How do people without SUV’s shop at Costco? It staggers me that people with little cars would even bother to come.
Today as I was visiting the Mecca of overabundance (Costco) I caught myself thinking about how important it is to hoard things in order to avoid the dreaded circumstance of running out.
You might think that I’m being dramatic to make a point, but my behaviour (500 garbage bags…really?) suggests that I’m actually a little afraid of running out of stuff. What if it’s morning and I don’t have enough cereal options to choose from? What if I’m hankering for a turkey burger but don’t have pineapple jalapeño sauce to top it off? I always have at least 4 jars of peanut butter - just in case Costco doesn’t carry their brand of it for a few months.
One day at check-out, I told the cashier that I was overjoyed that a product was back because they hadn’t carried it for months and I had almost had to go without because my stash was depleted. I reflected to her that this might be a part of the corporate strategy; a kind of intentional practice to induce fear of deprivation, which would increase my tendency to hoard (by which I mean: buying 4 kilograms of sun-dried tomatoes). She smiled at me, in a knowing kind of way. Not acknowledging the hidden liturgy of the church of Costco out loud, but affirming my moment of recognition, my realization that I had been formed by the practices of the corporation.
So today as I was gunning down the aisle to see if they finally have the 18-pack of organic mac and cheese that’s been out for a little while, this hits me: I’m afraid of deprivation. Afraid, not quite in the same way that I’m fearful of my family being annihilated in a tragic car crash, but at least mildly anxious about the prospect of going without. And while I may not experience the emotion of anxiety, my behaviour tells the story.
My next realization was that we tend to be anxious about things we aren’t exposed to. The key to treating most forms of anxiety is through exposure: your brain learns that the anticipated outcome either doesn’t happen or if it does, it isn’t as awful as you expected. But if you don’t have any exposure, you don’t learn that you can cope with that thing you’re anxious about….which is a round about way of coming to terms with the fact that I haven’t had to experience deprivation in any significant way in quite a while.
While this absence of deprivation might seem to many like an achievement, or even the way things are supposed to be for white middle class professional men, to me it’s a recognition that power and privilege have begun to insulate me from the real world.
My position in this society has allowed me to create an illusion that my independence and self sufficiency can create a personal version of the world in which being deprived is non-existent. The overabundance of my world, and its celebrations of excess, have shaped me into a person who fears losing things I don’t even need.
A part of my poverty of excess, is the belief that I need to protect myself against the loss of inessentials.
Hoarders aren’t just the folks who won’t throw anything away and can’t walk on the floors of their living spaces for all the junk that is in the way. We are a society of hoarders. We are constantly taking more than we need to protect ourselves against the fear of being without.
Am I the only one who has spiritual awakenings in the freezer section of Costco?
So I started putting some stuff back. I started making a few specific choices to either risk deprivation (relax, there’s still two jars of peanut butter in the pantry) or actually enter into some small forms of deprivation right now. We have no almond bark, and we shall go without this week, even though it was on sale.
And I started thinking about what else I might do to intentionally expose myself to this dreaded deprivation. What kind of practices might help me lean into this fear?
After the check-out, as I passed through the food court part of the store with it’s delicious and cheap soft-serve ice cream, I remembered that there’s a long standing practice from a variety of spiritual traditions that might just be designed to help me with this problem: fasting.
Fasting is a form of temporary voluntary deprivation.
It’s not the same deprivation that billions of people on the planet face each day, but it’s an experience that invites transformation. Fasting allows us to choose deprivation for the sake of allowing it to form us in all the positive ways it is able.
We tend to think of deprivation as entirely bad. I realize that some might read this and see my exaltation of deprivation as proof of how privileged I am that I would dare consider it to have any merit. They might think that only people with too much would start to idealize being hungry. (A similar argument has been made about anorexia being an expression of Western decadence) But I think we can still engage in some voluntary deprivation without idealizing it, or forgetting that most others in the world are deprived without choice.
I'm not suggesting that we should all adopt a kind of asceticism that turns deprivation into something we use to prove to ourselves or others how "spiritual" we are. But in a culture of overabundance maybe there is real value to choosing some occasional deprivations, like fasting, as a form of counterconditioning from time to time.
I fasted once for non-medical reasons years ago. It was awful. I became obsessed with food. Instead of it being the beautiful spiritual experience I imagined it would be, it became a hyper-focus on my physical desire to feel full. But what I didn't grasp at the time was that embracing deprivation rather than becoming obsessed with escaping from it was crucial to the practice having real value.
Deprivation, when we aren’t frantic for escape, can form us in good ways.
It can reorient us to our interdependence on the planet, and on each other, while shifting us away from our illusions of self-sufficiency.
Deprivation can help us turn away from our endless preoccupations, and allow us an opportunity to be present again with ourselves and the world. What happens when people are “deprived” of their smart phones? It invites us to be here and actually with each other, although we may not always capitalize on the opportunity.
And in my Costco awakening I realized that deprivation can expose us in small ways to the experience of lacking something, and in turn help us learn that we are able to cope. Many of us catastrophize the experience of hunger. I sure do. It's not really a rational fear, but our emotional reaction to the idea of being hungry, or being without is so overstated, and so untested, that we live lives dedicated to avoiding the possibility of going without. Fasting brings us into confrontation with those imagined catastrophes and lets us experience that going without is not a so terrible and even is something we can cope with.
Perhaps little cars, however “impractical” or inconvenient are an invitation to some forms of deprivation. Perhaps our commitments to ever increasing capacity is feeding our clinging to overabundance by supporting our avoidance of deprivation. Perhaps a little car at Costco is the safest way to go after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment