Who knew the New York Times aspired to be Buddhist, and would have its reporters write about the things I do. But it's hard to miss the way it's stuffing the season with all sorts of advice on DIY stress management. And it just topped them off with a gobsmacking Sunday Op-Ed piece on the power of not shopping. The headline of that essay, Suffer, Spend, Repeat, could've been a byte-size review of my recent posts, Just Enough and Holiday Gifts.
What the author did far better than I was reveal how far gone we are into the Age of Nefarious. So I want to thank Oliver Burkeman, a reporter at the venerable (read that: British) Guardian, for illuminating with thankgha-like precision the modern interdependent links of suffering. He is a guide to how step by step Samsara is now assembled.
He begins: "...
it
may strike you that retailers have gone out of their way to make holiday
shopping as unpleasant an experience as possible. The odd truth is that they
probably have. And there’s a reason for that: evidence suggests that the less
comfortable you are during the seasonal shopping spree, the more money you’ll
spend."
What a fool I am. Christmas comes at the dark time of the year, so it is theoretically supposed to be celebrated as the time we become bodies of light. A time of compassion, empathy and caring for others, a time of generosity. All is calm, all is bright. We Buddhists can live with that because after all, calm and bright means perfect meditation experience.
But in reality Christmas is now the dark time corporations spend fortunes to make us so miserable we'll spend fortunes. That's all it's about. Burkeman tells a horror story not even Dickens could've conjured:
modern psychological insights are no longer about helping people liberate their suffering. They are wholly dedicated to helping corporations profit from that suffering. Coy to the world! "
...
stores crank up music, repeat the same songs, pipe in
smells, race shoppers around to far-flung points of purchase and clog their
heads with confusing offers. All of which makes it more likely we’ll part more
readily with more money"
Who knew there are actually human beings willing to dedicate their life to the marketing power of scent? Or that a college professor actually studies what music tempo makes people most likely to buy something? Who wants to know researchers at supposedly illustrious universities like Yale, Stanford and Duke use their hard-won expertise to calibrate "shopping momentum"?
My ignorance was bliss. I didn't know until Burkeman alerted me that I lived in a world dedicated not to abating suffering but rather adding to it through a tactic known as "disrupt-then-reframe.
The idea," Burkeman explains, "is to confuse a potential customer, so as to evoke uncertainty, then
rush in and offer a reassuring path through the resulting confusion. We hunger
for what psychologists call “cognitive closure,” and if spending is the
solution, so be it.... The relentless sensory overload — from the cinnamon
smells to the Salvation Army bells — fuels agitation and an impulse to escape.
How convenient, then, that there appears to be one obvious route through the
chaos: buy that Nintendo Wii or that iPad or that designer perfume — whatever
you’ve been wavering over — and be done with it."
Then comes the clinker! The author asks why we think that buying something will make this artificial anxiety go away. He asks why we don't rail against this nefarious manipulation; He points out that we don't need to make ourselves suffer like this.
"An alternative," he says, "might be to cultivate what
Buddhists call 'nonattachment' — and if the earliest Buddhists tended to
practice this in beautiful natural settings, perhaps that’s only because they
lacked shopping malls. Stand on a busy downtown street at dusk on a
pre-Christmas Saturday with this in mind, and decline to be swayed by the
exhortations to spend, and it suddenly becomes a purely exhilarating spectacle,
as breathtaking, in its own way, as any waterfall or mountain panorama."
I think the New York Times is trying to report how we all got to be neediest cases.
~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved
