“Less is more.” It’s a simple statement, a piece of folksy wisdom that a parent, or perhaps an armchair philosophy major, offers up when your entertainment budget has gone into the Red.
But the notion of “less is more” is a complicated one. It’s main thrust is that there is a positive correlation between having more ‘stuff’ and having more problems, usually being the cost and anxiety caused by having to care for them.
But what is most of our ‘stuff’ now? There’s ‘stuff’ like nice clothes and fancy sheets and high-definition televisions, yes. With the unstoppable march of technology, however, ‘stuff’ is more likely to be an access product or a product that opens the door to other purchases. In part, I mean laptops, but my particular attention is on smartphones and tablets. But we’ll speak of these as a whole.
Now, many things can be done with these products. Papers written, calls made, notes taken, etc. Yet services like Spotify, Netflix, and a variety of e-book distributors allow a person access to media libraries that would have been unfathomable less than fifteen years ago.
‘Stuff’ doesn’t exist in a substantive way like it used to. Now, does a person ‘own’ the movies they watch on Netflix? No. It’s more like having a library leased to you. But it’s still there on your laptop, waiting to be accessed.
So, less is more, right? You own less, so you have more. But you have access to all of these films and songs and books. And that’s not bad. Not in and of itself. But we, you and I, are at risk of overconsumption. You don’t ever have to watch or listen to something you don’t want to, ever again. Cool! Less of the mundane and awful. Yet, there is the risk, the very real risk, of placing ourselves in the position of feeling prisoner to our “To Watch”/”To Listen To” lists.
It’s amazing that it’s so easy to find new and interesting creative works. This is our era’s equivalent of writing in the vernacular and opening up the written word to more people. Which is all to say: the Internet is kind of a big deal.
With all of this in mind, we have to recognize the wave that threatens to sweep us away. There is so much ‘stuff’ that we can interact with. Even with cutting out the 95 percent, we don’t want anything to do with, we still have a staggering amount of things to watch and read and listen to. But we need to leave space open in our lives so that we can just sit with things. I will be fine without hearing the latest leaked track from some hip producer or watching the entire “Joe Biden Rulezz” Youtube playlist. There is value in thinking about something and talking about it and not diving into some other consumption project until then.
I want to work with these ideas more. We’ve seen the surface, so let’s prepare to go further.
Rhett Henry is a College sophomore from Lawrenceville, Ga.
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