My Way is the Highway
By Peter Block
I was in San
Francisco last week and Denver before that. Atlanta before that and
earlier Boston, Chicago, New York and L.A.. All anyone talked about was
the traffic. How long it took to get here, how long to get there. As
soon as we arrived we started worrying about getting back. And all this
driving was about getting to work and back. And if we were not going to
work, we were going shopping.
When did traffic
become so important? And what happened to talk about the weather? In San
Francisco there was an earthquake, but all anyone talked about was the
traffic. I kept saying, “What about the earthquake?” and they responded
with, “Traffic was awful this morning.”
When they say
life is a journey, not a destination, now I know what they mean. It
means we got stuck in
traffic.
What seems
important about this is that when traffic replaces the weather,
technology has replaced nature. A walk in the park has been replaced by
the ride home from work.
--And
where are we driving to? Work and the mall. When did work and shopping
begin to define our lives and go from occupation and necessity to
obsession and desire. When did Mother Nature turn over the reins to
Henry Ford and Home Depot?
--The
distance between home and work is a measure of the distance between our
body and our mind; it is the distance we have traveled from ourselves.
If home is where the heart is, work is the place where feelings are
unwelcome and reason is worshipped in the form of economics. Is the call
of the workplace, where we make the money, and the mall, where we spend
it, so seductive that it has convinced us these are life’s destinations
and worth spending so much time getting there?
Us for Sale
When earning and purchasing defines us, it is us that has been consumed.
We have surrendered our personhood and become a product ourselves. We
are the target market we thought we sought elsewhere. If we are the
product, the highway is the distribution channel and our office is the
showroom.
--The
shareholder has become the real customer and management has become a
sales force convincing us that it is right and necessary to be consumed
in service to that customer.
--As
products, employees are now inventory, warehoused at home, transported
on the highway and delivered for purchases in the showroom called a
workplace. Employees have become “just in time” commodities. Add ten or
ten-thousand when you need them, ship out ten or ten-thousand when you
are done with them.
Transformed from a long-term worker to a cost item, a temporary,
short-term asset that can be capitalized, exported, factored at a
discount to be converted to cash. And all with our consent.
--And
for this privilege we convert our cars into fast food restaurants,
mobile offices and communication centers, forget about the weather and
focus on the final ride home. Slow today. Stop and go. Watch out for the
accident in the right lane on 880 South, near Fremont, Calif.’s Great
Mall exit.
I Shop, Therefore
I Am
We take that exit to the shopping mall to complete the triangle of
highway and workplace. After we have been consumed during the week, we
go to the Great Mall and are resurrected into a weekend consumer. There
to be entertained by the purchase possibilities of one hundred and ten
stores.
--It
is not by accident that the mall is as standardized and predictable as
our workplaces and the highway we use to get there. You can shop at any
mall in any city and never know you were out of town. In a way, the mall
should feel like the workplace, for they serve to justify each other. I
shop to justify having worked so long and hard, and I work long and hard
to support the shopping habit.
--What
connects the highway and the mall and the consuming nature of work is
that they are all high control environments, each with its own order and
culturally driven promise. We embrace them as a retreat from the
wildness and unpredictability of nature. Not only Mother Nature, but our
own nature as well which is filled with chaotic emotions, feelings,
doubts and mortality. Commerce, the car and the mall have a reassuring
promise of security that our own experience cannot deliver. Nothing is
so unpredictable as the weather, and it is in its unpredictability that
we seek a replacement.
--The
problem is our willingness to pay any price for what the work, the mall
and the car mean to us. We have bought the illusion that success is
defined by the work. Freedom is found in the car and pleasure is
purchasable at the mall. These are three basic tenets of the consumer
society and they are false gods. We feel more and more vulnerable at
work. While the car, spending its time creeping on the interstate,
laughs at freedom. And the mall is too numbing to call it a pleasure.
--It
would be nice to offer an answer to all of this. Some think the solution
is to work at home, interestingly called telecommuting. Working at home
only masks the nature of the problem. It may keep us out of our cars,
but it invites instrumental, commercial energy into the home. Once the
wolf is in the door, it will move from room to room, and no matter how
unwelcome, will be reluctant to leave.
In Search of
Balance
It is on our watch that workplace, shareholder value and materialism
have surrounded us and are signaling the end of nature.
--We
often talk of needing more balance in our lives. Balance is not about
giving equal time to work, personal life and free time. Balance is the
capacity to know who we are and to feel that our mind, body and spirit
are in balance wherever we are. We are unbalanced in the power we have
given working, traveling and buying. We have lost ourselves in their
pursuit. And the work culture and consumer culture are happy to prosper
as a result.
--Maybe
seeing things as they are helps a little, even more important is seeing
our own part in it. The world we complain about is the world of our
creation. If we stopped shopping for entertainment, got to work using
back roads or stopped moving to the suburbs, went home at 5:00 every day
and took all of our vacation time, it would help.
--And
all of this because last week in San Francisco, I wanted to talk about
the earthquake and all they cared about was the traffic.
This article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in
September 1998
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