This is a fantastic line from a brilliant
book and also one of my favourite films, Fight Club. It's one of the many
quotable lines from the film and this is my middle-class, "I've moved back in with my parents", interpretation of it.
My mum loves to have a tidy kitchen and
everything has to be in its right place. This includes the dishwasher. It has
to be 100% full, all the plates must be rinsed, and everything in its
particular spot of course. I appreciate a good Jenga mission when it comes to
dishwashers and I definitely fall on the rinsing plate side of the dispute - it
is not a food disposal machine for Christ’s sake! So yeah, I get where my mum
is coming from. However I am somewhat inconsiderate when it comes to taking
glasses from my room to the dishwasher.
That journey is one I took 3 times the
other day as I had 10 glasses in my room. I filled the top part of the
dishwasher while the bottom part was around 90% full. This left my mum in a
predicament that she has to deal with every couple of days: How to fill every
available space in the dishwasher before putting it on. She told me that I
should just wash them up rather than use all the space, as there was still room
for a couple of plates.
I realised that this is what Tyler Durden
meant when he was speaking about things owning you. You buy a dishwasher
because you don’t want to clean things by hand anymore. Old school washing uses
more water, takes longer, and messes up your beautiful hands. But then you
become so obsessed by the dishwasher and the control you have arbitrarily put
on it in one way or another, such as having to fully load it before letting it
run - you lose sight of why you bought it. It is there to do the washing
up for you, to make your life easier, not to force you to do washing up and to
agitate you into filling it 100%.
You feel obliged to complete the ritual of
the item, in this case making sure it’s fully loaded. This is true with many
things we have. Something like facebook. If I have a notification, I have to
look - it’ll drive me crazy if I don’t. Another example is when I first got a
mobile phone. I bought it so I could keep in better contact with my friends
(and to play Snake). But then I hear the vibration of a new text while I’m
drifting off to sleep, and I have to read it! If I don’t know who is texting me
instantly, it’ll bug me and I won’t sleep, even though the last thing I want
now is contact with my friends telling me how drunk they are!
I bought a car so I could be comfortable in
it and drive around in style. I ended up cleaning it every 5 days and driving
myself mad when I accidently spilt coffee on the interior.
If I buy a tablet computer to make things
simpler and easier, I'll end up spending hours figuring out how it all works, only
to never use half the functions. If I were to use it, it would take longer than a computer,
and will ruin aspects of my social life.
If I hear my smoke alarm bleeping. I have to
heed its warning, and escape my burning house alive.
Okay maybe that last one is helpful but do
you get the point? You buy things with good intentions, but you end up being overcome by your addiction of being obsessive with things. You eventually spend hours doing something that doesn't benefit you and you don't even enjoy yourself doing it. It just becomes another task you have to do.
What is particularly ironic about this whole
post is that it was all started by a Fight Club advertisement on my facebook
wall. That inspired me to write this and spend my time on this. Things
you own end up owning you.
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