Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Are We Only Consumers?

I was listening to a guest on NPR talking about how, as Americans, we are always supposed to be producing goods or consuming them. For better or worse, we live in a consumer society, and that’s the way we keep the gears going—or it was until Covid-19 disrupted us.

I’m not much of a producer (though I did produce three children, which should count for something), but I try not to be too much of a consumer, either. I see how much of my kids’ identities are tied to their consumption. My daughter and her crowd favor Starbucks and Brandy Melville; my son and his pals like Dunkin’ Donuts and Adidas.

I get it: It’s a way of signaling who they are. But I don’t want them to grow up to produce only so they can consume. It’s like our whole country (and the world) is caught up in some enormous binge/purge cycle: You have to make money so you can buy stuff, which you give away to make room to buy more stuff. Who wants to be on that hamster wheel?

When I was in my early twenties, I was obsessed by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. I remember envying, though I knew it was absurd, the time that de Beauvoir, Sartre and other philosophers spent trapped in occupied Paris, hanging out in cafés drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and talking. Though I was young, I already felt too busy. A friend of my mother’s, who taught French and had studied in Paris in her youth, explained to me that France was so devasted by World War II that in the aftermath, existentialism was something they could export. The French Cultural Service sent de Beauvoir on a speaking tour of the United States. Existentialism became all the rage on college campuses, and young Americans, like my mother’s friend, flocked to Paris.

I’ve been thinking about that lately: What if this time off the hamster wheel allowed us to think more deeply? What if, at the end of this time, we had some world-altering ideas? What if America’s great new invention was a philosophy, not a consumer product?

Maybe I’m crazy. But it’s worth thinking about, and right now, we all have time to think.