I went candle shopping with a friend today. Her indulgence in a highly inefficient means of distributing light and scent is part of a self-care routine, so who am I to judge?
But the existence of the $50 scented candles is quite absurd – in a Camusian sense, that it sheds light on the unfathomable void of human desire.
Consider the scented candle: its essence, the dollop of scented alcohol infused in wax, is probably the cheapest component. The design and packaging, ten-fold its material costs; the marketing and distribution, hundred-fold; add a double-digit margin, and slapping on some VAT, and you have the most indulgent and frivolous of goods. You’re quite literally burning money.
So I asked her why?
“Because it makes me feel good,” she said, rather indignantly.
Fair enough. Value exists outside of the functional, and who is to say that everything we do, everything we are, is not at the most deep-seated intimate level an attempt towards ‘feeling good’? Feeling good is the quintessential intrinsic value, the ends of life itself. I consume, therefore I am. All hail consumerism. All hail the void.
So “Feel Good” has positive value, and that value should be reflected in the pricing. I have my scented candle too – coffee, so let the judgement be inward. I drink coffee because:
- Coffee is the most cost-effective delivery mechanism of caffeine. This is my primary value of coffee.
- Fresh coffee tastes good. Colombian coffee tastes even better. Consuming coffee is a pleasurable experience.
- It makes me feel good. It is an act of indulgent and luxury. I spend about 4% of the median household income in Shanghai on coffee. The alternative is to save or invest this amount, but based on my current expected trajectory in life, the present value of my life-time income is such that this amount yields higher returns to me if it is consumed coffee form. That puts me in a position of indulgence: I have the luxury to consume coffee, instead of devoting that expense or time to more income generating activities. It is the luxury of optimism.
I value each of these three things differently and in incremental order of urgency, like some kind of “Maslow’s hierarchy of coffee”. For the sake of convenience, I purchase all three in a bundle, in a cup.
Neither coffee nor scented candles are native to this society. Both are adopted lifestyles of the burgeoning middle class, aspiring to live the life of abundance of their western counterparts. In the other camp is the counterculture calling for a return to more antiquated ways – why look outwards, when we have two thousand years of history in which to look for symbols of status and excess?
A criticism of modern day consumerism, arguably first put forward by John Kenneth Galbraith, in his 1958 book The Affluent Society, goes something like this: that we live in a world of post-abundance, where the most immediate, intrinsic needs have been met and consumption has become a product of engineered desire, an artificial spiral towards some higher class of living.
Isn’t that the point, however? Consider what’s happened here – millions of people that has leapfrogged generations of economic development, who now lie in opulent beds dreaming of a childhood of rationed milk, whose youth is the story of a great divide, of a schism tearing their life apart, classing one neighbour above another. In that story the divide, the schism, takes on a most palpable form of things owned, and of the luxury of doing and owning things that feel good. It seems to be the natural sequence of things, the escape from a life of necessity into a life of frivolity.
Is it any surprise that we are now in a mad scramble to feel good, lest the void catch us? What else is there, if not scented candles and overpriced coffee?
#00117F 