Camus talks about how ideas come to us when we aren't expecting them; similarly Nicholson Baker talks about how our minds change behind our backs - when we aren't looking. Well both of these ideas coalesced for me at a weird place this weekend: the milk aisle - or the milk section of the larger row that contains what used to be dairy items - except now more than half have no dairy in them. Granted none of this is new - not by a long shot, but somehow, Saturday morning, trying to find the expensive locally-farmed-wonderful-tasting milk, I was struck: Soy Milk, Almond Milk, Cashew Milk, Organic this, non GMO that. Prices ran up to about 6 bucks for a gallon of milk-like product. What the fuck was I supposed to buy? This was going to get complicated. So I started reading ingredients - mostly out of curiosity but then I got confused about how one would get milk out of an almond: Apparently you don't milk the almond. That's good - I probably couldn't have digested anymore new information. (Okay - to be fair, I did already know that. But I had no idea there was a thing called "Cashew Milk")
And here's the thing that really got me: I think I'm supposed to see all of these choices as a kind of freedom - something to celebrate. Thank god I don't live in one of those backwards-ass places that only have 2 kinds of milk! But I don't - not at all. I see this as competing brand strategies fighting hard to manipulate me into buying products. I mean it's not just the milk aisle - go buy laundry detergent. I mean it's 2016 - all detergents are going to clean your clothes. But Tide needs you to not buy Downey so Tide puts out products that contain other products (fabric softeners) and then Downey makes another commercial with that adorable bear. And so forth and so on until there's so many choices all you can really do is fall back on product loyalty or just admit you don't have a damn clue anymore and just buy the cheaper ones. (I mean I know that you do pay for quality to a degree - but only to a degree)
I think our culture wants to suggest that all these choices have something to do with freedom. But that idea of freedom is also a marketed product. I wish to suggest that marketing is the meta-discourse of contemporary America. Everything is packaged and sold from milk to presidential candidates. If marketing is the meta-discourse that means primarily the population is seen as a consumer. And of course nothing is less affirming of my belief of myself as an "individual" than realizing I am seen by the marketing world as a prepackaged demographic. I am liberal, over-educated, white, 35-year old, over-consumer of media.
And I am all of those things, but I'm a million other things too. I am large; I contain multitudes - to invoke Whitman. This isn't an anti-capitalist rant - not exactly. I'm not suggesting we walk into a store and buy "Bread" and "Milk" and "Soda" brought to us by some kind of state agency where everything is in brown cardboard and labeled only by what the product is. That sounds even worse. But I am saying that it's getting a little weird - I'm saying that freedom cannot simply be exercised by consumer choices - that's not freedom at all, really. There is a kind of slavery involved in being prone to act on every impulse and desire - to satisfy every created want - to see one's self as primarily "consumer." This is also not a rant about stuff - I love stuff. My stuff can beat up your stuff. My complaint is that it's really easy to forget that a lot of desires that are floating around in my head, aren't my desires at all. They too are pre-packaged and fabricated and they all promise much more than they deliver.
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