Kismet, aka auspicious coincidence

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!"
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