Debt is sharecropping

Unlike most people I know, I regulate carefully the spending of small amounts of money on things like clothes, haircuts, manicures, books I want to read once but can just as easily get on interlibrary loan if I wait, bottled water, soda, coffee, treats and prepared foods, eating out, and in general any food item that doesn't derive from the grocery store or somebody's garden. How did it come to seem normal for middle-class and even working-class people to spend so much on prepared food so many times per week? This is not, by the way, moralizing on behalf of elaborate slow-food family dinners--not that I'm against that stuff either, if you like it--but for myself I favor the fastest food there is: bread and peanut butter and fruit straight out of the fridge, for instance. The cost in both time and money is negligible. I really don't understand the desire to spend more. Why isn't retaining their money worth more to people than a series of impulsive mini-luxuries and illusory conveniences throughout the week?

Advertising has something to do with it, and so does habit and social norms, and a general background level of prosperity--compared to the third world, anyway. (I'm aware that relative incomes are slipping in the US for all but the top percentiles.) And each individual item, taken singly, doesn't cost a huge amount. It just costs way more than it needs to and is unnecessary. A twenty-dollar bottle of moisturizer? Thanks, I'll hold onto the $20, "because I'm worth it." (I know, I know, that's not even anywhere near the high end products.)

I don't mean to scold or set myself up as superior. Everyone has the right to determine their own priorities; I just advocate awareness: for instance that the cumulative amount spent buying sodas each month (compared to the amount spent on more nutritious food staples) really does reflect the proportionate position a person thinks soda ought to occupy in his life.

I'm aware too that my habits are way outside the norm, freakish by current cultural standards. It hurts to suspect that some of my nearest and dearest may think me "cheap." I don't think of myself that way. I didn't buy the cheapest house I could find, or the cheapest car. Ditto furniture and major electronic appliances. Those are long-term investments and I want to get the best long-term value I can. I love going to museums or getting tickets to other artistic performances. But I don't want to drop unmonitored little bits of money on restaurant food or objects and services whose ability to provide satisfaction is fleeting. The cumulative effect is significant.

This is not a moral issue. It's practical, like a well-insulated house. You want all the money you invest in heating and cooling to go directly to your comfort, instead of being dissipated uselessly outside of your own living space. You want to eliminate leaks.

The worst sort of financial leak there is, is consumer debt. Of course, go into debt for a house or car or an education: those things can be worth it because in the right circumstances they promote your long-term assets. But nothing else is worth debt. All money spent paying interest is money that could otherwise have been spent to enhance your life. If you cumulatively spend more on consumer purchases than you can cover with your income, and make up the difference with credit cards, you are reducing your spending power, not increasing it. This is obvious enough, and in fact, I've learned recently that a slight majority of US citizens don't pay any interest at all to credit card companies, either because they don't have credit cards (about 25%) or (another 30%, including me) because they pay off every new charge within the grace period before the interest is applied. Prior to googling up some statistics while writing this blog post, I was under the misapprehension that the average American pays a whopping credit-card interest charge on a regular basis. Not so. But a good-size minority does, only a whisker less than half. The average amount of income that went to credit-card debt among households carrying a credit-card balance was 21% in 2004. Now, since the financial meltdown, it's down to under 17% in most places, but still, OMG, 17% is a sixth of your income, a hefty fraction, and many people are forking over that much or even more of their resources mostly just to purchase the privilege of continuing to owe money while chipping away with a teaspoon at the original purchase amounts (paying the credit-card minimums ensures that total interest expenses will comfortably outweigh the principal amount). What a trap.

A person mired in consumer debt is in exactly the same position as a sharecropper.

*Project Runway* lets me down

You'll think this is terribly naive of me, but last week I lost my innocence with respect to reality television. For the last year or so, I've become an avid watcher of Project Runway, which will be a surprise to anyone who knows my extreme reluctance to invest any time or money with clothes and fashion. My mate got me into it. At first it was only something to do while snuggling on the couch; I brought my book with me. Gradually I came to see that clothing design is an art form like any other; following its trends is no more inherently contemptible than following literary trends. Tim Gunn is a delight, providing the kind of compassionate, honest critique I aspire to as a teacher and workshopper. And besides, the human drama is riveting. Watching the designers try to maintain grace under the pressure of extreme desire and fear as they wait onstage to hear whether they will be eliminated is a moral education just like literature is. I'm often very impressed by their integrity. (Whether it's at all decent to exploit that kind of mental suffering by actual people for mass entertainment is a different question.)

So, but, okay, Season 8, Episode 9, "Race to the Finish." At the end of the previous week, Episode 8, the preview scenes showed Tim saying to Valerie "You can't forfeit!" Then the bathroom door swinging shut and Gretchen saying: "Val...?" And then Tim in the workroom in announcement mode saying "Even I'm shaking over this." My mate and I looked at each other in wild surmise: what's next? A contestant dropping out? (It's happened before.) A trip to the hospital? (It's happened before.) Worse?

http://www.mylifetime.com/shows/project-runway/season-8/video/full-episodes/episode-8/a-rough-day-on-the-runway

Well, what it was, really, was nothing. The implied narrative arc among these three incidents was a complete fabrication. Tim's "shaking" was just a commiseration with all the designers over the not-really-all-that-surprising twist added to the ongoing challenge (create a ready-to-wear complement to the high-fashion piece). The "forfeit" business was only an offhand bit of teachery encouragement. And the bathroom weeping was unconnected with either of the other moments of dialogue and action. AND they were put out of chronological order.

Oh! Oh! I'm so disappointed in the person who bears moral responsibility for this piece of blatant fibbing. The director, would that be? Well, not Tim, anyway, I comfort myself.

I mean, of course the material for any show like this is manipulated, shape is imposed on umpteen hours of raw footage edited down to a scant one hour. I knew that. But there are honest and dishonest ways to do that kind of artistic manipulation, and I guess somewhere in the back of my head I assumed, naively no doubt, that Project Runway was more or less honest. Now it's right up there in the front of my head: What if there are things in the show that are lies in the same way that trailer was a lie? Nothing prevents it. This could be happening all the time, and I wouldn't necessarily know it.

The Project Runway trailer reminds me a bit of emotional upsets that my mate and I had early on, before we arrived by mutual efforts at our present happy state of stable equanimity, affectionate generosity, and tolerance. Not that there was any dishonesty involved in the case of our relationship, but I would be shocked sometimes to learn that out of two or three of what I had regarded as completely trivial and unrelated incidents over the course of a few days, she had constructed a linked narrative of inconsiderate behavior rising to a plot climax. I've been the object of unflattering narrative-construction at work also, where Dr. X believes, on the basis of a botched communication from Dr. Y, plus another unfortunate coincidence--I happened to be present when somebody asked him something he didn't like, but it wasn't my idea, but he probably thought it was--that I'm an enemy. Alas! There's pretty much no fixing that impression at this point. Every new contact between us gets grafted onto the existing story.

And then, and then... what if--? Could I myself, honest memoirist that I am, also be falling into unconscious narrativization errors? Creating a storyline at times where none really exists, from random events no more related in the real world than the stars of the astrological constellations? It's what people do. It's what Buddhist teachers are warning us about when they tell us to "drop all the stories we tell ourselves."

Okay, I'll try to keep a skeptical eye on my human tendency to narrativize, and I hope y'all will too. But as for the Project Runway preview, that's just despicable.