Sitting there, eating frozen yogurt with my littler people, in a really nice strip mall in a nice section of town. Stream of consciousness: this is too nice, something bad is bound to happen. I hope we don’t get attacked by zombies, ha, ha.
It’s a joke of course. Preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Reading Pride, Prejudice and Zombies.
So of course I zone out like I do, and start thinking about the disconnection between all the things we consume and who creates them. Everything we do is made somewhere else. We don’t make shoes, clothes, food, highways, computers, cars, or anything but some very small part of the economy.
Maybe you are an electrician: you wire some very, very small part of the world at large, and not normally your own home. Electricians never get their own ceiling fans installed, just as plumbers never get the new kitchen sink in. They are too tired from doing it for other people, for money.
In a subsistence economy, life is simple: once you have enough to satisfy the needs of life, you are done. You can relax. For us, though, how do we know how much is enough? When do you stop, and why? If we were content with the medicine of the 1970’s, we would be having no issues with healthcare costs. If we were content to live solely in homes the size of our grandparents, we never would have had the housing boom and bust.
I feel sometimes this vague dread in really nice places–air conditioned, beautiful, and everything is plentiful and everyone is attractive. It seems artificial, like it is hanging on the edge of a cliff, like it can’t endure. Yes, we can get this happy, happy, happy world for some short period of time, but if it can’t last, then it is doomed. Death follows life just as taxes follow income and lies follow excessive regulation. Order is followed by disorder.
The zombie myth “holds” this anxiety, I think, for many people. It is the disaster over the turn of the hill that we just can’t quite see yet. Zombies are unreal enough that we can project onto them this fear without consciously connecting it with our own innermost thoughts.
This is simply one path through the zombie forest, but I think an interesting one that might at some point benefit from more exploration.