RedemptioVox

Oddly I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about refrigerators. Particularly I have been wondering how such a thing ever arrived at ‘necessity’ status. Now certainly some will assure me that they don’t feel like they ‘need’ their refrigerator, and to that person I offer congratulations. For the rest of us the refrigerator is a pretty important piece of our lives. Put another way, if your refrigerator were to die would you think instinctively 1. “I wonder if I should get another one of those” or, 2. “I need to get another fridge.” My contention is that most of us would offer answer 2. Frankly this makes a certain amount of sense. After all a refrigerator helps to preserve the shelf life of our foods, keeps them safe from bacteria and therefore allows us to grocery shop something like once a week. All of this is wonderful, in fact it is too wonderful. I say too wonderful because it is wonderful to a degree that I would not imagine life without it. Thus my question, how did this enormous machine become so important to me?

In the past people didn’t gather all of their food in one trip weekly. In the past foods did not last as long since they were not refrigerated at home. In the past food was prepared at times to avoid spoiling the groceries and thus dinner was not always what everyone had a hankering for. In the past, people got on just fine. Yet living without the things I have just described sounds mostly awful to me and it is the awful sounding-ness that disturbs me. 

I believe that there was a day when the refrigerator was just an idea, a dream in the mind of a man. Then it became an experiment, then a prototype, a test group, a floor model, a luxury, a commonality and presently it exists as a perceived necessity. Today we don’t imagine life without things like refrigerators because we allowed what was once a luxury to become a necessity.

But who cares, we all have refrigerators now, why does it matter if it is a necessity or luxury? 

Let us consider the previous why question by first examining its under girding how. Luxury moves to necessity by way of wealth. This is a relatively intuitive notion though I will explain.

Who has access to luxuries? The wealthy. Products that are only accessible to the wealthy typically become symbols of status in our culture. This provokes in competitive manufacturers the drive to produce a product like the status symbol for lesser cost. This is done based on the belief that the masses are anxious to possess these symbols but lack the necessary means to acquire them. Thus a cheaper version is produced and the masses follow suit devouring the newly affordable supply of these status symbols. 

This is where the trouble begins for at this juncture the item, in our case a refrigerator, is still a luxury. The item continues to be seen as that which is owned by an ever-growing class of elites (this of course is the game of it all). The shift to necessity occurs when the item crosses a tipping point of sorts. Let me illustrate by considering a product that has experienced this shift more recently.

I can remember the first time I saw someone talking on a cell phone and I thought to myself, “Wow, they have a cell phone.”

Today I meet people and upon making a contact I ask for their cell phone number. Meaning that I assume they have one. When someone doesn’t have a cell phone I tend to think, “Why would you not have a cell phone?”

Somewhere along the way a shift occurred wherein our surprise moved from being on the person with the phone to the person without it. When this happens I believe luxuries become perceived necessities.

I write all of this because I am learning to live lightly in this world. I want to be free of my things. In fact I want to learn to interact with all of my things, from the most extravagant to the most ordinary, as if they were luxuries. I want to do this not as a game wherein I pretend things I really need are luxuries but rather I want simply to recognize my things for what they really are, luxuries.

Most of all I want to be free of my sense of entitlement that assumes not only a right to retain my present level of wealth and comfort but to see it consistently expand.

When I attempt to re-understand life with a healthy assessment of the status of my things it becomes easier to imagine giving more to those who have real need. Ultimately I want to be person who lives generously, gives sacrificially and meets needs. To get to that point I need to understand that I could give a lot out of my excess before I would start to give out of my own need.  I need to be honest enough with myself to recognize that most of what I own, is in fact a luxury and not necessity.

“…the things you used to own, now they own you.” -Chuck Palahniuk