What is your life all about? I’m not talking about jobs or families, as important as those can be. What drives the way you live, shapes the choices you make, fills your waking moments, and occupies your dreams?
The individual narratives are each a bit different, but many American stories are shaped by one of three leitmotifs or themes:
• Acquisition
• Exchange
• Achievement
The more prominent one, on display almost everywhere, is the acquisitive vision.
Sometime ago now a colleague of mine went shopping at the grocery and noticed a mother and her small child shopping together. The little girl pushed her own diminutive grocery cart, proudly displaying a flag, announcing “consumer in training.” And in cyberspace the socialization of yet another generation is well under way.
Advertisers talk with regularity about the “lucrative cybertot” market and are quickly developing new methods of gathering information on a generation of children who do not yet get an allowance to spend. Marketers offer free t-shirts and chances on CD players to children in exchange for completing on-line surveys. One children’s web-site called Batman Forever declares that ”Good citizens of the Web, help Commissioner Gordon with the Gotham Census,” using loyalty rather than t-shirts as the ploy.
As if part of some science fiction plot, we are cultivated as customers, consumers, and acquisitive machines destined to feed the economy. General Motors used to remind its workers, we take you from cradle to grave. You grow up in a Chevrolet and you’re buried in a Cadillac. But as we begin to develop market profiles on 4 year olds, even that declaration seems benign by comparison.
Indeed one could argue I suppose, that given the assumptions that govern our economy and the assumptions about one that looks healthy (i.e., one in which people buy and sell a lot, all the time) that we have been co-opted in our own enslavement to the “I am what I own” model of adult existence.
Owning things is not bad in and of itself. Those who argue that it is are typically people who were educated by parents who acquired enough money to pay their tuition bills and/or hold endowed chairs at universities that are paid for by rich folk.
The more important question is this: Is your life narrative all about getting stuff?
Tomorrow…life as exchange.
If life is not about acquisition, exchange, and/or achievement, what is it about?
Good question….I’ll get there! : )
Everything in life seems to be geared around “acquisition” but it becomes our goal to lessen the emphasis on “acquisition” and place it squarely back where it belongs. Certainly not on the front (or only) burner!
Only a few people are called to poverty and the rest of us are granted the privilege of acquiring possessions. Jealousy sticks its head up and hatred begins to those who have more than “me.” God certainly intended mankind to enjoy the fruits of their labor and have enough left over to give to others. The point is not to be…acquired.