Have you noticed it, too?
Have you noticed the rise of what I’ll call “livin’ large
culture?” I’ve met a definitely-not-trivial number of wealthy people who seem
to deliberately pursue a lifestyle that is sure to have them dead in their
fifties. They weigh literally over three-hundred
pounds, they golf a lot, they’re rich, and their main interests are whiskey and
cigars. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with being rich or golfing a lot, but
being morbidly obese while simultaneously binging on cigars and hard liquor is
going to kill them. They know, and they don’t care. This is a mystery to me
because these are highly intelligent, self-made men. If anyone would know
better than to make a habit of ingesting large amounts of carcinogens
voluntarily, it would be the group of people known as “well-educated
millionaires.” I have no explanation for why these people exist. Does their
success make them weary of additional years of life? Is there something about
being a millionaire that causes a person to want to cut his life short? I don’t
fault them for their tastes in alcohol and tobacco, but in the 21st
Century, money can buy so much more than that: exotic vacations, less carcinogenic
drugs, romantic liaisons, high-tech gadgets, or literally anything else that won’t waste your liver and lungs and give
you seven kinds of cancer.
But, no.
Have you noticed “more is more culture?” This is perhaps
best illustrated by American society’s current preoccupation with bacon. I like
bacon. A couple of strips of bacon taste good to me, either crisscrossed on top
of a hamburger or alongside a breakfast omelet. But “more is more culture”
demands, well, more. Restaurants now
serve things with extra bacon to the
extreme. Up until a few months ago, at Chili’s, for example, you could get
a regular bacon cheeseburger, or you could get this other thing that was
decorated with about as much bacon as there was beef. Insane. Looking at their
menu just now, I see that that burger has been replaced by something called “The
Boss Burger,” which, according
to Chili’s own nutritional information, clocks in at 1,660 calories ignoring the side of French fries it comes
with. 1,040 of those calories are comprised of fat. That means that a full 2/3 of the burger is made of fat.
The burger’s sodium content clocks in at 2,880 mg, or 25% more than a sedentary
adult should eat in a single day. Again: this excludes the French fries. It
goes without saying that eating such a thing will hurt your body. You will
become inflamed and uncomfortable. You will likely experience insulin
resistance. You’ll become tired and, if you’re not used to eating such things,
you’ll get a headache.
Such menu items merely serve to feed “more is more culture”
its food. There are many other ways this culture feeds itself and many
different things it eats.
Cadillac Escalades, for example, were once about the biggest
SUV you could buy, but today there are sundry Yukons and Suburbans that dwarf
them, providing literally four rows of
seating for average American households that have declined steadily for the
past 60 years. It’s now possible for a middle-class family to purchase an eighty-six inch television for
non-commercial use. Eighty-six inches is over seven feet of screen. Game of
Thrones is just fine, but do we really need to the shape of the characters’
retinal capillaries? And while the average American adult weighs less than the
three-hundred-pound guys who are “livin’ large,” the men now boast of “dad bod”
and the women campaign on social media for the normalization of plus-size. That’s
“plus-size” as in more than the regular
sizes. Seemingly every aspect of the human experience is spreading out.
Everywhere I go, it seems that the principle goal of people
is to occupy as much space as humanly possible, whether it be occupied with
their plus-sized cars, plus-sized bodies, or plus-sized attitudes. Nearly each
time I run or cycle on the road, cars honk angrily and people swear at me for
having the nerve to be a non-vehicle on the shoulder of the road. Some even
slow down, roll down their windows, and advise me to get off the road, knowing
full well that I am both legally entitled to run or bike on the road and that I happen to have the legal
right-of-way! You can’t go to any sort of public event like a music festival or
an arts demonstration without the many space-occupiers spreading out their
picnic blankets, folding chairs, nieces, and nephews out to occupy as much
space as possible – before anyone else has a chance to occupy any space of
their own! On a recent trip to a movie theater, I watched as a young boy and
his sister positioned themselves on the two outermost seats of an entire row, “saving
seats” for a whole row of their family members, who came much later and with
great noise and fanfare. Meanwhile, urban sprawl consumes every last visible
patch of green space imaginable, the bulldozers and backhoes mowing down every
tree and filling every pond so that the next plus-sized family can populate
that virgin 0.3 acres with a swimming pool too small to swim in, an outdoor
grill too large to fully use, a dining room too expansive to have a
conversation in, two or even three
dining tables, a litter of iPad-surfing narcissists, and a surreptitious infestation
of rats.
Look, I’m not merely being a misanthrope here. This is a
real problem. It’s a problem when urban sprawl replaces a diverse ecosystem
with a foreign one comprised of just five animal species: Humans, and dogs,
rats, and house spiders they carry with them everywhere. That problem is made
all the worse when the local homeowner’s association prohibits all but a list
of 20 yard plant species. It’s a problem when cars are made so large that
people feel uneasy driving down streets on which they might encounter a
pedestrian. It’s a problem when the aspirational ideal of the human diet is something
that will give you both cancer and type two diabetes if prolonged for more than
about a decade. And it’s a problem when not even fabulous wealth can elevate
you out of this mindset, when it actually embeds it deeper into your psyche
such that you will cigar yourself to
death.
It’s not consumption that I object to, nor is it
over-population. There’s something brazenly wasteful about the way people
operate, almost as if acknowledging the needs of other people diminishes the
experience. When businesses buy up an acreage, mow down every tree on the land,
and then leave it dormant for two years while they wait for the land to
increase in value, the economic aspect of it doesn’t bother me. It’s the
aesthetic part the kills me. Why mow down every tree? It’s as though the land
were a freshly baked pie that someone decided to take five bites out of – from the
precise center of the pie – and then leave it on the counter so that anyone
else who wants pie is forced to have a badly misshapen piece, partially eaten
by a stranger.
When you watch toddlers play, you’ll notice how they
carelessly toss aside toys when those toys no longer captivate their attention.
They’ll be playing with a ball, notice a train, drop the ball onto the floor,
letting it roll wherever it may, and run toward the train. They have no concept
of tidiness, and barely any awareness of the fact that someone else in the room
may wish to play with the ball, or someone in the future might want to find the
ball. They are simply, in that moment, finished with the ball and onto the
train. Even if we teach the toddler to clean up the ball when playtime is over,
we still haven’t addressed the fundamental issue, which is an awareness in the
immediate moment of how our present actions might impact bystanders.
This – well, what is it? an emotion? an attitude? an aesthetic?
– has begun to permeate all aspects of life. My interests, here, now, in the
present moment trump not only every other person who is and who might be, but
even the interests of my own future self! I smoke the cigar. I eat the bacon. I
super-size the family cars. I
lay my homestead across the middle of everything, uprooting animal, mineral,
and vegetable and replacing it with a stone grotto pool and a “kegerator.”
It shouldn’t be illegal. But we as a society should
voluntarily for more than this.
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