Ranthropologist

Tag: Shifting Perspective

  • Shifting Perspective: The Efficiency Trap

    Shifting Perspective: The Efficiency Trap

    A few months ago I wrote about the privilege of having the time and money to make homemade bread. I haven’t stopped thinking about the changes that have occurred in the world, and in modern capitalist culture in particular, that have made what used to be a basic daily task into something we no longer have the time and/or money to do. It’s been on my mind more heavily recently as I ventured into experiments with making my own soap. It’s not hard; on the contrary, the basic process involves simply combing sodium hydroxide (lye) and water with oil, stirring until it thickens (a process called saponification), then pouring it into a container of some sort to harden and eventually slice into bars. I mastered these basics on my first try and have now made four separate batches, all sliced and now spending a few weeks curing before they can be used. And how much money have I spent on the tools and ingredients to make this soap? At least a few hundred dollars for a digital scale (for precisely measuring proportions of lye and oil); a steel pot dedicated to soap making; a stick/immersion blender; a few thermometers (turns out the temperature of your lye water and oils is important); various oils (palm, coconut, and olive are the basics); various essential oils for scent; a container of lye; a steel soap slicer; and silicon molds so the soap has a nice uniform shape and releases easily when it’s ready for slicing (see the photo at the top of this post for some of my nice, round, molded soap). Of course, some of these are fixed costs that I won’t incur again; but the cost of the oil alone adds up fast.

    When I mentioned this new hobby/science project to my dad, he told me that Grandma G. (already chronicled for her bread making in the homemade bread post) used to make lye soap for laundry. Daddy and his siblings would take turns stirring the big pot full of cooking grease that Grandma had saved throughout the week and combined with lye. Since they weren’t lucky enough to have a stick blender to make the process quick, the kids would stir for hours until Grandma deemed the mixture thick enough to pour. This wasn’t a science experiment or a hobby; it was a household necessity if Grandma, Grandpa, and their six kids were going to have clean clothes.

    What happened to our culture that led us to eliminate homemade bread and soap from our list of things to do? It started with things like cheap bread and soap that you could buy pre-made at the store. Buying these staples instead of making them was more efficient. It made running a household easier. It freed up time. But where has that efficiency led us? Somewhere along the way, people bought into the idea, peddled by companies with something to sell, that we had better things to do than make our own bread, formulate our own soap, grow our own vegetables, make and mend our own clothes, cook nearly all of our own meals… I am tempted to go on and on with the list of things we used to do for ourselves.

    What has the efficiency of the capitalist marketplace done for us? Many good things; but when you shift your perspective back to a time when we were more self-sufficient, you might start to wonder why efficiency has ended up making us busier than ever before. We end up being grateful that we can buy soap and bread at the store now, because who has the time to make their own? (For that matter, except for people like me who are privileged to have the time and money to engage in these DIY projects, I doubt anybody is consciously grateful for the store-bought staples we now all take completely for granted.) We are happy for all the fast-food outlets and “quick casual” restaurants and the recent proliferation of online services that will deliver pre-chopped vegetables and other ingredients to your door so that if you want to make a home-cooked meal, you don’t have to waste time on prep. Cooking from scratch has become a high-status hobby – we litter our Pinterest boards with gourmet recipes and fancy tools because cooking this way is aspirational – if you can afford artisanal cheeses and locally-sourced charcuterie, and hand-craft little cards identifying them at your wine party, then you’ve made it, by God! And we forget that there was once a time when the Sunday chicken dinner was considered the luxury meal to reward a week of hard work.

    Of course, it can always be worse. Most of us are part of the significant proportion of the population that has nothing to sell but its labor. For a big majority, that means working for as low a price as your employer can squeeze out of you, which means that maybe you can’t afford to buy enough fresh groceries to cook for yourself every day or have the time for anything but a quick stop at the drive-through. If you have kids, maybe you and your spouse each work more than 40 hours a week trying to support your family, trying to achieve the American dream that is the hope of so many, the one that is built on our addiction to efficiency, the one that has led to lower wages and higher prices in the service of shareholder profit, the one that allows us to buy $20 jeans and $10 shirts and cheap jewelry that we stop wearing after a few months, the one that entices us to fill our houses and our lives with mounds of completely unnecessary things like battery-operated nose-hair trimmers and commemorative Princess Diana plates, the one that says BUY! BUY! BUY! at every turn, the one that won’t tell us that none of these things will ever truly satisfy us.

    Isn’t that really what efficiency is about? The capitalist system is based on the majority of the population selling their labor to a tiny minority that will pay them for it, and then trading that pay for the endless conveyor belt of things that we have been tricked into believing we need, as well as the things like bread and soap that we actually do need, but no longer have the time or the resources to make for ourselves. Don’t mistake me – I am not 100% anti-capitalism; in fact, I acknowledge many of the benefits of this mode of production. But the trap of efficiency is one of the drawbacks. When people controlled their own labor and were able to provide for themselves and their families without having to rely solely on wage labor, I believe society was better for it. But now it’s all about production and growing the economy, and there seem to be few, if any, alternatives. The marketplace proliferates with new products that, when you assess them objectively, are totally unnecessary – but hey, they might make our lives easier! What’s easier than having paper plates that you can throw away instead of wash? What’s easier than a pop-up paper towel dispenser in your bathroom or kitchen instead of cloth towels that you have to launder? What’s easier than having 50 pound bags of dog food delivered straight to your door so you don’t have to make a trip to the store? With all this efficiency, why does it seem that we are busier, and poorer, and more trapped, than at any other time in human history?

  • Shifting Perspective: House and Home

    Shifting Perspective: House and Home

    Several weeks ago I impulsively started looking online at local houses for sale and began fantasizing about owning property again. In 2011, I walked away from the condo I’d purchased in 2005 for $196,000 because it had dropped in value to somewhere around $40,000. So with a foreclosure on my record, and a deliberate one at that, my options are limited until the foreclosure drops off my credit report in 2018. Still, there are options for me, and that was enough to get me browsing websites and scrolling through pictures of remodeled kitchens and laminate floors.

    Looking at all those pictures and thinking about what I’d want in my ideal house made me start ruminating on what I want vs. what I need. Depending on how you define need, none of us needs very much in terms of housing. Four solid walls and a roof enclosing space for sleeping, cooking, eating, and bathing are all anyone really needs. Just look at the mini boom (pun intended!) in micro housing – a trend in which people are making themselves comfortable in tiny living spaces, often made out of unusual materials like old shipping containers. I am pleased with the micro house idea, but at the same time, I have a lot of stuff – enough that it fills my current 2-bedroom, 1200 square foot rental pretty snugly. This troubled me as I put in an offer to buy a smaller house – 3 bedrooms, but only 975 square feet. I wondered what I’d have to give up to fit my stuff into this smaller space. My offer was not accepted (which I decided was for the best), but I continued to be troubled as I thought about all the space I take up in my house. I have described living here alone with my two cats as being like the last cookie in the bag – I rattle around in all this space that is designed to hold more than one person – and yet my stuff fills in all the corners.

    My uneasiness with the house hunt crystallized recently while I was at the gym. I don’t have television at home, so when I go to the gym I enjoy watching mindless drivel. On this particular day it was a show with some silly name like “Love It or List It.” The show involved a couple who had to decide to either buy a new house or keep the one that the show’s designer had remodeled to fit their needs. The show seemed inoffensive until the couple started looking at possible houses to buy. Every house the realtor showed them was deemed too small. They had nothing but disparaging words for the bedrooms that their kids might occupy, calling them “half-bedrooms” or “closets.” These rooms were big enough for a bed and dresser – typically kid-room furniture – but apparently that wasn’t enough for this couple. They weren’t smug or arrogant about it; in fact, they seemed to genuinely want the best for their kids. Yet, I still found their attitude distressing, and began questioning my own desire for a big enough house just for me and all my stuff. This, of course, is where the shift in perspective comes in.

    Why do we want so much space? I could offer long and complicated explanations that dig into culture and capitalism and the structural nature of inequality, but at the most basic level I believe that human beings naturally want more. We have to keep this in perspective, though, by remembering how much more many of us already have compared to people in so much of the rest of the world – and also right here in the United States. Remember the micro houses? They are now being offered as a solution to homelessness in some cities. These homeless people are happy to get the tiny house. People in many parts of the world live in structures that most people in the US wouldn’t dream of calling home. From war-torn neighborhoods where people try to make do in the bombed-out shells of their apartments and houses to rural villagers in traditional huts to people building shacks in landfills, people all over the world struggle to keep the walls and roof they need to say they have a home.

    This does not mean I think everybody should have to live in a tiny house. It does not mean that because some people suffer, we all should suffer. But maybe we should redefine how much space we actually need to call our house a home. I think we should remind ourselves that what makes a house a home is not its size but its meaning. That’s why realtors say they’ll help you find your “dream home” – they’re selling the physical house as the embodiment of the idea of home. But while a house is tangible, a home is not. Any place can be made home, regardless of its size or how much stuff it can hold.

  • Shifting Perspective: Word Power

    Shifting Perspective: Word Power

    Consider the following brief life histories of two 18-year-olds:

    A was a sullen, withdrawn child. She seemed predisposed to depression early in life, and caused her parents concern when she would run through their house claiming she was being chased by invisible monsters. She had school friends, but at different times in her young life she considered a doll she made out of leaves; a rock; and a small glass bottle to be her closest friends and most prized possessions. By the time she reached sixth grade, her parents were divorced. A lived closer to the working class part of town than the upper middle class areas many of her classmates inhabited. At 13 she was smoking pot with older kids in the neighborhood and was busted at a local discount store for shoplifting. In high school, A held her own but had some difficulties. Math in particular gave her trouble, and she nearly failed freshman algebra, chemistry, and geometry. She participated in very few extracurricular activities and seemed to shift deeper into depression. At one point an incident with a kitchen knife and a suicide threat caused her parents to seek professional help for her. By 15, A had a boyfriend who was already out of school and spent most of her time with a group of older boys, staying out with them until the morning hours. As high school drew to a close, A’s guidance counselor told her that she would not gain entrance into the state university system because of her poor math grades. A did not apply to any colleges during her senior year. After high school graduation she found a low-level job as a receptionist.

    B was a precocious child who was reading adult fiction by second grade. In fourth grade she was allowed into the school-wide spelling bee – typically restricted to 5th and 6th grade students – because she had already completed the spelling and reading lessons through the 6th grade level. Junior high school saw B widening her circle of friends but also maintaining a reputation as an exceptionally bright student. In 8th grade she missed making the county spelling bee by just one word. By high school B was enrolled in honors courses and did well in them with little effort. She was one of only 3 students to earn the highest possible grade on the Advanced Placement exam in English. B was also an accomplished athlete, earning MVP honors for her performance on the swim team during her sophomore year. She participated in clubs as well, including the French Club, Key Club, and Oceanography Club. Her friends were mostly honor students who spent their free time enjoying board games and role playing games. During B’s senior year, her guidance counselor called her to his office to tell her that her score on the verbal portion of the SAT exam was the highest one of his students had ever achieved. At graduation, B chose to spend a year working at a local art gallery and saving money before starting college. She was accepted into a small but prestigious private college the following year.

    Now that you’ve considered the stories of A and B, where do you think they will each end up in life? A sounds troubled, while B sounds accomplished. A has been involved with drugs, crime, and older boys, while B spent her school years studying and participating in extracurricular activities. A was a mediocre student who was discouraged from college by a guidance counselor. B was an honors student who was praised by a guidance counselor and admitted to a prestigious college. Yet, A and B are so very much alike – so alike, in fact, that they are the same person: me.

    That probably wasn’t much of a twist for those of you who know me. The point I am illustrating here is the power of words. The details you pick out of a person’s life story can cause you to view them as a hero or as a villain; as a troublemaker or as a model student; as having a dead end path in life or as being on the road to a successful future. As I’ve said before, humans are pattern-seeking animals, and we don’t often look for all the contextual information we need to flesh out our first impressions.

    The power of words to change our views is something we should be very aware of. It is relevant to so much of what we hear, see, and read in the world today, particularly in news reporting. I bring this up because of the different ways in which people are represented and how subtle those word choices can be. This pertains, in the moment, to the case of Michael Brown (and a few years ago, the case of Trayvon Martin). What we read is what we see, and both of these dead black teenagers have been portrayed as potential thugs and gangsters (and also as angelic innocents). There are multiple examples of how the power of words shapes our perception of events. If you want to find them, there are many articles and commentaries you can read about how people of color are portrayed more negatively in the media than white people.

    I don’t particularly feel like dissecting the racial divide that still exists in our society in this post. Mostly I wanted to engage in the exercise of writing about my own life in two different ways. I challenge you to do the same, and to ask yourself how you might be portrayed if you were the subject of media attention. It behooves us to remember that every single person is more than a single event, a single photograph, a single conversation. They say there are two sides to every story – I say that’s the minimum. Let’s try to consider as many of those sides as we can.

  • Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Just over a year ago, I decided to start indulging my creative side by crafting objects like lamps, clocks, and even furniture out of vintage, found, and second-hand objects. I even turned my little projects into a business of sorts, and started a website to showcase and write about my creations. As I learned how easy it is to make things that I thought would be difficult – like wiring lamp sockets, cutting, sanding, and finishing wood, and drilling through glass and metal – I started experimenting with other things I realized might be easier than they seem. This led to experiments with making food from scratch. As it turns out, ice cream, fruit jams and preserves, soda, and nut butters are easy to make and generally taste better than what you can buy at the store.

    At first, I felt smug about my new-found insights into the relative ease of the DIY lifestyle. It made me wonder how consumers got so easily fooled into believing that paying full price at the store was better than making their own bread and jam and peanut butter and ice cream and soda. But then, when I was sifting flour into my bread machine one evening, I suddenly thought about my Grandma G. Grandma G. made bread for her six kids and her husband every day. She did it by hand, and though by my father’s account Grandma’s cooking wasn’t great, it was serviceable. I pondered the innovation of the bread machine that allowed me to spend five minutes measuring ingredients into a pan so the machine could spend three hours mixing, kneading, and raising the dough which I would then transfer to the oven. I didn’t have three hours to spend mixing my own dough on a regular basis, which is why I had the bread machine. Bread making from scratch has become a luxury, and as such, it has also become a marker of status. In other words, it is a privilege. That is, if you are making your own bread, that probably means you have the luxury of time and resources – ironically, resources Grandma G., who was raising a large family on Grandpa G.’s meager salary, didn’t have. Her bread making was a necessity, not a luxury. She didn’t have a bread machine and access to hundreds of fancy bread recipes; she just had flour, yeast, salt, water, and her own efforts.

    This line of thinking shouldn’t have startled me, but it did. I had to admit that I am privileged to indulge in DIY cooking of the staples most people buy at the store. I have the resources to buy organic produce, free-range chicken, hormone-free milk from pasture-raised cows, and the myriad tools that make it easy to bake your own bread and make your own nut butters and jam. I own a fancy, high-powered food processor that whirs nuts into butter in just a few minutes. I have giant stock pots that I can use to boil fruit and sugar into jam, and tools for canning it. I have a fancy ice cream attachment for my expensive countertop mixer. I spent hundreds of dollars on bottles, caps, strainers, and funnels, and roots, herbs, and special yeast for making soda. Somehow in all that frenzy of DIY activity, I lost sight of the fact that what people used to have to do has become what most people can’t afford to do.

    How did we come to this state of affairs? Why is it now a privilege to get back to the basics that my Grandma G. practiced in her daily life? These are not rhetorical questions, but as of yet I’m not ready to dig too deep into some of the possible answers. At their core, these are questions related to the stratification that is inherent in the structure of capitalism, but they also have a lot to do with our individual pursuits of a better, faster, easier way to get things done. Our pursuit of ease in the interests of freeing up time to do more things has ironically led to us having less time than we used to. Grandma G. made bread for her family every day because she had to, but she undoubtedly would have loved to buy loaves at the store instead. Now, the daily treadmill of making ends meet, especially for those in the lower economic strata, makes buying loaves at the store the necessity, and having the time to make bread from scratch becomes the privilege.

  • Shifting Perspective: Kiddie Couture

    Shifting Perspective: Kiddie Couture

    On April 24, 2013, a building in Bangladesh known as Rana Plaza collapsed, killing 1,129 people and injuring 2,515. Rana Plaza housed several garment factories, in which workers – including children – were employed in manufacturing clothing for a variety of brands, including The Children’s Place, Benetton, and Walmart. The collapse triggered a wave of collective shock and outrage throughout the developed world as people were faced with the reality that working conditions in Bangladesh were poorly regulated, often dangerous, and beset with bribes, graft, and abuse.

    At the time of the collapse, the minimum wage for Bangladeshi workers was $38 a month. Following the collapse, international pressure and a series of worker strikes led the Bangladeshi government to raise the minimum wage to $68 a month, beginning on December 1, 2013. The real shock to many people in countries like the United States was having to face the fact that the reason we are able to buy $10 t-shirts and $19 jeans is because workers in places like Bangladesh make the equivalent of 39 cents an hour – and that’s assuming a standard 40-hour work week. In reality, Bangladeshi workers can labor for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Of course, the cost of living in Bangladesh is much lower than it is in most parts of the world – but we are fooling ourselves if we believe that this is truly a living wage.

    I bring this up not because I have a solution for the wage slavery taking place in much of the economic periphery – I don’t. I bring it up because I think it’s important for people to have perspective. To that end, I offer the story that made me decide to rant about this topic. ABC news broadcast a story about a new trend in children’s clothing: renting clothes instead of buying them. On the face of it, I think this is a terrific idea. The company offers parents the chance to pay a fee to rent clothes for special events such as weddings instead of having to pay full price for an outfit that will probably only be worn by their child once, and which they will outgrow soon in any case. Great! Sounds like a wonderful way to reduce our impact! But here’s where I got fired up: the company in question, Borrow Mini Couture, only rents high-fashion clothing. They carry brands such as Moschino, Roberto Cavalli, John Galliano, and Fendi – brands that charge hundreds of dollars for a single piece of children’s clothing. The least expensive Roberto Cavalli dress on the website retails for $352 – and it’s sized for a one year old girl. You can rent it for five days for $98 – $30 more than the monthly minimum wage of a Bangladeshi garment worker.

    The ABC piece makes it sound like this company is a boon to parents who want to save money. That very idea makes me want to weep. It’s not about saving money. It’s about aspirational parents being able to say they dressed their tot in couture clothing. Now, I don’t know where these couture brands manufacture their clothes, but that’s not really the point. Even if they are made by workers who are employed in safe, well-regulated factories where they earn enough to make a dignified living, what does it say about us as a society that we would even consider paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a single piece of our own clothing, much less the clothes for our kids? And what does it say about us that there are people who will spend $50 to $100 just to briefly rent a status symbol for their child (or more accurately, for themselves)?

    For the shift in perspective I wish to impart in this rant, I offer this 2-minute video produced by the Toronto Star of children working in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Juxtapose this video with the ABC story and, like me, you might just want to weep – and I hope, want to think about what this means for the world we live in.

  • Mini Rant: Overheated

    Mini Rant: Overheated

    Southern California is in the grip of the first real heatwave of the summer. It’s hot. It’s humid, by SoCal standards. There is a lot of thunderstorm activity in the mountains and deserts. I would be lying if I said the heat wasn’t a bit much, but I also happen to be one of those people who would prefer to be too hot over too cold so it’s not getting to me that much. However, I would also be lying if I said I wasn’t incredibly irritated by the constant exclamations and complaints over the heat. If I see one more ridiculously stupid “news” article referring to how San Diegans are escaping the heat (BREAKING NEWS: MALLS AND MOVIE THEATERS ARE AIR CONDITIONED!) I am going to snap and start sabotaging ACs. Yes, it’s hot, and we all know it (i.e., no social media pictures of car or patio thermometers needed). But boy does this bitching start to sound like a case of “My tiara is so heavy it’s giving me a headache.” We live in a country where most people have air conditioning or access to air conditioning. Heat is no longer life-threatening to the majority (although sadly, there are still heat-related deaths amongst impoverished people in the United States who have no AC and no easy access to cool places). Yes, heat sucks sometimes. It makes you sleepy. It makes getting outside and getting things done uncomfortable. But have some perspective, people! AC is a very new invention. Humans have adapted to and survived heat conditions worse than this for millennia. In most parts of the world, they still do.

    Heat in Indian

    Photo by Saurabh Das  /  AP

    This photograph shows people in India in 2009 attempting to escape the 120° heat by sheltering under a bus. In May 2013, India had a heatwave that resulted in 500 heatstroke deaths in three days in the state of Hyderabad. I guess my point is that those of us who can escape the heat should have a little perspective before indulging in the constant carping about the temperature. I’m not saying we can’t acknowledge our own discomfort; I just want people to practice remembering how fortunate we are.

    This post is a preface for a new series to come, in which I talk about what people want vs. what they need, and how the high level of confusion between the two has led the world to a pretty perilous state. Meanwhile, I’m going to make myself a frozen fruit smoothie and enjoy the 78° setting of my thermostat, and feel fortunate that I have access to such relief.