Post-demand pastimes
A few weekends ago, I was at a soccer game (which, let’s face it, describes most of my weekends). I saw a woman with a hotdog in each hand, trying to navigate the crowd to hand them over to her sullen kids. She had probably waited a while in line to buy those hotdogs. But the kids, of course, weren’t satisfied with the service. The ‘dogs were “already cold” and “hard to chew”.
Watching the scene play out made me exhausted. It’s not the hotdogs per se — it’s the entire sequence, and what it represents. A microcosm of everything that is wrong with the post-demand world of abundance we live in, it represented that lazy, gluttonous need for the next thing, for food, for new clothes, for “feeling good”; so far removed from a life-sustaining, critical, desperate need. And it’s all the same food, the same clothes, the same “feeling”. In our own self-centered bubbles, we’re all queuing to buy that same hotdog, not for energy, but to just pass the time. It’s that same revolting urge that makes people want to fight over plasticy, worst-of-the-rest TVs and air fryers on Black Friday — just to save a few bucks.
Under capitalism, the middle-class has prospered. Many hundreds of millions of people have seen an astounding increase in their quality of life. But lately, as a result, upper-class antics have started seeping down. Facades are propped up by debt and denial, as luxury goods are made accessible with micro loans and buy-now-pay-later schemes. Intercontinental travel at Instagrammable intervals is not even a given — it’s a must. Now, a million tourists are vying for the same picturesque view of the skyline, posting a million versions of the same photo on social media, crowding the clout cloud ever more.
The system — the economic system, that is — allows it, and so people will do it. The broad definition of economics is also the most poignant: deciding how to use limited resources to satisfy unlimited wants. In short, economics is prioritization. And yet, more and more people seem determined to ignore that fact, as we race into the post-demand world. Even the most determined anti-capitalists, the ones touting the death of private ownership as a “solve-all”, draw worried breaths at declining GDP numbers, as the economy buckles under its own weight trying to determine the prioritization of resources in the face of several crises.
In the end, economics is inherently unsolvable. Capitalism is as close as we have gotten, and yet, it is by no means a perfect system. Capitalism is great for innovation (in fledgling markets) and maximizing output — it can bring out some of the best qualities in people. At the same time, it also brings out some of the worst, and the system is toothless when it comes to regulating any negative impacts that the output may have on the world.
I didn’t see what happened to the hotdogs after the first few bites. I’m guessing they were thrown away; wasted resources. In a sense, a perfect description of the state of our world and how we value what we have. If we are to revamp the system, maybe that is a good place to start.
