03-21-2020, 08:45 PM
(03-21-2020, 09:27 AM)sbarrera Wrote: I think it's mostly about c.) convenience. People's priorities shifted to getting what they want and getting out, not to staying and chatting and making friendships. In other words, business stopped having a community orientation and became strictly about fulfilling individual needs. It also comes out of the growth of the world economy and global supply chains - it all just favors the bigger enterprises, who are ready to cater to the demands of the hyper-consumer.
At least, that's how it was before 2020.
The quarantine in several states (including California, Illinois, Michigan, and New York) could make life lonely and frustrating for the duration. People are going to miss much of what they put on hiatus. Every generation will treat the quarantine differently and get a different impression of it. Was it necessary, people will ask after the fact? Who knows?
In any event the model that depends upon people finding meaning in buying "crap at Big Box-Mart" will itself get stale. Fads go that way as a rule. It may be ironic, but "Big Box Mart" put people in contact with each other. Deficiency became surfeit, but at the least, planning and saving to get some big-ticket item (which is how people did things in the 1950's) that one examined for its merits gave people some purpose -- and a longer time-frame.
"Get it now!" may not be so attractive when it involves the complexity of d--t, which will be about as dirty a word as f--k in a few years.
I am tempted to believe that people will seek chatting that can lead to friendships. Buying more stuff? That has lost its appeal when much of what one bought with the feeling that one was an astute shopper if one bought it becomes clutter that makes life uglier and more complicated.
Ice-cream socials, potluck dinners, pool parties? Those will be back in vogue as America goes forward to a time more analogous, if not quite the same, to the 1950's. All of those will be pay-as-you-go.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.