My father always used to tell me to cry over people, not things. Simplistically, this meant that if I were to break my toy, I shouldn’t cry. But if I were to lose a friend or family member, crying would obviously be completely within line.
Although this phrase was originally intended to just get me to remain calm when I broke something or messed up an art project I was working on, it’s recently allowed me to rethink the materialist structure we live by. As adults, how can we cry over an iPhone breaking when there are people suffering in our country, so close to home?
It’s tough to see the relation between the two at first: What does an iPhone have to do with the homeless man begging every day outside your grocery store? Or with the woman being exploited in China to make that iPhone for you?
It may not seem like this is an unpopular opinion these days, with many people trying to live anti-materialist lives. However, we tend to preach what we don’t practice in this sphere of our society — myself included.
It’s nearly trendy now to join the anti-materialist movement. People line up at stores to buy things that look as if they’re raw and homemade, yet they’re still providing monetary compensation toward a system they’re against.
I’m probably one of the guiltiest of this. I don’t sew my own clothes, I don’t always make my own food (especially not with meat and veggies I raise myself), and I definitely don’t live in a rent-free location. But I do find myself feeling increasingly angry that I’m a slave to my money.
How do we fix this issue right now, though? It’s difficult when our country’s current state of mind considers rectangular paper and plastic cards as deities. Let’s be honest, we view our wallets and phones as extensions of our bodies. They never stray far, or else we begin to panic. We even go so far as to accuse people — even our best friends — of stealing because we feel so strongly about these objects that we would never allow them to wander away from our sight.
But how have we gotten to this point? How have we let capitalism dominate our culture past the point of forgetting humanity? How have we forgotten that it’s people who matter, not the meaningless things?
Every extra hundred dollars that we spend on a phone or a new pair of shoes could be spent making a hundred people less hungry, or making a hundred people suffer a little less in this world. It’s not easy to change our mindsets so quickly. It’s not easy to see a paycheck as arbitrary or to see our iPhone as an exploitation of human rights. But once we learn these facts, we still continue to carry on with our everyday lives.
I write this as I type on my MacBook in a coffee shop, in which I just bought two cups of coffee to continue my addiction. And by my addiction, I mean my addiction to coffee and my addiction to the materialist life I live.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying becoming separate from the materialist culture our country promotes is a step we can implement in one day, one month, one year, or one lifetime. But each gesture we make to avoid buying for the sake of buying and to avoid seeing money as the determiner of our true happiness is a step in the right direction.
Reach writer Rebecca Gross at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @becsgross
