It’s a fascinating experience living in somebody else’s (unoccupied) home. At first it feels a little invasive, as if you’re intruding into a stranger’s life, gawking from the sidelines, almost pretending to live it for them. You judge them by the art on their walls, the books on their bookshelves, the food in their fridge (and the liquor in their cabinet!).
If surface judgments can be trusted, our AirBnB host on a recent trip to San Francisco is probably somebody with whom we have much in common. A software engineer, with a small no-frills apartment in the Mission (read: moderately low-rent district), minimal “stuff,” no television, no telephone, small collection of books, substantial evidence of travel (or ambitions for it) to Africa, Europe, Asia. We’d seen most of the movies in her small DVD collection. A postcard on the back of her door offering this adage (in part): “Simplify. Embrace the adventure.”
But then the novelty passes, of course–the longer you stay, the more it starts to feel like your home, and the mental images that you’ve constructed of your host, inferred from subconscious but studious analysis of his/her possessions, fade and lose their color and richness.
I’d be lying, of course, if I claimed that these vignettes of other people’s lives are the main reason we utilize AirBnB. Mostly, it’s because we can get a great apartment, with our own kitchen, in a vibrant neighborhood, for less than the cost of a (super-cheap) hotel room.
But it’s also an irresistible thought exercise: we want to go to San Francisco for X days–surely there are innumerable San Francisco citizens who will be out of town for those same X days...? Why should their home sit idle, a waste of space and resources, while we rent a high-priced hotel room? While their car sits idle, our car sits idle back home, and we all drive around in high-priced rental cars?
What could be more wasteful? Only in a society intoxicated on consumer materialism would this be the norm. Once you agree to step back from these social norms–customs that we’ve shaped and that have shaped us our whole lives–you can’t help but to start re-examining them.
For example, I have a cordless drill. It sits on a shelf in a garage that we use for storage space. I use it once every month or two. Why do I own this? Why should this device, which would represent a revolutionary advance capable of transforming the lives of many who live in developing parts of the world, sit idle on my shelf, transforming nothing? If we were able to locate, via satellite imagery, all the cordless drills sitting idle on garage shelves in a 50-mile radius around my own, how many would we see? 500? 5,000? How much action would you guess each of those drills sees, on average (excluding those employed in the construction sector)? Ten minutes per month? Maybe less?
(And note that I’m not even mentioning the things that we NEVER use–rollerblades, pingpong table, racquetball gear–as we’ve already given these things away.)
Certainly, there’s undeniable convenience in having that cordless drill within a 30-second walk from the time and place I discover I need it. But the drill is merely an example. How much stuff do you own that sits idle for most of your lifespan, and almost all of its lifespan? How much of it do you really need to access instantly? How much of this real need is impossible to predict within a day or so?
For those of you who use your cordless drill regularly–I’m not talking to you. If you avidly build things or fix things, for a living or just for fun–that’s different. Some people in this world have to build things–I certainly won’t (because I don't have the skills). And what’s more virtuous than fixing something that’s broken?
But how many cars (to pick another example), in North America, sit idle for most of the day? Why are we okay with paying tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention operating costs) for a tool that we use an hour or two per day? Hell, most families have two.
To me, the instant gratification borne of excessive affluence and overabundance causes us to confuse effortless convenience for real need.
This is why we are excited to participate in the sharing economy, part of a movement toward “collaborative consumption.” It’s based on the simple premise that we no longer need to “own” things to be happy–we just need to have access to things, if not on demand, then within a reasonable timeframe.
We can use public transportation, or rent a car from ZipCar or GetAround, or we can get a ride from somebody on Lyft. We can rent our music from Spotify, or ReverbNation. We can circulate books through PaperBackSwap, get our movies through Swap a DVD or Netflix. When we travel, we can find a place to stay on AirBnB, or Craigslist, or CouchSurfing.com. Hopefully, soon, we’ll be able to borrow consumer goods (that damned cordless drill, for one) via Unstash.com.
The lingering question is this: why do we, in Western Civilization, insist on owning these things? On having shelves full of books and DVDs, garages full of golf clubs and tennis rackets and power tools? Why can’t we agree to house one cordless drill per 10 or 20 square miles, (with exceptions for professional builders, legitimate amateur tinkerers, etc.)...? What are the obstacles here? Do we not trust each other? Will our needs go unmet when we don’t have access to the right stuff at the right time? Will our economy crumble when people stop buying cordless drills at The Home Depot? These questions aren’t necessarily rhetorical–I’m honestly curious to know what the real obstacles are, and I’m interested in playing my part in surmounting them.
There’s something invigorating about participating in collaborative consumption, in this new sharing economy. I'd encourage you to explore it, as well. In the words of Unstash.com’s manifesto: Own less. Live more.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Albus Dumbledore, RIP
Dumbledore’s dead. It’s something I can’t pretend to have fully processed, even though I read the sixth Harry Potter book a number of years ago. Consider me mired somewhere in one of the stages of grief. Bargaining, maybe. Or Depressed.
Some people are stuck in the very first stage of grief: Denial. Hilariously, the internet is rife with web sites, forum discussions, and social media chatter postulating that Dumbledore’s death was (and is) an elaborate hoax by Joanne Rowling.
Rowling has since confirmed Dumbledore’s death, but only indirectly, and she seems to have remained coy on the subject, perhaps finding the question more valuable unanswered.
However, I’ll leave the dithering to conspiracy theorists and chat room groupies—I firmly and fully believe that Dumbledore was killed by Severus Snape at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in a stunning development that led to what is easily the most climactic literary experience of the new millennium (and perhaps the last century).
That her Harry Potter series is a remarkable work of literary fiction goes without saying in some circles. And though the literary elite invariably turn up their noses at anything that achieves popular success, in this case they’re wrong—Rowling is a master storyteller. Although her prose is remarkably clumsy (full of long, winding sentences, incoherent expository dialog, and adverb after painful adverb), her character development is fairly unparalleled in the world of modern fiction. Readers of all ages have no choice but to make deep emotional investments in many of the characters, to fully immerse in the 7-book-long narrative arc. It’s no secret that strong characters drive strong narratives, and an astonishing number of Harry Potter characters are deeply drawn and wonderfully complex (a feat admittedly made more manageable when you have the scope of 4000+ pages, 20+ hours on screen, and 15 years to leave your impression).
It’s easy to abandon the thought exercise, and dismiss this brilliance as genius—it almost seems futile, like pondering why Michael Jordan so dominated the basketball court in the 1980s, or Andy Warhol the pop art scene of the 1960s. Why even bother?
In my view, however, the more fascinating (yet mind-numbing) question is this: how could she kill Dumbledore? How could she do that to him? To us?
As a wannabe writer of fiction, I’m amazed by the audacity, the chutzpah, the cojones she demonstrated in taking him away from us—after making us love him, need him, rely on him for so many pages, over so many years. Fiction writers (good ones) will tell you that this is the wrong way to look at it—that she didn’t decide to kill Dumbledore. The story finally revealed itself to her, bit by bit, and she merely transcribed what she saw—she told us the truth.
I believe this. But still. How easy would it be to talk yourself out of committing this dreadful crime? How terrifying was it to contemplate alienating your loyal readers, who put bread on your table, and whose love for your work sent sales into record-breaking territory? The financial ramifications aside, how hard must it be to push your story blindly over the precipice, after putting your heart and soul into 3300 pages over the course of more than a decade? All we (her loyal readers) had to do was keep reading—Rowling had to keep on keeping on, had to keep toiling away, in spite of the grief, guilt, apprehension, and self-doubt that surely dogged her. And she had to do it with a smile—while a resentful and restive reader base stood waiting, alarmed, in a rebellious mood.
Years ago, we started reading the series aloud to my now-eleven-year-old son Riley. As we recently approached the end of Book Six (during which Rowling commits the crime), my apprehension mounting, I could sense the emotional connection he had made with Dumbledore’s character, and I wondered what effect his passing would have on Riley.
We carefully arranged to arrive at the dreadful tower scene at an opportune moment, with sufficient time to pause, ingest, and talk through our feelings. The tears I expected made a brief appearance, and I could see that Riley, at 11, was as devastated as I was at 30. Because Dumbledore is far more than a father figure—he’s a beacon of hope during dark times. He’s the adult in the room, the rest of us mere children, looking to him to tell us what to do while he’s busy slaying the beast that has darkened our doorstep.
Dumbledore’s death cut us off at the knees, left us all reeling. How could we possibly battle the Dark Lord without him?
How could she kill him?
It’s easier to know why she killed him (or at least to presume we can know), though not nearly as satisfying. Surely opinions and interpretations vary, but I think most readers would agree that Rowling knows, wisely, that death lurks patiently, constantly, unrelentingly among us—it’s perhaps the only constant in life as we know it (taxes aside). To paint a picture conspicuously absent of this reality would be dishonest—and honesty is, ironically, the fiction writer’s stock in trade.
Dumbledore was far from the only casualty in Harry’s world. We still all grieve for Sirius, Lupin, Tonks, and Fred Weasley (and, after some reflection, Severus Snape), not to mention several other minor characters. We even grieve for Harry’s parents, James and Lily, though we never knew them. The deaths of people all around Harry mark various stages of his burdensome journey to adulthood—a journey we agreed to take with him, and during which even the most cold-hearted of readers can’t help but shed a mental tear or two.
Good people die, sometimes at the hands of bad people. It’s easy to lose sight of this reality in the glossed-over, sugar-coated cocoons of modern comfort that we’ve built for ourselves here in the Western world.
The chronicling of good triumphing over evil is far more honest (and believable) when it doesn’t varnish away the costs borne along the way. For unflinchingly telling us the truth, we all owe JK Rowling a debt of gratitude.
Some people are stuck in the very first stage of grief: Denial. Hilariously, the internet is rife with web sites, forum discussions, and social media chatter postulating that Dumbledore’s death was (and is) an elaborate hoax by Joanne Rowling.
Rowling has since confirmed Dumbledore’s death, but only indirectly, and she seems to have remained coy on the subject, perhaps finding the question more valuable unanswered.
However, I’ll leave the dithering to conspiracy theorists and chat room groupies—I firmly and fully believe that Dumbledore was killed by Severus Snape at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in a stunning development that led to what is easily the most climactic literary experience of the new millennium (and perhaps the last century).
That her Harry Potter series is a remarkable work of literary fiction goes without saying in some circles. And though the literary elite invariably turn up their noses at anything that achieves popular success, in this case they’re wrong—Rowling is a master storyteller. Although her prose is remarkably clumsy (full of long, winding sentences, incoherent expository dialog, and adverb after painful adverb), her character development is fairly unparalleled in the world of modern fiction. Readers of all ages have no choice but to make deep emotional investments in many of the characters, to fully immerse in the 7-book-long narrative arc. It’s no secret that strong characters drive strong narratives, and an astonishing number of Harry Potter characters are deeply drawn and wonderfully complex (a feat admittedly made more manageable when you have the scope of 4000+ pages, 20+ hours on screen, and 15 years to leave your impression).
It’s easy to abandon the thought exercise, and dismiss this brilliance as genius—it almost seems futile, like pondering why Michael Jordan so dominated the basketball court in the 1980s, or Andy Warhol the pop art scene of the 1960s. Why even bother?
In my view, however, the more fascinating (yet mind-numbing) question is this: how could she kill Dumbledore? How could she do that to him? To us?
As a wannabe writer of fiction, I’m amazed by the audacity, the chutzpah, the cojones she demonstrated in taking him away from us—after making us love him, need him, rely on him for so many pages, over so many years. Fiction writers (good ones) will tell you that this is the wrong way to look at it—that she didn’t decide to kill Dumbledore. The story finally revealed itself to her, bit by bit, and she merely transcribed what she saw—she told us the truth.
I believe this. But still. How easy would it be to talk yourself out of committing this dreadful crime? How terrifying was it to contemplate alienating your loyal readers, who put bread on your table, and whose love for your work sent sales into record-breaking territory? The financial ramifications aside, how hard must it be to push your story blindly over the precipice, after putting your heart and soul into 3300 pages over the course of more than a decade? All we (her loyal readers) had to do was keep reading—Rowling had to keep on keeping on, had to keep toiling away, in spite of the grief, guilt, apprehension, and self-doubt that surely dogged her. And she had to do it with a smile—while a resentful and restive reader base stood waiting, alarmed, in a rebellious mood.
Years ago, we started reading the series aloud to my now-eleven-year-old son Riley. As we recently approached the end of Book Six (during which Rowling commits the crime), my apprehension mounting, I could sense the emotional connection he had made with Dumbledore’s character, and I wondered what effect his passing would have on Riley.
We carefully arranged to arrive at the dreadful tower scene at an opportune moment, with sufficient time to pause, ingest, and talk through our feelings. The tears I expected made a brief appearance, and I could see that Riley, at 11, was as devastated as I was at 30. Because Dumbledore is far more than a father figure—he’s a beacon of hope during dark times. He’s the adult in the room, the rest of us mere children, looking to him to tell us what to do while he’s busy slaying the beast that has darkened our doorstep.
Dumbledore’s death cut us off at the knees, left us all reeling. How could we possibly battle the Dark Lord without him?
How could she kill him?
It’s easier to know why she killed him (or at least to presume we can know), though not nearly as satisfying. Surely opinions and interpretations vary, but I think most readers would agree that Rowling knows, wisely, that death lurks patiently, constantly, unrelentingly among us—it’s perhaps the only constant in life as we know it (taxes aside). To paint a picture conspicuously absent of this reality would be dishonest—and honesty is, ironically, the fiction writer’s stock in trade.
Dumbledore was far from the only casualty in Harry’s world. We still all grieve for Sirius, Lupin, Tonks, and Fred Weasley (and, after some reflection, Severus Snape), not to mention several other minor characters. We even grieve for Harry’s parents, James and Lily, though we never knew them. The deaths of people all around Harry mark various stages of his burdensome journey to adulthood—a journey we agreed to take with him, and during which even the most cold-hearted of readers can’t help but shed a mental tear or two.
Good people die, sometimes at the hands of bad people. It’s easy to lose sight of this reality in the glossed-over, sugar-coated cocoons of modern comfort that we’ve built for ourselves here in the Western world.
The chronicling of good triumphing over evil is far more honest (and believable) when it doesn’t varnish away the costs borne along the way. For unflinchingly telling us the truth, we all owe JK Rowling a debt of gratitude.
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