Community versus Efficiency

Or why I finally cancelled my Amazon Prime

Photo by Nadine E on Unsplash

I just got back from a book club event at a local bookstore, Stay Gold Books. I’ve been trying to do more things that involve me in community and that bring me closer to friends. So, when I saw that Stay Gold was doing a book club event on one of my favorite books, bell hooks’ All About Love, I decided to go and asked a friend if she wanted to join me.

It was such a great morning. My friend and I met for breakfast beforehand, and had a lovely long talk. Then we went across the street to the bookstore, where a bunch of strangers conversed about a book (my heaven). And, because it was bell hooks and this book in particular, we talked a lot about community.

Our need to rethink and re-form community is something I’ve been banging on about in here and IRL a ton, but also something I’ve really been grappling with. I am trying to walk the walk AND I struggle with doing so, because it’s hard. After all, our world is set up to disconnect us and a few people are making a lot of money by doing so.

It’s this equation I keep hearing about in my positive psychology podcasts, in that Buy Now documentary I’ve referred to a few times, and from so many people in my life. We’re lonely, we’re disconnected, we’re afraid, and we’re buying shit to make us feel better, but the way we’re buying things is paradoxically what’s helping to keep us disconnected. We’re ordering shit right to our door, despite our creeping suspicion that none of this can be good. We worry that we order too much, that we don’t need any more stuff, that the business practices of these places are exploitative, and that—most importantly—IT’S NOT WORKING. After the momentary high of opening a new box, we go back to jonesing for our next fix.

So, today, when I got home from Stay Gold I did what I have been threatening to do for awhile, now. Something I knew I wanted to do, because it aligns with my values, but that I have NOT done because it’s so fucking convenient.

I cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription.

I first realized I wanted to do this when I watched Buy Now, but then came my counterarguments. I don’t use Amazon “that much.” When I do use it, it’s usually “an emergency.” I like the shows! It’s where I partake in a lot of my BBC comfort watches, and the BBC isn’t bad, right?

Cue to the universe gently poking holes in all of these ideas since.

First there was my dear friend in Minneapolis, who also listens to and reads a lot of the same things as I do, so we’re always discussing a lot of the same issues. We’re both people who are very happy to sit in our houses and read a book. We could do this for days on end. We also know such hermiting is not good for us, on a number of levels. So she called me and told me how, instead of Amazon-ing a book she wanted, she ordered it to a local bookstore on the other side of town, that she knew had been hard hit in recent years and that she wanted to support. Ordering it to that bookstore was totally inconvenient. She had to leave her house. She had to drive across town. She had to talk to other humans to get the book. And you know what? It was great! Even as a card-carrying introvert, the entire experience was rewarding. The inconvenience of it all helped make it feel good. She felt like she was doing her part by contributing to a local business. She got some sunshine and fresh air. She saw a part of town she doesn’t normally have a reason to go to. She bought a few other books, because of course she did. She had a nice chat with the owner of the store. It was inconvenient, and it was lovely. It made her day.

She also had to keep shutting up the voice that told her she could be working, which leads me to my second revelation.

A recent guest on all of my favorite podcasts has been Dr. Ellen Hendriksen (who I’ve realized works at my alma mater, which is fun). She wrote a book called How to Be Enough, which is the best book on perfectionism I’ve read, although I now know what it’s like to be an insect pinned to the wall in a museum. I feel thoroughly seen, and maybe a little bit autopsied.

Anyway, this book has a million things to say that will blow your mind, but one thread she keeps tugging at is this idea of “efficiency” or “productivity.” I am someone who was taught in my family and by the larger culture (as well as something I was realistically hard-wired to latch onto), that I have to justify my existence. I don’t get to “just be.” I have to earn everything, and that everything includes things like rest, happiness, joy, love, etc. On any given day, I’ve earned my right to exist by checking off my to do list, which has to be both extensive and difficult.

This is not fun, and while it has served me in a lot of ways, you can probably see it can be both crippling and stultifying. It can also make me an asshole, when I judge others by my own exacting standards. It means no one ever lives up to my expectations, most especially me.

I am in therapy for this and have been forever, so I’m better. Yay! But the thing about this type of thinking is that it’s a bit of a hydra AND it’s a shapeshifter. A shapeshifting hydra. So you identify one place it’s acting in your life only to realize that actually those two other things you thought were innocuous are actually freighted with perfectionism. OR you work on one aspect of perfectionism only to realize you’ve created a different, equally rigid rule to combat it, because it’s how your brain defaults if you’re not careful.

Along these lines, I’ve realized that, like a lot of you, I’ve created rules around efficiency. I’m always thinking about what’s the most efficient way to do something, or to get somewhere. And then I HAVE to choose that way. It’s the most efficient! Why would I “waste” time?

And sure, that’s served me well. I’m a full professor and I’ve written books that got published and my YNAB is tight (IFYKYK). But I can also be rigid, overly self-reliant, and so obsessed with finding the “right way” to do something that I forget why I was doing it in the first place. A lot of these tendencies, meanwhile, were only exacerbated by the pandemic.

Finally, I reckoned with how much “not that much” really is, alongside the ridiculous notion that I used Amazon “in an emergency.” It is not an emergency to forget to buy a something you can wait at least 24 hours to be delivered. And an order here and there adds up.

So, I’ve cancelled my subscription to Prime. It’s a small act, but it’s the sort of friction that means something. I won’t want to pay a delivery fee when I could run up the street. Even better, I can reframe a “task” like my friend did, and see an opportunity to support a local business and have a nice few hours doing so.

And to that little voice that tells me I should be doing something “more productive” with those hours, or that it’s “not efficient",” I can tell it to settle down. More nefariously, however, is that voice that tells me I’m privileged to have time to “waste,” and that not everyone could take time to go to a bookstore, and that I should feel guilty for getting to do so (and to feel better I should work instead, like these imaginary people have to do).

That’s the harder voice to ignore, for me. It’s poking at a few different pain points that are buried pretty deep. But I can reframe that idea, if I work at it.

After all, I am certain that it’s not helping anyone for me to buy into the system that convinced me I am inherently worthless until I prove otherwise. My acting like I’m busy all the time, focused all the time, productive and efficient all the time—it’s propping up a lie. We simply can’t be that efficient all of the time and we shouldn’t have to be. My vision of the world is one in which all work is honored and also, more radically, we are not our work. Where social networks aren’t places to post selfies but safety nets that help catch us when we trip. Where we each think about how our individual actions contribute to the whole—to those closest to us and to communities we’ve never met.

And to come back to bell hooks, this was her superpower. She wasn’t afraid to fantasize. She wasn’t afraid to envision a world that sounds “too” everything. Too nice. Too impossible. Too optimistic. Maybe even to be so crazy as to root oneself in love, in abundance, rather than scarcity. She saw everything that was wrong with our world and she grieved it, even as she refused to become cynical. She saw what we could be, despite what we kept insisting we are.

So that’s why I quit Amazon Prime. I want to live in a world of local bookstores, where, as one of the owners of Stay Gold books said, quoting Vonnegut, “we get to fart around.” I want everyone to get to fart around, not least because I want to stop apologizing for farting around. I want to enjoy farting around. To have, for my to do list, simply this: “fart around,” and to be satisfied. And I don’t think Amazon gets me closer to living that value.

I won’t start on Bezos and his superyacht, but you know I’m thinking about it. ;-)

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