We Get the World We Make
I'm back! A few thoughts on Amazon, podcast recs, and links to check out—all for you
I’m back! It’s been a very full schedule for the last few months — buying and selling a house, coaching little league baseball, my company was acquired so onboarding with a new organization, and so much more. Full and good, but full. Glad to be back sharing with you.
In December of 2019, I canceled our Amazon Prime membership and declared 2020 to be “The Year of Strategic Inconvenience.”
My apologies for perhaps unintentionally instigating a global pandemic.
The reasons for canceling Prime were pretty straightforward: the human and environmental cost of a business that promised infinite products shipped in increasingly immediate spans of time. Podcast episodes like this one and articles like this one pulled back the curtain on what it takes to pull of what is genuinely an amazing feat of human ingenuity with an often hidden (but in plain sight) cost.
It’s been more than 18 months since we canceled the membership—regretfully, we still continued to use Amazon at a similar clip after canceling as we did prior to canceling. It turns out, a system designed to give you the lowest prices and quick shipping is a hard drug to kick.
This past week marked “Prime Day,” the holiday “invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. I hope you are spending it with your loved ones.” author Ellen Cushing writes.
I tweeted out a PSA during Prime Day.
While we didn't buy anything on Prime Day, just four days earlier we bought a baseball glove for one of our kids on Amazon. Hypocrisy, thy name is Adam.
We bought the glove online after looking at a few local stores but not finding what needed—a 12” glove with a full mesh pocket, black and brown preferably. So it felt justifiable to find a wide selection and quick delivery. I don’t think there is anything “wrong” with this decision or this purchase. Or many of the purchases you make. But that doesn’t mean that decisions don’t have consequences.
Here’s a short excerpt from Ellen Cushing’s The Atlantic article analyzing why we are so addicted to Amazon and what it means for us individually, in our communities, and as a planet.
Speed and convenience aren’t actually free; they never are. Free shipping isn’t free either. It just obscures the real price. Getting hand sanitizer and toilet paper and jigsaw puzzles and sex toys delivered to your door, contact-free, as a contagious disease ravaged the globe didn’t mean that no one was venturing into the life-threatening outside; it just meant you weren’t.
Next-day shipping comes with tremendous costs: for labor and logistics and transportation and storage; for the people who pack your stuff into those smiling boxes and for the people who deliver them; for the planes and trucks and vans that carry them; for the warehouses that store them; for the software ensuring that everything really does get to your door on time, for air-conditioning and gas and cardboard and steel. Amazon—Prime in particular—has done a superlative job of making all those costs, all those moving parts, all those externalities invisible to the consumer.
In some ways, it’s the ultimate expression of individuality reigning supreme. My needs, my circumstances, my choices justify and drive my decision-making.
When faced with the facts about what it’s actually like to work in an Amazon fulfillment center or the sheer volume of resources it takes to power all of the Amazon technology, it’s easy once again for us to rely on the individual lens in our own defense. You can hear the rebuttals.
“Amazon is so massive that my stopping to use their shipping or canceling my membership won’t make a difference. I’m just one person.”
“If it’s so bad for the workers, why don’t they just quit?”
It’s ridiculous to think that anyone person canceling Prime or stopping the use of Amazon altogether will bring the company down—yet that’s the defense we rely on to justify the continued use of a system designed to keep us buying.
We can actually stop or start doing anything simply based on something closer to an objective lens of “does this contribute to more or less good? to more or less suffering? to more or less sustainability? to more or less healing? to more or less alignment with our values?” Surely no one says one of their core values is “efficiency and comfort at the expense of others.”
To be sure, there are genuine benefits for some people that they’d struggle to find elsewhere. Someone who is homebound getting delivery of essential goods and products. A single parent who can spend more time resting or engaging with their kids instead of running a series of errands. I don’t know how to balance the genuine needs of those particular situations with the fact that most (almost all?) of those using Prime’s 1 or 2-day shipping on things like picture frames or extension cords or Pokémon cards simply don’t need such human and environmentally-costly service.
Cushing continues in her article,
When you subscribe to Prime, you’re paying to pledge your fealty to a single company’s ecosystem—something that consumers once wanted to avoid. You’re paying to have your every purchase cataloged—also something consumers aren’t wild about, at least in theory—so that Amazon can use that information to sell you, and people like you, more goods. You’re paying to become part of a system that is purpose-built to keep you paying, forever, and to keep Amazon growing, forever….
I fully understand why most everyone I know uses Prime.
And I fully admit how easy it is for me, 18-months post subscription, to keep coming back to add books to my Amazon wishlist or order a few things for our swimming pool. But I want to continue to wrestle with the macro view of things—that we get the world we make through our daily choices and our habits that go unscrutinized.
….we get the world we make through our daily choices and our habits that go unscrutinized.
We get to have an impact and we get to make decisions based on what we feel brings about the most collective good.
We mainly gain efficiency (in our days and in becoming “better consumers” by ordering things online—but what are we giving up?
Kurt Vonnegut may be onto something in this regard.
[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Know someone who might enjoy this twice-monthly newsletter? Share!
Links to Check Out
“How do we catch up with friends when we are still figuring out who are we now?”
A Well Lived Life of Purpose. I’ve really come, perhaps late to the game, to enjoy the newsletter from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits.
CRISPR has long thought to be the thing that will unlock a total scientific revolution. And it looks like that very thing has begun. Wow.
“Rich Americans enjoy almost 50 percent more greenery in their environment compared with lower-income communities.” The implications of this are more significant and go deeper than you may realize at first glance.
I quickly pre-ordered The Plant-Based Athlete when I heard about it and then read it in a weekend. Really practical, accessible, and compelling. Not just for high-performance athletes (clearly, see: me), I’m using it as inspiration to get back a misplaced level of wellness and fitness.
“Stop Living in Infinite Browsing Mode.” This article sparked my reflection above about Amazon.
Joy generation at the click of a button.
How to Prepare for the Second Coming by Abigail Carroll is a poem shared with me by my spiritual director. It was a salve I didn’t know I needed.
Podcasts
The Vanishing of Harry Pace (Radiolab). This is a miniseries and it is amazing story-telling, very relevant, and a complex story that will leave you thinking about it long after you’ve finished listening to it.
Breath (Radiolab). There is a moment, in the first third of this episode, that really unlocked a new understanding of how our physical realities, namely breath, impact our mental and emotional reality. Great stories throughout, but this part, in particular, was such an insight.
Drs. Jane Goodall & Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Talk About Hope (How to Save a Planet). Listening to Jane Goodall is always an education and inspiring. And hearing Ayana Elizabeth Johnson talk about her annoyance with the question “what can I do to help save the planet” inspired a new level of motivation to look at not just what I can do but who I’m working with in collective and concerted efforts to change the way we use and abuse this one planet we have.
Integrating Our Experiences (Headspace). If life ever feels disjointed and chaotic, this short reflection may be helpful to come back to every now and again.
Monica Padman (Take Your Shoes Off w/ Rick Glassman). Monica is half of the duo leading the über-popular podcast, “Armchair Expert,” along with Dax Shepherd. This (very, very) long-form interview with just Monica is an entertaining and interesting chat about her career arc, behind-the-scenes at Armchair, and so much more. If you’re an Armchair fan, this will be fun. If not, it’ll be random.
I Love You Waymo (Revisionist History). Malcolm Gladwell is back and this time he’s taking a look at self-driving cars. Turns out, they give humans all the power.
Taken for Granted: Lin-Manuel Miranda Daydreams and His Dad Gets Things Done (WorkLife). I’m always up for hearing Lin-Manuel talk about his work, his process, his ideas. And adding in his dad makes it all that much more fun and insightful.
For the Road
Spare me perfection. Give me instead the wholeness that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am, just as I am.
—David Benner