The outsourcing of our American lives
What we won't do in order to do nothing at all.
Arriving home from an outing with our kids last week, we were greeted by the sight of that giant buck (above) in our next door neighbor’s front yard.
All three of our kids were mesmerized (though a little unsettled because it was one big animal) as I put the minivan in park for a minute and stared him down. Eventually, we moved past and opened the garage. He ran across the street, bringing into view a second equally large deer on that side.
“Mommmmmmmmmmmmmmm!” they screamed, running inside the house to get my wife to show her the deer. She threw on some shoes and ran outside. At first she couldn’t see where we were pointing, and then once the directions became clear it was of obvious. There was no missing him or his friend.
We speculated that both majestic creatures had made their way to our neighborhood from across the road, where a controlled archery-only deer hunt had closed down our regional park for a few days.
The kids were still buzzing about it a day later when we arrived home from another night time outing while keeping a watchful eye for deer.
“Why do people hunt?” our 4-year-old son asked as we made our way down the street to our house.
His question should make it obvious that we don’t hunt, but my thoughts on hunting in general have evolved as time has gone one from an act of cruelty to an act of practicality.
“Well, in this particular case they’re hunting deer to protect against overpopulation and to protect the habitat of the park,” I said, more or less reciting what I had read on the park web site. “But they will also use the deer for meat.”
“Why do people eat deer?” he asked.
“Well, it’s pretty tasty,” I said. “And back a long time ago, people had to hunt for a lot of their food. If they didn’t kill it or gather it or grow it themselves, they couldn’t eat. There were no grocery stores or restaurants.”
This sufficiently blew the minds of all three kids, even if I suspect that had heard some variation of those facts from me before.
Our 10-year-old chimed in: “I feel bad for people back then,” she said. “They never even got to have Cheez-Its.”
I was about to say that she was missing the point, but then I stopped. Actually, she had understood the point perfectly — and it was a continuation of something I had been thinking about for the last week, month, year and perhaps decade or more.
I have a strange thought from time to time that I won’t be of much use during an apocalypse.
While I have a fair amount of common sense, I have very few practical skills. I don’t grow food, make things or fix things. Even with instructions, I’m bad at assembling things. If it was a zombie apocalypse, I wouldn’t be much help with a shotgun.
Unless doomsday can be staved off with a quickly and sharply written piece on what is wrong with the Timberwolves or a podcast about Vikings free agency speculation, I’m probably going to be hanging near the back.
In modern life, assuming this isn’t the apocalypse, these deficiencies are far less devastating even if from time to time I wish I had more practical skills.
I make my living with questions and words. Paired with a strong work ethic, I can earn a solid living and I do not take this for granted.
With the money my wife and I earn, we can pay for the things our family needs to survive: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, etc.
We do not grow, gather or hunt our own food. We buy it at the grocery store and restaurants. We do not make our own clothes. We did not build our house. These, too, are things that we buy — as has been the case for the vast majority of Americans for many years.
We also spend money on services that compensate for a lack of practical skills. We do not change the oil in our vehicles or fix them when they break down. We’ve hired the same excellent handyman for various household projects for almost 20 years, spanning three different residences. If something goes wrong with the plumbing, I have hopefully learned to call a professional.
While it doesn’t necessarily make me feel good to lean on help like this, these transactions feel reasonable. I’m paying someone with a particular skill for something that I either don’t know how to do or would do quite poorly, possibly leading to bigger problems down the road. This is more or less how a functioning economy works.
Where I run into a personal, financial and grand philosophical dilemma is the emergence of the convenience economy: paying for services that I could do myself but can also afford to outsource out of a combination of laziness and privilege.
Food delivery is one of those battles. We (gratefully) received a nice gift card for a delivery service that we put to use during the chaos of moving to our new house in the spring. But I was also appalled to find that our family of five order from a restaurant that we order from fairly frequently (usually getting takeout, not delivery) was about $25 more for delivery on the app than takeout through the restaurant.
I can drive to get our food! It’s the least I can do after not growing it, not cooking it and ordering it merely with a few button pushes on my phone.
This same energy caused me to have a private meltdown earlier this week. As I was driving on the freeway, I saw a business vehicle advertising itself. What was their enterprise: They are a service that will come to your house and pick up all the dog poop in your back yard. Depending on the frequency of visits and size of your yard, this could cost a few hundreds of dollars a month.
Is this what we’ve come to? That we want dogs but we’re willing to pay someone else to deal with the mess? That we want food but are willing to pay the highest premium for the least effort and friction in the transaction?
To be clear, I do not fault these businesses for wedging their way into our grotesque economy and I certainly don’t blame anyone working these jobs in order to pay for their own food, clothing and shelter.
But it all feels too royal, too caste-like — an expanding privileged class ordering around an expanding service class. Fetch me this! Deal with that! I’ll be over here binge-watching or scrolling, pretending to be busy and important.
Even those who feel sheepish about it, like comedian Nate Bargatze in this SNL bit about DoorDash, are still participating. And plenty of people do it without a second thought, like it’s just normal and the way the world operates and moves forward.
This is different from technological advances that have added convenience to our lives. We no longer bring our clothes down to the stream to wash them and dry them on the rocks. We don’t have to start a fire every time we want to stay warm or cook food. Countless other automations and conveniences have emerged in over the past few generations.
Some of these advances have contributed to the decimation of better-paying manufacturing jobs, and plenty of that workforce has transitioned to the fast-growing service sector instead — roles that are often more volatile as part of the gig economy.
Just because the time we live in is further along chronologically doesn’t mean this is all progress. I don’t equate an easier life to a better life, although I feel like I’m in the minority there as more people bend toward the sun of convenience.
I think a lot of the knowledge workers who have participated gleefully or at least willingly in this growing class divide — fueled by the fulfillment of their conveniences and indulgences — will be in for a reckoning in the coming years. Artificial Intelligence sure seems poised to do to white collar workers what technological automation did to blue collar workers.
Maybe that’s a needed correction to help us get back to more people in the middle and fewer on the edges.
Hopefully it doesn’t feel like an apocalypse, but something between the extremes of hunting a deer to fend off starvation or instantly having a box of Cheez-Its (perhaps delivered to your waiting, expectant hands) might be closer to progress than the path we are on.