We Need to be Entertained

This is a post about dishwasher detergent. More specifically, it’s a post about what’s wrong with the world.

Most of my posts here shall be about what’s wrong with the world.

Recently my girlfriend, who shall also be known as The Amazon, helped me load my dishwasher (she’s very helpful). I passed the detergent to her which was in pod form because I couldn’t find my usual powder when I last shopped for groceries. “Careful,” I told her. The pods require you to thoroughly dry your hands before you pick them up and then to wash and dry your hands after picking them up.

Now why should we have a product that requires all that? The powder is much simpler. You shake it in, then you’re done. I hate the pods. But as far as I can tell dishwashing powder has become all but extinct. Gel is popular now, which just strikes me as messy. And these god-forsaken pods are ubiquitous.

What’s the benefit of these damn pods? I ranted to her about how much I despise them. They’re less economical, they’re wasteful, and worst of all, they require special handling. Why should I risk burning my skin while loading the dishwasher when this was never an issue before? Why should I have to add a round of hand-washing, a dollop of hand soap and a dishcloth that will need laundered to this formerly simple routine?

And for what? An over-engineered, multi-part, tri-colored, space-age product encasement that will be seen for 3.5 seconds and then dissolved forever. Imagine the extra work the detergent factory has imposed upon itself with this pointless trend. They can no longer decant a powder into a cardboard box and be done. Now they have to retool their machines to create little psychedelic fidget-spinners. How is this profitable? There must be some slave labor involved somewhere along the way.

“Well you know,” The Amazon said dryly. “We need to be entertained.”

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more succinct distillation of the Crisis of Modernity.

She’s right. We’re a culture who needs to be entertained. Every second of every day by everything we touch. That 3.5 seconds of detergent transfer just wasn’t titillating enough before the corporation launched its product redesign.

We are not content to find our joy in eating, drinking, sitting outside in the sun, hiking in the woods, playing a game, having a conversation, or gathering with friends.

The industrial revolution and the advent of cities made us busy and isolated and lonely and sad, they say. So the entertainment industry was born. We needed movies and plays and dance clubs and televisions to get back our joy.

Now that’s not enough either. Now we are surrounded by miniature screens containing the sum total of all human knowledge, we can buy anything we’ve ever dreamed up, and we can watch the vilest of human behavior, real or re-enacted, any time we please at a single click.

The damage to our souls is apparent in the viciousness of our social media interactions, our amusement with the pain of other humans (see: reality TV), our cavalier attitude toward sexual assault (see: our “romance” stories, our elected officials), a complacency with violence that allows the steady rise of mass slaughters of school children by their classmates, and a national racism problem exacerbated by the election of the Psycho in Chief and most recently highlighted by the latest string of police brutality incidents against Blacks.

It’s apparent, too, in our decision to ignore these issues in the pursuit of ever-more-interesting looking cleaning agents.

For the first time in forever in developing countries, life expectancy is falling, deaths from drugs and alcohol are at an all-time high, and the suicide rate has tripled for kids as young as 10.

We are in crisis.

In my opinion, there are three keys to healing and living a worthwhile life. We, as a culture, aren’t doing any of them well.

We need to be kind. We need to be brave. And we need to tell the truth.