on luxury

This is the first in a “series” of four inter-related essays that I have written on the following topics: Luxury, Choices, Cleaning and Capitalism. These four essays express much of what I hate about “modern life”… To balance things out, after I post these four I will endeavour to write four essays on things that I am excited or inspired by in modern life. (But maybe that will be in the break after my first semester of uni.)

Luxury

The notion of “luxury” is one that is often used in marketing campaigns. We are sold the idea of luxury: here is a luxury item or a luxurious experience – it is presumed that we want it. It is the quality of a thing or experience that is desirable and connotes status. It is “superior”, it makes us superior. Because we have more than others we are better than others. Upper class.

“drool”

Luxury equals excess. We do not need it.

Luxury goods are invariably produced by people who cannot afford them. Many luxury items are manufactured by people living in poverty. The people who work in places that offer a luxurious experience, such as resorts, could never afford to stay there. The idea of some of us pursuing luxury, letting others squander while producing this luxury is questionable at best.

Not only are luxury items not necessary, but often their existence entails excessive consumption. Think of the waste and pollution produced on a luxury cruise, for example. Or travelling in a private jet. Or just always getting new shit and throwing out shit that is still good because you need to have the newest model, the most luxury model.

Advertising executives would have us believe that we are to salivate over billboard depictions of rich assholes dressed in designer clothing, wearing ill-gotten diamonds, drinking the most expensive champagne, while flirting with each other on their million dollar yacht. Such images of supposedly desired luxury make me want to puke.

Of course there are many standards of luxury. The middle class standard of living that we enjoy in the west is luxury compared with that in poor countries: this reality cannot be overlooked. But the idea that, already living in such comfort, we would seek further, excessive luxury… it is pure greed.

There are, out there in the world of self-help literature, many books written instructing us on how to get rich, so that we too can be among those who live in mansions and spend our time on the golf course or “shopping”. I find these books disturbing in their unquestioning promotion of the much celebrated individualistic pursuit of wealth and luxury that is expected in western society. Firstly, excessive wealth does not equate to happiness, secondly, even if it did, it is a short-sighted, egotistical exercise that does not consider the consequences of this type of consumption.

Some things that are associated with luxury:

Mansions / Yachts/  Owning a wardrobe bursting with expensive footwear/  Resort holidays/  Having other poorer people do your housework for you/  Owning the latest digital Apple products the very instant they are released even though your old ones still work/  “Fine dining”/  Being so rich that you don’t have to work/  Living a life of limitless leisure/   Endless “shopping”/   Having a super-expensive pure bred dog/  Going to other countries to play golf/  Diamonds and other dumb jewels that say “i love you” 

Ultimately I think that to acquire wealth for yourself beyond a certain level is grotesque. It is greedy and unnecessary, nobody needs to be a millionaire. After a certain point, wealth just gets hoarded – for what? It is more than you need, more than your children could ever need. Or it is used to buy stupid luxury items.

In my utopia nobody would be able to get so stupidly rich and wealth would be more evenly distributed, and poor people wouldn’t have to rely on the “generosity” of rich people in order to live. But in the current imperfect world, it is my extreme opinion, that when people acquire beyond a certain amount of dollars they should just fucking give it away. I’m not talking about some bullshit percentage of your income that you give to a seemly Christian charity that makes you feel good and kind. I’m talking about all the money you have past a certain point, you give it away. Keep enough savings for a buffer in case you lose your job and give the rest away. 

Plenty of rich people love to make a big song and dance about their philanthropic activities, their bullshit charity galas and whatnot. But they only give away so much so that they are still multi millionaires or billionaires or whatever the fuck. They are still “society’s elite”, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. Giving money away merely affirms their status. They still live excessive, luxury lifestyles. They’re not really sacrificing anything. If they gave so much of their money away that they actually lived a modest lifestyle, if they actually made some personal sacrifices and forewent some of their luxuries, then they might have some genuine integrity.

Bill Gates, for example, has donated $28 billion. His net worth is estimated to be $56 billion. His “generous” donations don’t make even a tiny scar on his lifestyle. He still has roughly $27.9 billion more than he needs. Also, how did he get so rich? By exploiting vulnerable factory workers in asia, perhaps. By hindering the development of open source software that proved competition to his empire. Bill Gates: you big, kind-hearted hero. You must feel great about yourself giving so much money to the destitute. God forbid you’d ever campaign for labour rights in the factories that made you so rich, god forbid you’d use any of your wealth to actually change the status quo. God forbid you’d let people have “Windows” for free. God forbid you’d ever give away so much that you wouldn’t be still living in obscene luxury and king of your empire. 

I don’t know what number it should be, the cutoff amount of money people could acquire. But if everyone just stopped and asked themselves how much they really needed to live, what luxury items they could do without, and only used what they needed and gave the rest away, that would be a reasonable start.

And the thing is, that once you start asking yourself this question and looking at the shit you buy, you begin to realise that a really large percentage of what you buy is not necessary. All the shit we buy, using so much energy and resources and undervalued human labour to produce, and then most of it ends up in landfill. It’s maddening.

“It is nothing new to live well. It is simply a matter of recovering the life ways of our forebears and putting an end to the kind of thinking that encourages individualistic egoism and the thirst for luxury. Living well is not living better at the expense of others. We need to build a communitarian socialism in harmony with the mother earth.”

So said Evo Morales 

happy valentine’s day assholes

so beautiful

Wow, Valentine’s day.

Yet another way that society/capitalism co-opts an aspect of your personal life and tries to tell you how to do it. If you are “in love” then on Valentine’s Day you are meant to do something special within the bounds of what can be bought and sold. For example it is expected that you will go out for a fancy dinner and the man will buy the lady some flowers or chocolates or jewellery or lingerie.

It’s all about convention and the idea that if you adhere to such convention it means you are in love, or that your man is a “good husband” or boyfriend or whatever if he does something nice for you on valentine’s day like buys you some shit you don’t need.

I find it infuriating because being in love is not actually about what you can buy someone on one stupid socially determined day, it’s not about “making them feel special” on this one lousy day of the year. It’s about treating someone with respect and wanting to do nice shit for them every goddam day of the year.

Valentine’s day has become a materialistic tradition and is ultimately a cheesy, contrived experience of “love” for people who don’t have faith in their own ideas of how to express affection and need to be told by the industries who profit. Roses!!! Diamonds!!! Something you can buy at the shop. That will do it.

no shopping

I think it’s time someone denounced recreational shopping.

Have you seen those car stickers that are all the rage right now? People stick them on their back windscreens and they represent each member of the family unit. They are EVERYWHERE here in Newcastle. On the back of every proud, carbon-emitting, oversized family vehicle.

You can buy them at the newsagents and they have a selection of stickers for each family member: for “dad”, “mum”, “girl”, “boy”, “dog”, “cat”, “grandma”, “grandpa” etc. You choose the one from the selection that most profoundly and intimately represents who you are. For example the boy might be on a skateboard, the girl might be wearing a bikini.

Anyway, I have noticed that a lot of times you see the family of stickers on someone’s car and the “mum” sticker is carrying bags, that, (since it is unlikely they indicate bags of her belongings suggesting she is homeless and must carry around her possessions at all times) one can only assume are shopping bags. The sticker that represents “mum” shows that she is shopping. And, shopping… her love of shopping, is what profoundly and intimately describes who she is.

 

Mum’s favourite thing, that which symbolises her personality more than anything else, is buying stuff. It doesn’t even matter what the stuff is, it’s just that she loves buying it.  It’s nothing new to “love shopping” – female characters in the mainstream media have long been depicted as “loving shopping”. Think of Sex and the City. There were four beloved women who “loved shopping”. The shit they bought (expensive clothes, shoes etc) practically defined them.

Why are women depicted this way? Can writers not think of a female character that has enough interesting personality traits such that they have to fall back on her consumption habits to give her supposed substance?

How is “buying stuff” a character trait?

And, moreover, why the fuck is shopping a recreational activity at all?

-Oh, that’s right, because we live in a society obsessed with excessive consumption, and most people don’t give a thought to the environmental degradation involved in obtaining the resources, the vulgar misuse of human labour in manufacturing the product, not to mention the pollution created in this process, or the fact that the product will spend more time as landfill than the relative five minutes it does being your prized possession…

(And for the record, I think that lots of men love buying stuff as much as women, but for some reason it is women who are depicted this way in the media.)

Do people not know what to do with themselves in their “leisure time” other than go and buy stuff? Consuming is perhaps the most immediately gratifying but ultimately unfulfilling way to pass the time… Were we to invest our energies into creatively engaging with the world (socially, artistically, physically or otherwise) we would probably have less need to “shop” for fulfillment.

Don’t even talk to me about “retail therapy”.

Capitalism, as we know it, promotes rampant, excessive, vulgar consumerism (just look at the ads, the media), and little time or energy is left for creative engagement with the world. It is so much easier to buy than to create.

Anyway, I think that the idea of “shopping” as a recreational activity, one that represents a person’s character, or something to “do” for “fun” should be put to rest. I think we all would do well to dig deep and figure out how we can creatively engage with the world and quit buying stuff for enjoyment.

But wait, what about the economy? Surely it will collapse if we stop spending money on needless products and then people will have no jobs. I know, I know. But this lifestyle is unsustainable, and something’s gotta give. The economy needs to be different and not built on needless consumption.

I denounce recreational shopping!

No Princesses

I do not want my daughter to “be” a princess, in any sense of the word. I don’t want her to love princesses or aspire to princessy aesthetics. I don’t want her to be obsessed with wearing pink, or any of the other trappings of princesses and femininity.

Little girls go for princesses largely because that’s the image that is presented to them as the ideal of femininity. Around the time when they learn about gender differences and begin to understand that they are female (if this be the case, not all people are born into the right body), they are vulnerable to the heavy-handed marketing of toy companies that manufacture and perpetuate a highly genderised childhood. (More shit to sell if your market is divided in two halves. God forbid a girl and boy child play with the same toys.) What is marketed and sold to girls is princesses.

What does the “princess” stand for? Some associations …

Royalty – ie elevated status without accomplishment

Wealth (inherited)

Being waited upon

Being beautiful

Being elaborately and unpractically dressed

Waiting for a man to come, being adored by this man

And over and above all, upholding the ideals of femininity (a princess is beautiful and genteel at all times)

Why do little girls embrace the princess archetype? Perhaps because a princess is special. She is special and beautiful and revered by all. I think we can teach girls they can be special through other means. Or even that there’s actually no need to be “special” at all. Being average is fine.

What is not associated with being a princess:

Skills

Opinions

Living a meaningful life

Contributing to humanity

Being thoughtful about the consequences of your lifestyle

Swearing

Thinking outside the box

Subverting the dominant paradigm

Being creative

Being resourceful

Choosing who you want to be and how you want to live your life based on a considered and informed assessment of the possibilities before you

These are some qualities I can get behind.

I don’t like this whole little girl princess phenomenon and I want nothing to do with it. I will do all I can to raise my daughter to hate princesses as much as I do. Instead I am going to influence her to be more like Prince.

vs

Investment Properties.

I’m calling bullshit on investment properties.

I’ve really had enough of this business, especially here in Australia, in cities like Sydney and Melbourne, where so many people who want to buy a home,  to get their foot in the door of the housing market, as they say, can’t, because it’s too expensive. Your average working guy or gal or couple even, who has a decent income and a bunch of savings often cannot buy a place to live in these cities because there is too much demand and not enough supply. And surely part of the reason for this is that there’s all those rich people who own multiple properties.

And I just think that is bullshit. I think it should be illegal. Yes that’s what I said, illegal! Basically I think that people should only be allowed to own one home. Every person or “family unit” (however that might be construed) ought only to be allowed one place of residence to call their own.

Now of course there’s the anarchists and socialists who would argue that nobody should be allowed to own any property whatsoever, and that everyone should have a place to live but nobody can “own” their place (as in sell it for more money) and nobody can pay rent. No landlords, no homeowners, no tenants. Just happy residents. And I’m kind of down with that, truth be told. But that would be such another world entirely, and possibly a bit too radical to contemplate, so for now I’m just going to argue for the one home policy.

Nobody needs to own more than one home. If you have more than one, you have too many. End of story.

Oh, but wait, now you are going to say, “But what about people who want to rent? Students, transients, etc?” Well, I think that one thing to consider is that more people who would normally rent would be able to buy a home because homes on the whole would be more affordable so less people would have to rent. But then for the people who really don’t want to own a home, all the homes not owned privately would be owned by the government and rented to people at a reasonable rate.

Sell your goddam investment property and let someone who needs their own home buy it. For the love of god. Balance the scales already.

 

baby gender clothing rage

Okay so I don’t even know where to begin on this one.

I have a baby who is female and she gets given a lot of clothes by relatives and friends of my parents and in-laws etc, including lots of hand-me-downs. About 95% of these clothes we are given are “girls’” clothes. This means, in case you don’t know, that they feature one or more (usually a minimum of 3) of the following:

pink

lace

hearts

flowers

butterflies

frills

lilac

stupid comments along the lines of “daddy’s little girl”

I just threw a huge bag of these clothes away (gave them to charity) even though she had never worn them, because they were so disgusting to me. MOST of the clothes were pink with frills and hearts and flowers and butterflies on them. No joke. She is ten months old, but has been given clothes of this persuasion since she was born.

Why does a baby even need to have a gender?

Femininity and masculinity are concepts that exist, that people can choose to embrace or reject depending on how they feel about them. Or at least that’s how it would be in my ideal world. Femininity and masculinity are relevant to a person with a self-realised identity. They are NOT RELEVANT to a baby. A baby does not need to have a gender. A baby will likely come with a biologically determined sex, though not all of us do. And some who do come with a biologically determined sex cannot embrace the gender that is assigned to this biology and seek to change it. Gender is not a fixed thing, it is culturally imposed. It need not be imposed as such.

A baby does not need to be gendered. There is no reason that it does. Gendering a baby only encourages adults to treat it differently, to treat it according it to it’s gender. Which entails saying such things to it as, “Arn’t you a big man” and “Aww, daddy’s little princess” and other such disgusting things that commence the process of gender role stereotyping right from the outset.

Have you seen the clothes they make for baby boys? They feature one or more of the following:

blue

machines

sporting motifs

slogans about being “bad”

stupid comments along the lines of “mummy’s little man” (no joke I have seen it)

The inadvertent messages spoken by these two schools of clothing are:

Boys – destruction, action, breaking the rules

Girls – love, peace, nature, niceness, prettiness, submissiveness

why????????

And I find it intolerable. Thankfully there are some clothing manufacturers with some taste and sense who design clothes in plain primary colours or with stripes or spots or other inoffensive patterns.

It wasn’t the case when we were young. When I and my peers were infants and toddlers in the 70s, there did not exist this foul plague of horrendous gendered baby clothing.  Sure there were dresses for girls, but they were just as likely to have been brown corduroy or nautical themed. Boys and girls alike wore brown, maroon, yellow, stripes, sailboats, whatever. Toddler clothing was for toddlers, not mini-teenagers.

Why has this dreadful phenomenon taken place? I do not know. Why did baby girls have to start being feminine and baby boys masculine from the age of zero? It is a truly terrible thing, as it just reinforces peoples’ already fucked up ideas about gender roles: that girls must look and act nice, and that boys are at the centre of the action.

Anyway, I wholly reject gendered clothing for babies and intend to dress my gal in gender neutral clothing until she is old enough to choose (save for the odd sailor dress).

Steven Spielberg is a fucking dickhead

So, last night for the first time in months BJ and I went to see a movie. We had the opportunity because my parents could look after Fox. I was thrilled to be going to a movie. It seemed like a really fun thing to do. We went to see Super 8. The problem was, that I basically thought it was a different movie. There was some movie I saw a preview for sometime about some people on a train and something weird happening, it looked kind of good, and I thought Super 8 was that movie. BUt it totally wasn’t. I don’t even know what that other movie was. But we saw Super 8. and it was total bullshit. Here is a list of reasons why it sucked:

1. It was so boring

2. The music was extremely annoying

3. Too many child actors

4. Too much child acting

5. What the fuck was Kyle “Coach Taylor” Chandler doing in such a piece of shit?

6. Such a dumb, played-out story

7. Little to no intrigue

8. It had this vibe of “wholesome family fun” but was actually full of violence

9. It relied on cute 70′s nostalgia to charm people–> bullshit

10. It was desperately trying to be E.T. for the new millenium. Which in itself was bullshit.

11. It was so, so boring.

12. There was, like, ONE female character and a hundred male ones

13. The one female character was a love interest to the male lead and her main job was to look “beautiful”

So obviously I shouldn’t have been in the cinema watching this movie that clearly wasn’t made for me. But I was there, and I was just so irritated that it was made, that it had to exist, such that I would end up sitting there wasting time watching it. I kept thinking, why is Steven Spielberg producing this rubbish, why why why. Why can’t he think outside the box and make an interesting film just once in his stupid life. I HATE HIM!!! This stupid-ass story has been told a million times already. And really, I just had to write this blog post to get this off my chest. A bit of culture rage for 2011… Thanks for tuning in. I love you.

slightly radical commitment pt II

So I just have to say, that after making the commitment that I declared in the previous post, I have felt completely LIBERATED!! It is so great. I see lots of great clothes everywhere that ordinarily I would want to buy, but I am OUT OF THE GAME so I don’t even think twice about them. It feels exciting and liberating to not be wearing the ball and chain of fashion-concern. It is really very freeing my friends. It’s like I’m out of the fashion rat race and I love it. That’s all.

a slightly radical commitment

So I have decided I am not going to buy any new clothes for a year from today. It’s sort of a big deal because I do LOVE clothes and buying/having/wearing nice clothes.

BUT

The truth of the matter is I have enough clothes already.

I’ve got enough pants

I’ve got enough shirts

I’ve got enough dresses

I’ve got enough shorts

I’ve got enough shoes

I’ve got enough coats

I’ve got enough swimmers

I’ve got enough hats

I’ve got enough underwear

I’ve got enough socks.

My cupboards and drawers are full, folks.

I’m pretty happy with my current wardrobe and if I buy anything new it will be a frivolity that I don’t need. I’m rejecting over consumption! (2nd hand clothes allowed.)

FACEBOOK!

People love to talk shit about facebook. People who are not on it and lots of people who are on it love to talk about it in a negative way.

For example:

“What a time waster”

“This is so stupid, people posting all these mundane details about their lives, who cares???”

“Oh wow look at how narcissistic everyone is posting all these photos of themselves looking hot!”

Those are some of the common put-downs people love to throw around regarding the institution of facebook. And sure, all of those things may be true. But I’m here to offer a different point of view. Because I love facebook!! I’m not even ashamed to admit it, I just freakin love it. I think facebook is great.  and here are the reasons why I think it is great. There are 5 main reasons that I can think of right now:

1. Community Newsletter

Facebook functions like a community newsletter, but the newsletter (and the community) is custom-made for each person, i.e. your unique custom made community with all your community’s news. And your community is world-wide and from all different times and parts of your life, and you just get to hear everyone’s news and get to share all your news with your world-wide community. So if someone you hardly ever or even never see because they live in Norway is having a baby or got an exciting new job or ran a marathon they were proud of, you get to hear about it. And that is something I like. I like getting to know what’s going on with my peeps all over the world. It’s pretty AMAZING when you think about it that you get to have an instantaneous community newsletter of your friends from all over the place.

Also people post links to things they find relevant / interesting / funny so in that regard you can find out about different shit that’s going on and see funny things if you want to and share such things with other people and then talk about them. Shared cultural experiences. 

2. Maintaining relationships

People say: “Oh you just have these stupid facebook interactions but you never have “real” interactions with people anymore, it’s taken the place of real life” etc etc. Well I think that’s BS, because I think facebook interactions are totally real, and it just means you have MORE interactions, because you still have the real life interactions, you just have all the facebook ones as well, and you interact with a much wider range of people than you would if you only had your real life interactions. And for me, cos I’m at home most of the time doing my mother duties and I’m not that mobile or whatever, I can have lots of interactions with people on facebook throughout the day which is nice. Because I don’t have that many “real world” interactions, but that’s because of my circumstances (it’s just easier to stay home mostly when you have a baby) not because facebook has taken over my real world interactions. They are different things and the two CAN co-exist.

3. Humour

There’s lots of humour on facebook and that is probably my favourite thing about it. Plenty of scope for making jokes with people. The perfect medium for “one-liner” type humour that has never really had a place before. You can really have a lot of laughs on facebook if you want to.

4. Love

There is also lots of love on facebook. No two ways about it. I find that because it is “your community” i.e. a social network, people are hardly ever rude to each other, and people pretty much only say nice things to each other and there is so much “congratulations” and “happy birthday” and that kind of thing going on all the time, it’s actually a very “positive” atmosphere on there generally speaking. This is very unlike other web sites where people comment, such as youtube or other forums where people don’t know each other and are anonymous, on those sites it is the NORM for people to be rude to each other, there is lots of sledging and insulting and assholery going on on so much of the internet, it’s nice that facebook is about people being nice to each other.

5. Getting information / opinions

Facebook is GREAT for getting information and opinions of people whom you know if you can trust. For example at any time if you are in a quandary and want a popular opinion really quick, you can just ask facebook and it will deliver. For example when I was at home all day breast-feeding I needed to find some good tv shows to watch so I asked facebook and got a million suggestions out of which I found some that were great. Or if you don’t know what to make for dinner you can ask for some suggestions and before you know it you’ll have twenty dinner ideas.

So these are the things I love about facebook and how it has been great to me. THAT’S MY EXPERIENCE!

But facebook is really WHAT YOU MAKE OF IT.

And that’s what I make of it and that’s why I love it.