The ways we cope with material insecurity
Camping and luxury goods provide reassurance for the same basic anxiety: that we can stop depriving ourselves whenever we like
I hate being cold. There’s a unique unpleasantness to waking up in a cold room, which is known to all kids who grew up in a household where this was done for reasons of economy. I still feel an instinctive eye-twitch of discomfort when I see a grandma in Chinatown bundled in seven massive layers, cultural revolution-style1. I have friends who take cold showers on purpose, for clarity of mind and whatnot. This has never appealed to me, because I’ve done that by accident enough times as a kid (due to the hot water running out) to know that it’ll only improve my circulation by means of utter rage.2
Oddly enough, I got into camping this year. I found some kind of perverse satisfaction in the act of bundling myself up in layers and sleeping on the ground, inside a glorified mosquito net with a tarp over it. In Canadian November, to boot. Waking up to the morning chill, having that first sip of coffee, and getting a fire going was genuinely…enjoyable.
I then walked through a Toronto park the other day and realized what a mindfuck this was. (For those who don’t live here, many of our public parks are filled with homeless encampments.) Evidently, the line between something being fun and hellish is razor thin, and has nothing to do with the literal equipment or physical act itself. It’s whether or not you are choosing to do it, and are able to stop and leave at any time.
Most people who grew up in working-class immigrant households will understand what I mean when I say that many of us live with a perpetual sense of material insecurity. My ability to keep paying my bills is entirely contingent on my ability to keep doing a set of socially contrived things that often don’t make any sense.
I was discussing camping with a Korean-American friend of mine who really enjoys her luxury-branded purses and Michelin star restaurants. It’s not a mindset that I particularly vibe with, but I give her a pass because she is also such a down-to-earth and kind-hearted person that I think she does these things not because she views them as status symbols or a way to think of herself as superior to others, but because she just…genuinely likes them. She happily admitted that camping would not be up her alley. “I like modernity,” she said. “We’ve worked so hard to get here and have heat and not sleep on the ground…why would we go backwards?”
Touché. But maybe camping and buying an LV purse are not as different from each other as we might think. Setting aside the obvious comparison that both will happily expand to whatever budget you decide to allocate3, the other commonality is that they both blow straight past any kind of practical consideration, to enter the land of the absurdly contrived. You could argue that spending a month’s worth of rent on a bag is ridiculous. You could also argue that paying a month’s worth of rent for heated, plumbed shelter and then spending another month’s worth of rent on equipment to enable living for a while in an area away from said plumbing and heat is equally stupid.
Someone once explained the sexiness of smoking to me in the following way: deliberately killing yourself a little bit is a great way of flaunting how much life and health you have to spare. Perhaps Veblen goods and contrived acts of “deprivation” (cold showers, intermittent fasting, all that good tech-bro nonsense) serve much the same purpose. Whether via deliberately chosen lack or deliberately chosen excess, they both act as reassurance by virtue of what they are: a choice. A choice, entirely within our control, to prove to ourselves that we’ve risen so, so far above needing to actually worry about the thing itself. R..right, guys?
#155
You know, the ones that make up for not being manufactured by The North Face, or made of Canadian goose down, via sheer absurdity of thickness:
Per the latest blog-bro life-hack trend. Bonus if done while wearing highly engineered sweatpants that cost more than a small family’s monthly food budget.
Do you need a $1,500 sleeping bag rated for -29°C? Who’s to say? Maybe you’re heading to the same frigid tundra backcountry as these folks:
