Life: A Free Trial
Everyone out there wants your money. We have to pay for utilities because we no longer live in the stone age, and functional housing is a safer environment than the Neanderthal cave. Increasingly though I have a feeling that with the crisis and cost of living on a steady rise, one might feel compelled to reconsider the benefits of the rather rustic lifestyle of the Amish. If you want the extra perks beyond the everyday basics, there’s always the bait of the free trial to spark enough interest enabling regular access to your wallet. After YouTube changed its standard form into videos constantly interrupted by advertisment just like real-life TV, it started pushing offers up your nose to pay for an Ad-free version. Which is absurd because one of the reasons people resort to platforms like YouTube is freedom of choice, abundancy of content and a giant rabbit hole full of distractions. Just like influencers, they make money by pushing you into their portfolio of invoices. The same goes for streaming like Spotify and Netflix. The latter even announced they would give up the policy of shared subscriptions, to squeeze more cash from our pockets. This is a company that keeps adding good quality program that’s almost impossible to keep up with due to the sheer size of it.
This doesn’t mean it’s not money well spent. Maybe the best argument for a subscription would be an increased offer of European tv shows and movies, like Dark or Black Spot. During lockdown, we discovered the good side of this, because it helped kill the time we didn’t know what to do with. The same goes for Medium, because it requires payment to enjoy the full scope of contents published on a daily basis. Like an endless Black Friday promising you long-term saving compared to what you would otherwise pay. Sometimes you bleed money for stuff you even forgot about: on one occasion, my bank report showed I was charged for a service I no longer use, or at least not enough to warrant paying for it. We have to reconsider what we regularly use compared to what we need and how much it costs. We all need a smartphone these days: the world has been recalibrated in a way where without a device that allows you to both check your emails, take photos and use it the old-fashioned way, you feel handicapped.
We pay for this not only with money but through giving up parts of our privacy, exposing valuable information like bank accounts, email servers and even our movement to the invisible forces that make our life easier. They also make it more fragile. While credit cards are increasingly being preferred to cash, it can sometimes escape our mind that the whole arrangement only works in a situation where we have available ATMs. And that might be learned the hard way if one is stranded in a place without it. The tragedy of adulthood might be that life is no longer a free trial. There are compromises to made for our lives to work without losing the comfort we are used to.
It’s easy to get depressed and feel discouraged by the media that keeps feeding us news about environmental and economic crises, uncertain future and dangers of a nuclear assault. When even Emmanuel Macron warns the French they should brace themselves for hard times ahead, you know it’s serious. Times like these are less cruel to societies used to uncertain prospects and adaptable to it. The problem of others is that enough time (and generations) has passed for them to forget why it’s a good idea to keep a stockpile of canned food, flour and oil in the kitchen cupboard. Since the end of WW2, with occasional political hiccups, the ride just got better and bigger, the possibilities endless and everything within reach. Shopping malls turned into cathedrals with shop windows instead of altars and the internet became a 24/7 where the virtual shelves were filled with things you never thought you needed.
Fast fashion turned us into hoarders and media like Instagram into addicts on trends that last shorter than a yoghurt. This fulfillment through materialism is a booster fading away even before we got excited about it. It took me hours to decide if I wanted that particular suit for a wedding reception. On the other hand, Geminis take absurdly long time to decide even on a shampoo. In the end I bought it and it looked great. Occasions where a white suit isn’t an overstatement are few. Though it makes me look like a combination of Harry Styles and a Colombian drug lord. Do I regret buying it? Absolutely not. Because I forget we’re stuck in a reality that offers no proverbial happy ending. Just the premonition of a bitter fight for survival that might as well be inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It’s unlikely that cities will turn into a wasteland with gorillas in a frightening frenzy. Nevertheless, the stress of having to choose between heating and eating is bound to create a new epidemic: one of depression, fear and anxiety. As if Covid alone wasn’t enough.
There’s not much we can do, apart from focusing on blessings that might be found even in a time of difficult obstacles. And trying to find creative alternatives to what we can’t influence. Experiences from countries that historically face economic and political troubles more often than the developed ones can teach us that there are rarely unsurmountable problems, just wrong solutions. And that difficulties make people show a more sympathetic face that you rarely get to see in times of prosperity. Precarity strips away pretenses that hide our vulnerability. There’s an assurance to be found in it. Just like Kubrick’s gorillas, we soon might have no more excuses for inhumanity and hubris.
The 1990s conflict in former Yugoslavia that claimed the life of more than 100,000 people also told stories of people that went above and beyond to help those who were supposed to be their enemies. They hid them in their homes, risking their own lives to help innocent civilians who happened to have the wrong nationality. They are rarely mentioned in the great narrative that is created as a political consensus after every war. Maybe because it shows shades of gray in the black and white picture that’s painted by the winner. Just like in the song, the winner does indeed take it all. The little stories of kindness as something ubiqutous rather than heroic are reduced to footnotes in the grand scheme of things. What we are currently experiencing has a much wider reach. It’s a litmus exposing the hierarchy of the social contract. And with it, the scale of distress we might experience depending on our own position in it. According to the Guardian, billionaires are building luxurious bunkers able to withstand all sorts of natural disasters. Many of us will be out in the cold when the time comes. This is how the world we created works, the price of that blazing ride into prosperity that seemed unstoppable. Until it wasn’t. The reality where, for the privileged few, life indeed is a free trial.
