“What’s the number one thing you want for Christmas?” This question started me thinking on the nature of wanting things and the challenge of gift-giving during the holiday season.
When I was a kid it was easy, I wanted a toy or a gadget, something that I absolutely had to have. Over the years, as I grew up probably, this desire for things started to mutate. It went from wanting when I was very young to sometimes needful things as I got older. As I continue to age along my path I discover that I want things less and less. I think it’s partially because of the poor economy – I can’t really ask anyone to get me anything because times are tough, unemployment is high, and nobody should feel awkward about not being able to get that perfect gift for someone else. We are all bound to budgets and we either use our savings or we borrow to make sure that someone has a “good Christmas”. I have found that I’d rather send cards and holiday greetings, spend time with people that I want to spend time with, rather than receive some token object of affection. It’s an impossible road to tread, because the culture is so wound up in giving things to each other that you feel awkward making a list and then you feel even worse if you don’t have a list to give in the first place. It’s kind of like a trap, in that regard.
A lot of the old standbys just aren’t as attractive to me any longer. Music is mostly artificial flotsam and jetsam, pounded into shape by machines, delivered either by an object like a CD or virtually, on iTunes. Much of modern media follows this bend that music has taken. Most of it is utter crap, and while it’s nice to have things that are good and you do enjoy, the chances that you already have what you like is almost a certainty. The issue here is there isn’t anything really new or notable when it comes to a lot of modern media choices. It is best exemplified by how people make and enjoy the media. In the 21st century most media is faucet-delivered. This has two angles to it, not only is what comes out of the faucet kind of bland, dull, and uninteresting, but in many respects opening the faucet and leaving it run doesn’t cost anything. In music, you have Spotify. A free account with which you can listen to nearly anything at all anytime you like. Faucet Music. Netflix. Faucet Movies. GameFly. Faucet Games. I don’t seek out music any longer, the artists I like are dead or have moved on to survival employment and no longer make music. Movies? They are the essence of faucet media. You find a production company, a script put together in a crayon-by-numbers way and as long as it makes its initial investment back you’ll be on a permanent treadmill of meaningless sequels. I don’t really like going out to the movies anymore, there are so few movies out there that interest me. There is a very tender balance between how much bullshit I’m willing to put up with and how much that bullshit costs, all balanced on a fulcrum where on the other side is what I could be doing with my time if I wasn’t enduring said bullshit. So there is no point in buying a BluRay of anything and wrapping it up as a gift. Most of the dreck that Hollywood secretes is recycled monumental bullshit. Remember Avatar? Try Pocahontas, try Fern Gully. It would be one thing if this was an isolated example, but it isn’t. This sort of derivative bullshit soaks modern media to the dripping point.
So I stand back from all of this and think about what I really want. What do I want for Christmas? I want time. Time to do what I want to do. It’s the only thing I lust after these days – time enough to read, time enough to do whatever else it is that I want to do. Time is impossible to buy, and utterly irrational to try to wrap up for someone else. Really all that matters for the holidays is to be with the people you truly want to be with. Sometimes you can’t make it and you feel bad because there is so much space between you, and sometimes you don’t make it because life is better when it’s lived apart.
This entire line of reasoning is a terrible thing for retailers who make their money on selling things, and for that I am sorry. But things aren’t want-ful much anymore. Sometimes they are need-ful, sometimes they are like-ful, but only in a rare set of instances is a thing actually want-ful. In some ways perhaps, the faucet services like Spotify and Netflix have done more damage to their subject media than they ever intended to. By making everything available, the value of that everything drops to zero. Just leave the faucet running, it doesn’t matter.
