You know the thing where you try to make a joke on Twitter, but fail to announce in all caps and so forth that the joke was a joke? I did this, tweeting, “Every time you click ‘track package’ you're basically announcing that you are a grasping materialist who simply demands your whims satisfied at any human cost.” I did not add /sarcasm, which was partly my mistake, but partly because I don’t, now that I think of it, think sarcasm totally covers it.
The sentiment was inspired by the moment of self-loathing I experienced when clicking on the tracking link for a very exciting order I’d recently made from well dot ca: three types of unscented soap, and toddler masks, in anticipation of my child being the age where one is meant to wear one of those, which seems implausible as a thing 2-year-olds could do, but I digress. But still: package, yay! Which in turn reminded me of how one is meant to feel like a terrible person for purchasing stuff, in these times, even if the stuff in question is arguably pandemic-necessity, and you’re literally not allowed to go buy things in person, except in certain big-box stores, which are evil, so if you for some reason didn’t arrive on this earth with cloth toddler masks and a lifetime supply of cleaning products, you’d best sit tight.
For a while, anti-materialism was the thing. Minimalism, as it was also called, although minimalism apparently has aesthetic significance as well. (Of course it does, do you guys not all follow Japanese-Scandinavian design and poodle Instagram accounts?!) A good person didn’t consume, which was code for, didn’t buy cheap tacky junk like the cheap tacko they had the good sense not to be.
Then came a backlash. Stuff is fine actually! It’s classist to insult people for bargain-hunting, or not shopping exclusively at New Brooklyn boutiques and fishmongers! Clutter is about memories, the stuff-experiences dichotomy is a lie (‘gear’ is stuff btw), and snobs have just convinced themselves that their aesthetic preferences make them good people. Kondo out, Dollar Store in.
Backlash-to-backlash has arrived. Anecdotally, in a generation too young to remember two rounds prior. Look at all these selfish, entitled materialists, not pausing their own consumption to consider that human beings had to make and deliver your environment-polluting false-happiness widgets. Imagine caring about stuff lol. (I can. I can imagine it.)
The Consumer is an independently wealthy layabout. It can’t possibly be that we’re in a society where service workers also consume, where you can’t assume that someone who’s ordered a package via the internet is a latter-day Roman emperor, pausing between grapes to see whether some new towels from Amazon Basics have arrived.
Which brings us back to manager-calling Karen. Not cop-calling Karen, not the racist one. Nor the one who takes interactions with service workers as an opportunity to be lord of the manor for a few minutes, just for kicks. I mean the one who fails to come at life from the perspective of ‘I have too much, please take some of this (gestures at opulence) away.’ She thinks — and she may be right — that she’s gotten a so-so lot in life, and will be ignored when making legitimate requests unless she makes a fuss. She’s too old to care what people will think of her, she’s in her own world and is focused on the specific request she’s made. It’s not that she wants to be the powerful party just this once, but she’s probably not charmed by hipster approaches to food service, wherein the barista’s scorn is, for some, the main appeal.