Here’s a ploy to beat the demons of boredom and greed: frequent the altar of the God of Small Things!
First, let’s take boredom: it’s in the nature of human beings to take up things with great enthusiasm, but lose interest rapidly. Being a species characterized by intense curiosity and a drive to go out and explore, humans hanker after novelty and variety. In our humdrum lives, there’s very little of that (unless it is driving on a city’s mean streets), and even on our infrequent holidays, we are shepherded and cosseted by tour operators and hotel staff. When we are relatively young and unfettered, we can risk going out to undeveloped places without assured accommodation or return bookings, but when we have families, jobs, and taxes to pay, these things are pretty much decided beforehand, especially now that communication is instantaneous and almost universal.
What’s left is then, to explore the world of ideas and things around us. Fortunately, there’s unlimited opportunities for the first, through books, internet, and the media. The second costs money, so my suggestion is to get hooked on things which are cheap, rich in variety, and moderately difficult to get. That’s why collection of sets, whether it be of stamps (very old-fashioned!), or cinema posters (very retro chic!), or LPs (also old-world), or jazz CDs, or tea-cozies, or china figurines, or coffee mugs, or botanical specimens, and so on, is an excellent option. Not only do they give the opportunity for search, stalking, and capture, but they also absorb hours of your spare time arranging, cleaning, cataloguing, and admiring them. And they need not cost an arm and a leg, provided you are not into collecting really costly antiques, vintage cars, or the like.
There is a link between this approach and the stability of systems. They used to say, in the 1970’s, that complex ecosystems are more stable, for instance. The interaction of large numbers of different species, predator and prey, eater and eaten (phagal relations!), pests and victims, and a variety of specializations and adaptations to specific ecological niches, and complex symbiotic interdependencies, leads to a community that has many stabilizing mechanisms, many checks and balances. Tropical forests are like this. In contrast, we have ecosystems that have very few ecological niches, very few species, and simple interactions, which have few checks and balances, and are therefore relatively unstable. One species may expand so fast that it eats itself out of food, and then there is a population crash. The temperate forests are supposed to be like that, characterized by epidemic diseases and violent population fluctuations and cycles.
I’m not sure whether ecologists still swear by the complexity-begets-stability hypothesis nowadays, and it may just be one of those fanciful thoughts, like the end-of-history and the dawn-of-equality theories we had at the turn of the century. But where it concerns consumer behavior, it seems to be spot-on, as we all know that more and more of the same stuff bores us to tears. So my way is to get some small thing to keep the interest in life and living, alive!
There is another aspect to this type of ‘retail therapy’ for a sense of well-being. I know many people, good friends and relatives, who swear by the latest and best. They believe in going to the top of the market. Well, a choice has always to be made between costs and benefits, as the best usually costs the most. Firstly, we need to be sure that it’s really the best, and not some market hype. Secondly, we need to be sure that we really need that level of quality, or durability, or finish. Technology is changing and developing so fast, that very few consumer products remain useful or relevant more than a couple of years. Indeed, you can’t even get older things serviced or supported any more. Sometimes the less costly choice may be more practical and useful if you take into account its useful life.
Thirdly, there is the blessed 20:80 rule again, which means that most of us do not even want to use all the options available, since we are quite satisfied by a small sub-set of them. In cameras, or computers, or cell phones, we don’t really want much beyond the basic operations; who has the time anyway! If you can’t understand how to open the case or switch on a system (it’s happened to me and a friend on top of a mountain range!), what’s the use of all the bells and whistles? What’s the use of all those gears and levers if you need to study a 200-page manual to operate it? So are we paying for the inventor’s fulfillment, or for our satisfaction? Indeed, we can even leave it to other, richer and braver, souls to forge ahead on the cutting edge of technology, and we can get by quite well on a slightly older model. Upgradation need not be done at every new release or model, and we can safely wait for two or three generations to pass by before our old model becomes useless. I’m thinking of computers, cameras, music systems, and the like.
Fourthly, there is the good old minimax principle, which dissuades us from putting too many eggs into one basket. If you put your entire savings into one big thing, like a house, it may be the last thing you will be able to do; the rest of your life may go in paying the mortgage and interest. So prefer to divert your mind with a multitude of small things, and leave the big ones to the movers and shakers of the world!
No comments:
Post a Comment