Despite being a pretty basic and necessary modern human experience, shopping for groceries can be awfully alienating and dehumanizing.
Consider the fact that it’s possible to purchase a week’s worth of groceries and pass dozens of people without having a single human interaction. That’s a remarkable accomplishment.
For example, self-checkout allows you the freedom to complete your transaction with a machine. But the cost of this freedom from other people is constant surveillance. The self-checkout machine has a camera and monitor attached at the top to remind you that everything is being recorded. And above the entire self-checkout section hang three large LCD screens with live video footage of the area. A green targeting reticle surrounds and follows each customer, as if the store is ready to call in a drone strike for shoplifters. Before you can leave, an employee must check your receipt to make sure you haven’t stolen anything. We’ve freed ourselves from the tyranny of talking with a checker and all it cost us was the presumption of innocence and all human warmth.
This whole experience is predicated on the idea that we are each our own, that we are ultimately only responsible for ourselves and to ourselves. And that means that we don’t owe anyone anything unless it’s contractually or legally defined. The store’s only obligations to you are legal. Their only responsibilities are to profit. When treating customers, employees, or producers as human beings leads to greater efficiency, then they will do so, but only then.
But it’s not just the store or the economy, it’s me. Because if I am my own, I don’t have to treat the store employees as my neighbor, even if they literally live next door to me. Once they put on their nametag, they are an avatar of the company. I don’t have to treat the farm worker who grew and harvested my produce as a real person; they merely serve a function.
And anyway, I’m too overwhelmed with the burden of being myself to think of anyone else. The store is filled with products and people that remind me of my inadequacy, my failure to exercise or eat right, my failure to have an attractive body or achieve a certain class status. This is my life, and I am the only one who can make something meaningful out of it. Every little choice I make either brings me closer to the best version of myself or closer to failure. Every little choice matters. Did I buy ethically sourced chocolate? Will this product damage the environment? How will this meal look on Instagram? Sometimes these choices (which are always growing in number) depress me so much I stop trying and I just buy whatever is familiar. Being myself is a lot.
This isn’t really about shopping for groceries. It’s about an entire society constructed according to the belief that to be a human being is to only ever belong to yourself. We designed everything from the layout of our cities to the way we make and sell products to the way we raise and educate children with the assumption that to be human is to be radically alone. To be human is to be completely responsible for your own presence in the world. You are the author of your narrative. You are the only critic who matters. You are the only one who can define your identity and discover your purpose and achieve your dreams and so on. You are your own and you belong to yourself. Which might sound great on the surface, even liberating and exciting. It turns out, though, that the day-to-day experience of belonging to yourself is a kind of weariness, a sense of inadequacy and boredom. Like shopping for groceries.
Instead of asking whether our environment is inhuman, our default is to self-medicate, to find a coping mechanism. And even while we self-medicate, we’re also making jokes about self-medicating because it’s obvious to everyone that this is not healthy. It’s not how we are meant to live. So we joke about binge watching Netflix, moms drinking wine at 9AM, college students abusing Adderall, addictions to porn and social media and retail therapy.
Sometimes we cope through self-improvement or self-optimization techniques. The reason I am tired and anxious is that I need to exercise more (or so I’m told by an Instagram influencer) or drink more water. All I need is a growth mindset or a better diet. If I just work a little harder I can get over this hump and everything will be better. And it’s true: if we belong to ourselves, self-optimization is probably the best we can do. Unfortunately, the problem with chasing the “best version of yourself” through endless iterations and identities is that you only have yourself to blame when you fail. And when you do, just when you start to feel helpless and inadequate, someone will be there with a new technique to sell you, a new way to save yourself. And so it continues.
The responsibilities of self-belonging are crushing. They promise a full, rich, exciting, marketable and remarkable life, but leave us frantic, anxious, depressed, and perpetually insecure. It’s the way we parent in isolation from others and then quite reasonably feel depressed and overwhelmed by the demands of parenting. The way we are told that we deserve unhealthy food or a luxury car or our deepest sexual desires and then are shamed when our bodies get out of shape, when we fall deeply in debt, when we have profound intimacy and commitment issues. The way we unironically glorify speaking our truth, following our heart, and cutting off friends who don’t help us become the best version of ourselves. In the West, we are taught to be self-sufficient, not just economically, but ontologically — our very being is our own responsibility.
It’s terrible advice to tell a poor person to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The physics and economics don’t work. It’s an absurd, Sisyphean demand. But that is precisely what we do to each other every day. Except we don’t just expect people to be economically self-reliant. We expect them to pull up their existence and identity by their bootstraps, too. And we’re surprised when people are burned out and exhausted.
If belonging to ourselves is a kind of hell where we only get through the day because we self-medicate, it’s worth considering that maybe we don’t belong to ourselves. Maybe what it means to be a human being is not to be alone (self-sufficient, self-created, and self-sustained), but to belong to “another, or to others, or to God,” as T.S. Eliot put it.
Until more recently, the idea that we belong to others (in some sense) was taken as basic truth. After all, the natural rhythms of life remind us that we are not self-sufficient. We depend upon others for our survival, identity, memories, and culture. We cannot give birth to ourselves and we cannot bury ourselves. And there are natural limits and responsibilities that come from our relationship to each other and creation. According to the Christian faith we all belong more fundamentally to God. And since we belong to God, we also belong to our neighbors and creation itself, none of which we get to use as mere tools for our personal gain or profit (which means that we don’t get to dump friends just because they can’t help us reach our life goals). To belong to God is to accept that there are limits, good and healthy limits, on how we can live and who we can be.
This feels very counterintuitive to modern people. Comfort, we have been told, comes from self-sufficiency and self-mastery. On the other hand, consider self-checkout. If a society constructed around this conception of human life is actually inhuman, maybe it’s because our anthropology is wrong. We are not our own. And trying to be our own is killing us.
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That’s heavy! Especially having been aware last night, as I was shopping for a few groceries, how alone I felt. I was aware of myself. Just me in the middle of a number of other individuals. And then to top it off with the stress of how expensive and out of control everything was. I didn’t feel that great getting in my car by myself but I certainly did look forward to those chocolate chip cookies! Hmmmm