Why Do We Dream of Living in Walmart?

Why the hell do we have so many things? Why do we keep buying more?

Hobby Lobby is one of the most confusing places on the planet to me. Every time I walk in one, it’s like being dropped off on a planet in another galaxy. When I’m really in a rut and know I need to do something unusual to get out of a routine of misery, it’s the first place I head to. A dome of fluorescent gray where I can immerse myself in my lack of purpose.

I sat down on the ground in one some October or November afternoon and let my eyes wander up and down the shelves upon shelves of Christmas ornaments that stretched 20 to 30 feet upward. Objects who only have a meaning if you give it one, otherwise they stand there motionless into perpetuity. For only a blink within forever, I was in their stagnant company. So, I look at all these colorful bulbs, and I’m thinking about how the town I live in has around 70k, maybe 80k people in it. I think about the ornaments wrapped in 15 year old newspaper that my family have had since I was in preschool if not earlier in some cases and how little I cared about the existence of any of them individually. Well, besides the one that sings a snippet of Elvis’s Stuck on You, that one’s awesome. Beyond that, the idea of Christmas to me never involved pieces of plastic on a string. It didn’t even involve a tree. Yet for all of us at large, we have this attachment to these ornaments so grand that it necessitates an incomprehensible amount of them consolidated into one section of one massive store of “things”.

Hobby Lobby is as full of “stuff” as any place has ever been. You see that shoddily printed edit of Abraham Lincoln wearing a gaming headset on a pieces of sheet metal? You can take your little debit card out and punch a couple numbers and hey, that’s your item now. Or this ream of fabric, or a mirror, or these chocolate molds, or decorative mirrors so small they don’t even have a function. I gaze into Abe’s eyes. Determined, poised, presidential. He doesn’t look back at me because he’s too busy owning motherfuckers in Black Ops to bat an eye. “Good for you, Abe”, I say wistfully as I meander onto other aisles, contemplative about the less than two hundred years since his leadership that led to me being there at all, “You show ‘em.”.

I exit Hobby Lobby with a full wallet and empty heart as always. A lot of people go to the mall or shopping in general to fill their gnawing void, I go to intentionally drown in it. Like someone who listens to sad songs after a break up. Storefront upon storefront of novelties that are a neat idea for three minutes before sitting on a desk forever all for sale at $35. The Buddha didn’t endorse this Buddha board, he’d probably think that spit on a dry rock would accomplish the same thing. At least, that’s what I think of what the Buddha thinks. He’s too busy gaming with Abe in the afterlife to care. I’m on Earth though, here to shake my head and keep moving with the crowd. I’ve made this trip a number of times by now. None of this surprises me. It simply keeps me guessing.

Have you ever seen those videos where people restock their overly organized fridges or pantries or bathrooms with an exorbitant amount of various options and products for every niche case or desire one could possibly have? A fridge solely for thirty different kinds of beverages with a freezer drawer solely for custom flavored ice cubes. There’s a little chimp in the back of my brain that gets a tickle whenever I see these kinds of things, he likes what he sees, he wishes he could have it. The front part of my head squints in bewilderment. Do you know how much time it would take to upkeep that one niche component of an entire home? I drink water 95% of the time anyway because frankly so many beverages are reasonably unhealthy to consume given how easy it is to guzzle sugar when it’s a liquid. Yet, there’s that dissatisfaction of recognizing my limited freedom. If I want a beverage, I have to go through the effort to go buy it and wouldn’t it be nice if it was all right here?

So many of these videos are influencers who are paid by companies producing plastic containers to make parts of their home look like a grocery store to make other people jealous or at least yearning to have their own home be like that as though it’s a realistic standard. They take the time to do all that because it’s their job. Professional stokers of the flames of desire. All with their $18 special egg holding drawers that take up more space than the perfectly functional carton of eggs did. Most confusingly is all of the abundant and assorted produce yet nothing that indicates that an actual meal will be made out of them unless they’re eating basic iceberg salads with room temperature dressing every meal. Seriously, I saw one video where a woman had like 20-30 oranges and another where someone else put 12-15 lemons all in a drawer. There’s no way you’re using all that before it goes bad. Generic produce, lunch meat, cheese, thirty different beverages, maybe some yogurts, all in bulky containers that leave no room for leftovers of any actual meal they may find themselves eating. Maybe the TikTok girly physique is dependent on a diet of 100 snacks a week, I’m not privy to those deets.

There’s a MrBeast video my roommate once put on in the living room while I was making some food for the two of us, not because we like MrBeast but just to indulge in whatever insanity makes him all his money. It’s funny, I used to watch MrBeast when he was a random guy making fun of kids making terrible YouTube videos when I was a teenager having absolutely zero idea he would become an internationally known figure. That aside, this video was about how for every day this one guy stayed within the confines of a Target, he would receive $10,000. He could use and consume anything in the store whenever and however he wanted, the caveat being that the only social contact he really had was MrBeast antagonizing him in one way or another to get him to quit. I mentioned nothing of it and laughed along in the moment, but it all struck a disturbing nerve within me. Within those red and white walls are objects that many yearn for and will never have for one reason or another, the only separation between them and the already made product being a paywall. Many of us think we’d do just about anything for a daily salary of ten Gs, yet this seemingly regular guy lasted about a month.

I could make the very obvious, cliched point I’m already teeing up about the value and necessity of human connection and that fulfillment if from relationships. I’m sure you’ve heard it as many times as you’ve heard an advertisement coaxing you to buy something new. I suppose that is even a part of the point I would be making, but more poignantly, isn’t this all so noisy? Doesn’t it make you see static snow when you go to sleep at night? The constant tug-of-war regarding the morality of the existence of desire itself. As though to be free from it is just, as though to indulge in it is the truth.

I hardly even allow myself to want anything, convincing myself I’m deserving of nothing in some haughty opposition to “the man” as though that’s some major own as they piss where I stand. Even still, in my apartment are six or seven cardboard boxes stuffed by my desk or in my closet that I haven’t opened in 3 1/2 years, ones that have simply been dragged around with me as I’ve gone to college. Full of “things”, ones I clearly don’t need. My therapist asks me why I don’t allow myself to feel sadness, self pity, genuine agitation. I shrug my shoulders, it’s been this way since I was ten. That maybe, if I wanted nothing, I could stop the yelling.

They call economics “the dismal science” and it’s taken me up until now to see why. So many tales of how the world will squeeze you dry, leave you with no room for error or sometimes mere breath; “You are a peasant in this forsaken world and you will give it nothing.”. This is the nature of desire and production hand in hand, mathematically and logistically. Nothing could ever be more fair. Give more to the world than you take from it, it’s a simple ask. The laws of thermodynamics beg to differ from consensus regarding the manageability of this notion. The transfer of energy from one form to another cannot be perfectly efficient. Every single born life is a contributor to entropic decay by no moral fault whatsoever, however many millions of years it may take. By having been born, I took something from this world no one can have, and I’ll take it with me to my grave.

Surrounded by objects that will last longer than my name, my mind spirals while my irises spin. If I hold my head in my hands for long enough, maybe I’ll finally get it. I never have. The thump of my heart creeps up towards my throat, a song playing too loud in my headphones in the hopes it can steal some of the overstimulation from myself. How do I give more than I am? Unlike all these things, I have only 60 years left to create all my meaning, to make up for all these trinkets and doodads whose ionic half-lives span the lives of dynasties. Why do we need so many? Why are these what we want? Why have we had to extract so much from our planet to make our principle purpose so impractical to achieve?

Perhaps the naturalists are right, we were never supposed to have all this. Yet if we weren’t, we wouldn’t have been capable of making it. I have a similar brain to ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, ones that couldn’t imagine typing on a computer yet were physically capable of intellectually developing those same skills. They starved, they murdered, they died. We of today chew each other slowly, indulging in gradual dissatisfaction. Why don’t you kill another leopard, make another spear for if yours breaks? Why would you ever go without?

I don’t know if it’s too late. The more I know, the less. Perhaps I developed a superiority complex about consumption as a way of providing myself a way to finally be able to fall asleep at night, placing my value system upon a different axis as a way to separate myself from being good enough for a world I can’t understand. Am I implicitly wishing for our demise? I sure hope that’s not so. I’m one of those beings, the everything I’ve ever been.

I’m sitting at a bus stop, waiting to go home, no bags in my hands. I leave the mall with no more or less than I entered with. It’s a pretty cloudy day, I watch as various kinds of people meander throughout the parking lot and plaza. How do people want things? After the last of too many questions, I sigh and shake my head. None of this helped at all, I’m just gonna go home and take a nap. It’ll give me an hour before I wage this senseless battle again.