12/29/2003

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Understanding Our Season of Celebration

Our month-long holiday spending splurge is drawing to a close. The size of that annual spending binge is difficult to comprehend. Many stores take in 50 to 70 percent of their total annual revenues during this single 30-day period and the extravagance of consumers during this brief period will be important to the overall economy during much of the coming year.

Each household will have spent thousands of dollars on toys for both adults and children, on attractive clothing and jewelry, on vacations and travel, and on multiple fancy feasts. Almost none of this spending could be classified as “necessary.” Most would agree that we are not living through the best of times right now. We have a struggling economy showing little job growth to replace the millions of jobs lost over the last several years. We are tied up in a nasty and frustrating war half-way around the world. And our government continues to haunt us with threats of catastrophic terrorist attacks here at home. Yet we spend and celebrate with abandon. What is going on here?

This is not a “Christmas humbug” criticism of our behavior. Humanity has been enjoying solstice feasts and celebrations at the hardest and most threatening time of the year for millennia if not eons. Thousands of years before we were an “affluent society,” just as we faced the long winter and the privation that went with it, we celebrated, often at the expense of stores that had to tide us over until spring or summer.

This might baffle some as irrational, but long before Puritanism and the Protestant work ethic focused us on frugality, efficiency, and productivity, we as a species had demonstrated that how we lived was as important as that we survived. Although we are often defined as a species as toolmakers, what really distinguishes us are our aesthetic pursuits, our culture. We are the animals who decorate our bodies, clothes, homes, and weapons, who dance, sing, recite poetry, and tell stories, who cook and season an endless variety of food even when there is no biological reason for doing so. We are also the animals who play not only as children but also as adults and who make love all year long, far beyond what is necessary for procreation. The pursuit of beauty, of sensual pleasure, of multiple complex emotional relationships, of activities that challenge and entertain us are all more central to who we are as a species than efficiency, necessity, and frugality. So this holiday season, we are only being human in our extravagant celebrations.

But there is a binge element to this that is puzzling. We work hard most of the year, doing work for others that we often do not enjoy. We suffer regularly with the anxiety that we are not earning enough money to “make ends meet,” harder times are just around the corner. What we actually experience is that we are only pursuing the necessities needed to support our families. We are “bread winners” who “put food on the table,” a “roof over our heads,” and “shirts on our backs.” We ignore what we actually spend most of our money on: things that are far removed from biological necessities.

Caught up in this economic anxiety and a culture of necessity, we find it hard to stay focused on what it is we want from our lives. The result is a tremendous amount of waste and the degradation of our lives. Consider just one example. Our political and economic leaders tell us that we need to develop major new sources of energy or our economy will collapse, impoverishing us. Yet what we really need the energy for is to fuel our every larger SUVs, our adventure play toys, and the steadily growing homes that house our steadily shrinking families. The energy is not needed to keep us from freezing during the winter or to put healthful food on the table. The energy is needed for our discretionary pursuit of particular qualities in our lives.

I am not criticizing that pursuit of quality. That is the essential human trait. What worries me is the destruction of other important qualities in our lives that is associated with the extraction and use of that energy. Energy extraction and use are described as objective necessities. The environmental damage they cause is described as discretionary and subjective. As a result of this conceptual confusion, our lives, our communities, and our planet may well be seriously impoverished, not enriched.

We need to step back and face the reality of what we actually want from our lives. If we do that, we are likely to see that it is not things but activities, relationships, and qualities that make our lives satisfying, interesting, pleasing, and challenging in a playful way.

There are alternative paths that we can follow in our pursuit of these important qualities, some more material and work intensive than others, having quite different impacts on our families, our personal relationships, our communities, and our planet. It is those important choices that the culture of necessity obscures from us as it condemns us to a consumption treadmill that depletes much our emotional energy and creative impulses. It may be time to step off that treadmill and celebrate all year long.

Happy holidays!