there is always a cost (three on a theme)
NRP used to run a review series that grouped three books together on a theme; three is a nice number — enough to feel the connections begin to snap into place, not so many as to sprawl. Three is small enough to be unabashedly specific, and when I can find three things that belong in a list together, I get a very bookish frisson of delight.
Lists also make no grand promises about Groundbreaking Conclusions (which I find elusive even on the best of days).
So here is my inaugural “three on a theme”, presented in the order in which I read them —
CHEAP: THE HIGH COST OF DISCOUNT CULTURE by Ellen Ruppel Shell
I read this book in college, around the same time I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s EATING ANIMALS, a period in which I felt, suddenly, that my consumption (of things, of resources) was too much, that I was taking for granted the ease with which I could feed and clothe myself.
CHEAP is in part a history of consumerism in America, told through the histories of our big box stores (Walmart, of course, as well as IKEA), and in part an exploration of why cheap things are cheap. The message I took away was this: There is always a cost.
If a shirt has a low price in the store, it’s because someone else in the life of the shirt paid for it (in stolen designs, in sweatshop labor wages, in poor-quality materials, in environmentally disastrous manufacturing, etc.).
This lead to a period of generally un-useful guilt and shame around my consumption, which I’ve mostly gotten over — opting for fewer self-flagellating rants about consumerism while still trying to think critically about what I buy.
“Sowers and Reapers” by Jamaica Kincaid, New Yorker
This is my favorite kind of essay — a blend of history, lived stories, and philosophical stitching. A braid of meaning. It’s a good essay to read out loud.
It's about gardens, about slavery, about labor and erasure of labor, about beauty, about being in relationship with others, about the stories we tell about the lives we lead (and whose labor makes those lives possible). At the end of the essay Kincaid describes hiring a landscape designer to build two walls in her garden.
“How glad was my spirit, when, at the end of all this, Ron Pembroke presented me with a bill, and I in turn gave him a check for the complete amount, and there was nothing between us but complete respect and admiration and no feeling of the injustice of it all, no disgust directed toward me and my nice house, beautifully set off by those dramatic walls, for he had his own house and his own wall…”
This moment has echoed in my memory for almost a decade. The shining clarity of their relationship to one another – labor, performed voluntarily and compensated fully, the dignity of encountering one another in this way.
“Sowers and Reapers” is part of a beautiful collection of Kincaid’s essays called MY GARDEN BOOK.
“5 Habits To Quickly Save You
5025 Hours Per Week” by Reysu, YouTube1
In his quest to save himself 3 hours a week of dish-washing, this creator has replaced his Tupperware, dishes, and cutlery with disposable substitutes. I think I might actually be haunted by this knowledge.
Forgive me; I’m going to go into the weeds for a moment — but this video has made me wonder: What is the cost of eating from clean dishes?
In our house, we use dishes my wife bought 10+ years ago. That initial cost (money, labor, transportation, environmental) has been spread over thousands of uses. The cost of cleaning the dishes (soap and sponge, water, time) is minimal (45 seconds a dish, probably?!). We are able-bodied, and so this is not a large cost for us.
To replace all of our dishes and Tupperware with disposable, we would instead pay for every dish, every time (money, labor, environmental) — including the breakdown of the dish (recycling, industrial compost, landfill). The higher cost in money (and, invisibly, in labor and environment) is “balanced” by a lower cost in time. If we were wealthy, this might be very appealing.2
All in an effort to save a few minutes a day — he passes the cost of those minutes on, largely to our environment. This myopic, dogmatic pursuit of hyper-optimization seems like capitalism’s worst values, dressed up as self empowerment. Buy more to save time! Fit more — and more — and more — things into your life!
I am not convinced that the accumulation of time (or the accumulation of wealth) is an inherently good or worthwhile pursuit. To what end are we accumulating time and wealth? At what cost?
And yet, I still clicked on the video!
Until next time —
With love & deeply mixed feelings about capitalism,
Portia
I’m not going to link to his video, because it’s truly a waste of 8 minutes of your life. He suggests tracking your time, limiting phone use, batching tasks, time-boxing, and using disposable resources to replace cleaning labor. He also edited the video after putting it up, cutting the section where he discusses biodegradable cutlery and changing the title’s claim from “50 hours” to “25 hours”.
If we were disabled, this would also probably be very appealing! And raises a challenging dimension: it is often expensive to access accommodations as a disabled person. The intersection of environmental activism and disability is well beyond my expertise, but this article about banning single-use straws is a good encapsulation of why we have to keep talking and listening to one another.