Egos dictating desires?
While I was out for a walk the other day, two cyclists came up from behind me. They rang their bells before they approached (annoying for me as it was quiet, there was lots of room to go by, no one else was around, they weren’t going fast and bells are kinda pointless on walking trails since people are allowed to wear headphones ….rant over) and as they passed I noticed they were decked out with all the best equipment; top-notch bikes, clothing, accessories etc. Completely unnecessary in my opinion. How so you say? Considering their leisurely pace, uneasiness on the bikes, their inability to steer straight, the stomachs that stretched through their $50+ lycra shirts …well, it all smacked of ‘looking the part’ rather than any sincere attempt at exercising, enjoying the outdoors and of course biking. I’m quite certain that if they didn’t have the hundreds of dollars in equipment they wouldn’t be out on the trail to begin with. They could never conceive of ‘just riding a bike’.
These thoughts came to me because I recently had a conversation about a similar thing in music. A person came into the shop the other day to get a newly acquired part fitted to their horn. And what’s so odd about this? Well, the horn was a wonderful step-up model that I had happened to hear the musician play before …and they can’t play. Not very well that is. Their ability as a musician is so far below the quality of their horn (that’s closing in on two grand!) that for them to have went out and bought a newer, customized part with the hopes of improving their tone is pointless ….the horn as it is is far more than they’ll ever need considering their present ability. But here again, like the cyclists, they too felt that they needed this ‘better’ thing to be …well, better – failing to realize that getting better only required the most simplest of approaches; practicing or just getting on a bike. Nothing else is really needed.
These are just two examples, but this sort of mentality exists in a lot of what we do; needing elaborate machines to type out documents for example, making phone calls, moving us from point A to point B etc. It seems that we buy into the belief that things somehow have to be sophisticated, and that we need the latest and greatest to accomplish what are essentially simple objectives. It’s also as if our over-the-top spending is an affirmation of our self-worth; we don’t buy because we need but because we’re convinced we have little value as an individual if we don’t. And so we end up with $400 worth of gear to go jogging around the block, a $50,000 car to get us to the grocery store when it’s not raining, and the newest piece of technology to tell us it’ll be sunny tomorrow or amuse us with some angry birds.
Bored? Perhaps. Overkill? Definitely, but there’s deeper issues at the root of it all that I feel speak volumes. Not just to our collective self-esteem, but to our consumerism that feeds upon itself and negatively affects us at the same time in terms of sustainable living and the environment. People have griped about this for a long time now, but from what I can tell very little has changed – at least in my neck of the woods. We still buy. We still feel the need to buy. It’s as if we don’t know what to do with ourselves if we’re not working or spending or participating in this endless cycle of consuming. The sad thing is that our idea of a ‘complete’ life is tied into this.
Which is weird, because life itself should have very little to do with it.
An unrelated(?) picture of a butterfly that held still long enough for me to get a closeup. Can you see the eye? Very cool.
