th century we passed a tipping point where technology became cheaper than labor. It was a gradual shift as skilled laborers retired and eventually died and the cravings of technology driven items such as Walkman radio/cassette players, personal computers and cell phones came into our main stream pop culture.
The overall shift in our culture of values changed at this very time. Households moved from single income male wage earners to more and more homes with two working parents. As the women's movement for equality took greater hold in the 60's and 70's and asserted their own abilities in the male dominated fields, the composition of households changed. Some for the good and some for the worse.
We began to rely on technology to fill in the gaps. Mom's weren't around as much now to bake homemade goods so we started buying up microwave ovens and precooked meals and more and more take-out. Children weren't nearly as busy with after school activities. Guys played football in the fall, basketball/wrestling in the winter and baseball/track in the spring. Gals had volleyball, basketball and track and all of this seemed to fit within biking distance and before dinnertime when mom and dad got home.
The technology of more convenience - we demanded more and more restaurants with drive-thrus and home delivery. We wanted our groceries to require minimal additional ingredients to assemble and cook. We wanted better technology to communicate since we didn't see one another and since no one was in one spot for very long any more. Cell phones showed up and when the costs and the coverages got less and greater service, households latched onto them. Now we are reduced to text messages that don't even use English (OMG! - LOL).
Our family size shrunk and soon a family of four found that a 2,000 SF home wasn't big enough and moved into a 3,500 SF home with the reasoning that it was a "better" neighborhood with "better" schools. As if to rationalize the move on the account of a better life for our kids. Or that all of the people we knew in the old neighborhood moved away and we were left with no one around.
Or that in our neighborhoods today how rare it is for you to know anyone over 100 feet away and that for most of the people around your home, you may or may not even know their names and the only contact has been (possibly) a friendly wave that gave vague credibility that you understood they lived around you. Or that the home you live in today is one that you legitimately see yourself in 10 years from now and that some idea of a better location somewhere across town would be much more ideal to the life you'd like to live.
Modern neighborhoods now have greater spaces between homes with wide sweeping streets that never run in a straight line and are graced with silly names like "West Andrew Creek Street" or "Dulcinea" or "Long Valley Ridge Road". Whatever happened to 3rd Street? The design of the neighborhoods push each home apart discouraging interaction. No wonder that on National Night Out celebrations that it can be an awkward venue of a gathering of strangers.
Our houses today are built with high technology and little craftsmanship. Very few can even afford craftsmanship anymore. Quality stonemasons or finish carpenters are very, very rare. If your home was built after 1990, the home you live in was built with profitability solely in mind with the cheapest products available. With a design not created by an architect with quality in mind but with thin veneers of aesthetics that gave the buyer the impression of high resale.
High resale. People buy their homes so they can sell later. As long as they're next to good schools.
Aren't good schools based upon the constituents that compose them? The faculty provide only a portion of the quality of education, it's the neighborhood that provides the next part and the individual with the rest. People make the assumption that a certain neighborhood with a certain type/style of home will produce classmates of a certain caliber that will "ensure" that your child is in good hands.
Our careers have fallen prey to this as well. I know of no one who has the same job they started out with in their career. They trade them out as they see fit. No long term commitment to the business that gave them the job. The same goes for the employers - very few get behind the lives of their workforce to give them opportunities to grow and feel part of a family. The relationship between employer and employee has boiled down to a purely transactional environment where employees are viewed as individual cost centers that need to produce along with shoving traditional benefits back for employee payment/contribution. Employees view growth opportunities not in terms of years or decades to reach milestones but in matters of months with expected compensation.
The technology of email, overnight delivery, faxing, online conference calling, automated customer service and cell phones have pushed the pace of work to a feverish pitch which only allows for implications at home. Work is never really "left at work". We are becoming more and more accessible - twenty-four hours a day. Emails are expected to be returned the minute they are sent. Call waiting and cell phones are impolite interruptions into face-to-face meetings or ongoing conversations. Demands are immediate.
Our relationships are becoming more and more transactional. We spend less and less time together and more and more time apart. In those times that a couple are together, tending to the household chores take precedence. The bathroom needs to be painted, the lawn mowed, the garaged cleaned. Oh yeah, play with the kids and if there's a few minutes at the end of the day then we can "maintain" a relationship.
Friendships are harder to maintain. When time is made and plans are carried out where a couple invites another couple over for dinner - why is it the the invited couple now feels obligated to return the favor? Wasn't it just a gift in the first place?
Our relationships and friendships are based upon an accounting of the give and the take where if it becomes too far out of balance the relationship or the friendship is disposed of.
We are a disposable nation. One that takes something for the moment and disposes of it when something new comes along. Commitments are rare and even more rarely reciprocated. We judge our success from the outward appearance of things accumulated - a nice home in a respectable neighborhood, a decent car(s), vacations ot the right places, clothes that show we're responsive to the right trends, spouses who have the right prospects and income potential, children who go to the right schools and play the right sports and who are in the TAG programs.
Our furniture has become like clothes and we throw them away or give the to Goodwill when we tire of them. We spend less and less time with quality and more more and more time with appearance. We have acquired a severe lack of substance.
We have sought out technology as the replacement of our community. We rave about Facebook and Myspace but won't take the time to make a new friend in our workplace or across the street. Maybe it's because someone might discover what we're really like? How could we live with that in the open?
In our quest to be all things to all people we've left our character and passion far behind. In that when we are confronted with people who have retained those traits we are immediately drawn to them.
Oscar Wilde once said: "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing". Has our culture descended into the grasp of the cynic or could our future be much different?
Hope.
Hope is the cornerstone that things can be different. Hope is the eternal optimist. Hope bathes in joy and wears it like a royal robe. Hope is to believe that all is not lost. Hope is the greatest of all things.
Is it possible to turn the tide of our collective consumer culture to change direction and refocus on those people and things that have and bring value. And with that we make a conscious effort to become a person who brings value to those that are around us. To freely give of our talents and abilities without any thought of reciprocation. To give our our spirit of hope.
I would think that a new day could dawn within this new year of ours.
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2 comments:
Maybe with the economic crisis will come a return to the values of using something as long as possible or buying an old home because not only is it more affordable, but you can always fix it up. I hope that we will turn the tide to less consumerism and more quality. Quality time, quality products, and quality businesses. My husband sees the value in keeping his employees happy and in the hopes that they will spend their careers working for him he pays them well and values them as human beings. They are a part of our family. I think some businesses see the importance in that. Have you heard of Zappos.com. They sell shoes, but their real business is customer service. They want their customers to be happy and that means bending over backwards to be helpful. They also want their employees to be happy, so that means as much vacation time as they need. Work when you want, which actually works out well because their employees like going to work so they want to be there. I think hope is so important, if we all bury our heads in the sand, we will all be headed to hell in a hand basket. So I hope that we can clean up the earth and find love for our fellow man and start to care about each other more. P.S. Why is it such a big deal to have friends over? I like just a spontaneous get-together with no pressure. Sometimes that seems impossible.
Claire
Claire-
Thanks for your comments. I didn't know that about Zappos (although I have heard of the company before). Great practice. I was the HR manager at my last job and you're absoluetly right about treating people like people and investing in their well being. When respect is offered first, a strong relationship and blossom. I didn't insulate you from the occassional bad egg, but as long as you're strong enough to deal with them as they pop up, then things seem to hum along very, very well.
I don't know why it's such a big deal to have friends over. I would think that it would be awesome to have it a couple times a week - I was thinking more along the lines of some transactional and/or reciprocal dinner (such as I had you over so you now owe me). Even though that is never part of the invite nor is it expected, but there is an underlying belief that we're indebted and I was wondering why we (as a culture) just can't take the gift of grace and enjoy it for what it is and maybe pass it along in some shape or form.
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