“…joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me…” – Ross Gay, ‘The Book of Delights’
Friday’s mass action happened. This week, the stock market is in free fall. Correlation does not imply causation, but #TeslaTakedown seems to be going pretty well. Shoutout to the protesters, shoutout to Bill S. Preston, Esquire, shoutout to any Tesla owners who have sold their cars. It’s never too late to sell your Tesla, or perhaps firebomb it. Speaking of, shoutout to those Teslas in France that, uh, spontaneously combusted.
It’s so easy to buy things in the 21st century U.S. Hell, it’s easy to buy things from your couch, and receive while still on the couch. A 21st century USian can functionally live the life of a cat. I can practically hear my dad through the screen, asking what’s wrong with living the life of a cat, to which I would counter that my dad’s also an accomplished surgeon who also had a long career in international public health and who also plays tennis and violin well into his sixties. With respect to cats, I would like to gently suggest that maybe we should aspire to more spiritual fulfillment.
To feed that impulse, in lieu of pictures, I’m honoring the recently passed George Lowe with clips of Space Ghost Coast To Coast. Talk about a stupid bit of comedy. Fascism wants everything to be rigid, to make sense, to have a purpose. Fascism can’t understand laughter, especially laughter that’s hard to explain. So in this anti-materialism column, we’re celebrating one of the great pieces of absurdist art.
Did going a day without buying things make you reconsider other purchasing impulses? Did you realize you needed dish detergent, and would have to either do dishes tomorrow or wash them by hand? I bet you adapted if you did. We’re adaptable, as people. And we (and the planet) survived for eons without Amazon Prime.
Sure, one hope of the one-day boycott is that it’s step one to get people in general prepped for a General Strike in 2028. The main hope is sticking it to our newly emboldened oligarchs. I honestly don’t know how much we stuck it to them, but what’s important is that people participated.
Now, one point of clarity: I’m not saying we need to accept new standards of lifestyle austerity because the fascists are in power. We don’t want the ownership class telling us to do more with less—everyone who’s ever survived a layoff and suddenly had to do three people’s job for the same salary knows about being told to doing more with less. What I am saying, though, is that we live in a culture that encourages buying random plastic trinkets in the For Sale aisle and eating endless bags of chips as a substitute for, like, having hobbies or hanging out with friends or prayer. We live in a culture that invents a tunnel where cars move slowly because trains are too complicated for tourists to understand, a culture that invents the Juicero because it expects customers not notice that they already have hands. It’s not that life needs to be harder, it’s that we shouldn’t be so scared of the inconvenient parts of life.
Thriving is not about abundance. A happy life is not about materialism. Consider the lilies of the goddamn field, as Ulysses Everett McGill said. The U.S. economy is about extraction. The bosses extract all they can from you, and to blow off steam, you’re supposed to go extract all you can from Temu, from your side hustle, from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I want to seek fulfillment in reading books, walking in parks, seeing live music, cooking food for my friends, watching my kid play with his grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I want happiness that can’t be plotted on a spreadsheet. To borrow from Ross Gay, I want to incite intangible joy.
The oligarchs and fascists don’t understand intangible joy. Hell, they don’t understand joy. That fact gives you power over them.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris