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Abundance robs us of sense of satisfaction
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IN late May, the canteen service in our office building was suspended for a significant renovation. When it resumed three months later, we were greeted with new decor, a new menu and new prices.
Different people reacted differently to the new setup, suggesting again the proverbial difficulty of at once delighting so many palates.
My assessment of the new canteen is more mixed, though I have since derived no small satisfaction from a single dish: a daintily prepared dish of pork, succulent, glistening, ready to melt at the touch of your tongue. Such a delicacy, in my humble understanding, should help ease people into a more charitable frame of mind.
Unfortunately, most urbanites are incapable of enjoying the dish now. Some of my colleagues have professed to experience a kind of vicarious pleasure by just watching me engage with the dish, but they are obviously incapable of the feat themselves. The general loss of appetite is truly a milestone in human evolution. I am particularly sympathetic with the younger victims, the children, who have been brought up in abundance, whose hearts no longer leap at the sight of food — real food, not junk food.
Unmistakable mark of the ‘good life’
Few realize they deserve condolences for the loss. As a rule, they are repeatedly congratulated for their loss, recognized as an unmistakable mark of “good life.” When I took my son to a restaurant, he sometimes ordered a bowl of noodles set off with a fatty slice of pork. He would wolf down everything, soup and all, with great relish, except the pork, which he always left to me.
With adults the loss can be more destructive, for it inclines them to seek satisfaction elsewhere. Some grow disdainful of the merest biological condition not yet debased by abundance.
In his “The Compleat Angler,” Izaak Walton cited Lessius as saying: “That poor men, and those that fast often, have much more pleasure in eating than rich men and gluttons, that always feed before their stomachs are empty of their last meat, and call for more; for by that means they rob themselves of that pleasures that hunger brings to poor men.” Here “meat” means food in general, as in “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”
In the industrialized era, human beings have evolved from a species that can be satisfied in their private conditions, to exhibitionists who feel constantly called upon to advertise the fact that they have the resources to satisfy themselves.
Our self-esteem is today more defined by the latest iPads and cars. They are the labels that certify us as “satisfied.” As the satisfaction is imaginary, it creates the potential for consumption to be elevated to a never-ending spiritual quest, otherwise known as “growth.” Imperceptibly, we grow distant from our instinctual, biological needs, the prime mover, and the first principles.
Lately I have been receiving unintelligible text messages from a friend, and when I inquired, he explained he has got the state-of-the-art Apple. The only trouble is, he has trouble making phone calls and sending text messages with it.
Consumption has become a ritual, the purpose, the means that justifies any result.
In the ignorance of our own wants, we often profess a knowledge about others’ want.
Quite a few of my fellow colleagues have expressed the wish of one day retiring to farms and supporting themselves by organic farming.
A modern hotel affords us an idyllic view of rural life, but it always leaves out something: the swarms of flies and mosquitoes, the latrine, or the lack of it, to say nothing of the high risk of crop failure in the absence of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Distance lends enchantment to the view.
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