Consumption

I received this from a friend of mine, who was living on a boat with her three children and her husband and is now back on land. I like how she describes the difference between buying something and bartering:

So here we are, back on land, back in the world, not to say in line. Even from our distant countryside, our world never ceases to amaze us. « Financial crisis » did we hear as we were sailing towards Tonga. « The world is changing » kept repeating the few newspapers we managed to put our hands on in Fiji. « The world must change » threatened journalists on Vanuatu radio. If that was the case, could someone explain to me why the selection is still so large that it took us one and a half days to find THE bath tub, among the five dozens we saw in the numerous stores we wandered in, soul lost and brain-dead, in the middle-size town near our house? And that's not all: you can buy clothing, cooking, decoration, gardening stuff, all of it eco-friendly, who cares as long as we stay consumers. I am like everyone else, I fall in the traps and become once again the pray of my desires, convincing myself they are needs. Country girl that I have become, I make rare incursions into town, where I gather unnecessary treasures which I bring back to La Garde and enjoy with a vaguely guilty greediness. Far gone is the barter we used to practice in the Pacific. The beauty of barter is that, in an exchange, one is never certain of the value of what one gives and one receives. Many times, we were given so many fruits and vegetables to thank us for a few trifles we had offered that, moved by the islanders' generosity, we added a few tee-shirts, caps, cans or books in their outrigger canoes. Barter creates links that are clearly not established with a supermarket checker. And, above all, makes you feel the strange and rare, at least rare for a European, exhilaration there is in buying only what one needs...

Christine