Choices and Post-Katrina Prosperity

Acquisitiveness is a bitch. It just takes up so much damn time. Whether it’s running errands or picking up hotties, collecting things is time-consuming and ultimately unsatisfying. There’s always more to get. Buy one sweater? Next month, Banana Republic or Daily Candy or Vogue will tell you you need another one, a different one, a very slightly different one. Get one little blonde tidbit? Immediately collect another one! There’s no end in sight. Like unsatisfying hors d’oeuvres, we snack on them one after another with no satisfaction, only stomach aches. As soon as I have something, I want something else. “Yes, have some,” is the polite and tempting lure of our culture. It’s why we’re so overweight and over-sexed and hyper and it takes a huge act of will and a lot of repetitive practice to resist it.

I’m reading Alain de Botton’s book Status Anxiety, which discusses these issues at a length of some 300 pages, and I’m sorting through a ream of choices about what specifically – very very specifically – to do with this sabbatical. I’m also watching Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath swamp thousands of people who literally now own only what they were able to carry. Having everything taken from you is obviously different from making a choice for a life stripped of excess, but they beg the same questions, namely, “What would you take? What really matters?? And if you can narrow that down to just a few things, what good are the rest? Many of my ‘comforts’ have lapsed into discomforts as they pile up, inspire guilt and must be stored, occasionally cleaned, reshuffled and on and on. Presumably, I bought them to improve my standing with both myself (“I look great!”) and others (“You look great!”) = I am great! Given the revolving door that is my closet and the sheer quantity of goods I house at the apartment and in our storage space, I am apparently not great enough yet.

It’s tempting to look at those with nothing and ennoble them, as if having nothing implies an ascetic choice rather than sheer deprivation. That’s obviously not the case. Presumably, they too would like to make enough money to devote some portion of it to the temporary boosting of their egos with material goods. Their lives look deceptively alluring in their lack of distracting options and shiny things. Of course, this is because survival is the only thing they have time to think about, which is not a price we are willing to pay for a slate clear of the difficult choices that prosperity offers us. When I was in Alaska a few years ago, kayaking on Glacier Bay, there was a lovely freedom in the focus required to get us breakfasted, packed, on the water, to a new destination and again settled and fed. That’s all we had time for in daylight hours and it was satisfying. After a week though, New York has lost none of its appeal: we know there is more and we want it, however burdensome the complexities of constant choice are.

As de Botton says, perhaps we just need to choose more wisely. “The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.” He conjectures that if we chose a smaller pond we would, consequently, choose less anxiety about not swimming effectively in a larger pond so far beyond our means. As a modern American, unable to escape my history (personal and social), I insist that I can both reduce my anxiety AND achieve beyond my means by choosing wisely where to spend my limited emotional, financial and intellectual capital. Among an overabundance of goods and options, what will I choose to focus on and what matters in the end, in the face of a flood, in the face of limited time and non-infinite resources?