For Your Fulfillment
By Soni Brown
So much has changed. Most nights find me tucked under the sheets by 8 pm. I have trouble sleeping as the monotonous pandemic days are exhausting. I find myself marking time by the chores that need to be done more than by the Roman calendar. It must be close to Saturn’s day if I have run out of clean bras. If the milk is about sour and the fresh fruit is attracting flies then it has to be close to Mercury’s day or Wednesday. Though the days bleed into each other, we’ve celebrated five birthdays, a wedding anniversary, and a made-up holiday after the Fourth of July that pulled decorations from Christmas and Kwanza. We called it a Kwanmas.
Back to school Zoom classes helped us regulate time more generally, especially as the days cooled and the nights grew longer. By then, I knew when to place online grocery orders that supplied me with 75 or 80 percent of what I needed in a week. Paper and cleaning supplies required in-store visits and had to be planned around our work and child-rearing schedules. I did this until I discovered it easier to set up a recurring online order. I ordered only essential items at first: diapers, laundry soap, and off-brand disinfecting supplies. I ordered textbooks and fulfilled reading lists from Amazon when the prices were better than the local book store. As I spent more time on Amazon I became more comfortable following through with the purchases on my wish list. The wish list was generated from Amazon’s suggestions based on my previous purchases and web searches.
I’ve been ordering more lately. I chalk it up to being bored and wanting some distraction. My attention span seems more selective. I am sure it is due to my increased media consumption. I am not alone. According to a recent Nielsen study on social behaviors, more Americans are turning to their Internet-ready televisions and social media to stay connected. Before the pandemic, I could read 1,000-page books in a day or two. I could sit at my desk and write lesson plans for a composition class I taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, carefully adding in-class video tutorials and worksheets. I often wrote by hand long letters to friends and writers I know who in some small way said something that transformed my life.
But that’s all gone now. Instead, I sit for hours and scroll through TikTok. My feed is filled with white women losing their minds as Black people live their ordinary lives near them. My favorite “#KarensGoneWild” videos, as the genre is called, are the ones where a reasonable request by a Black store employee is met with curse words and a declaration of the infringement of constitutional rights by the Karen. I imagine myself in these scenarios and pantomime how I would react. It’s a slick revenge fantasy for those times when racist microaggressions dumbfounded me. Most of the time I fantasize about giving these women a sound thrashing when I hear the repackaging of fascism and xenophobia into threats of calling the police.
Another tactic I often use in my fantasy is orating elevated rhetoric to prove white supremacy as the byproduct of moral inferiority. Recently, I was driving with my three-year-old. Snug in her car seat; she was busy babbling to the window. We were stopped at a traffic light. My mind was wandering when I started to recall a recent TikTok video where a white woman was screaming at a Black woman, telling her to go back to Africa. In my head, I was parroting the words of this imaginary Karen back to her. I suppose it alarmed my daughter who asked who I was talking to. “Oh, just a Karen,” I replied. She seemed ok with the answer and went back to talking to the window tint.
These #KarensGoneWild videos don’t satiate my appetite for quick content which finds me looking up long-desired items on retail behemoths Amazon and AliExpress, a division of the Chinese owned Alibaba. This habit formed after the incident with my daughter. It coincided around the time that I stopped reading the books I had on hand and right before I started buying things and food almost exclusively online. What was once a small getaway from the Brady Bunch stack of pixelated faces on Zoom meets is now a nightly event before bed.
Amazon’s algorithms seem to predict my unspoken desires better than Alibaba’s, so I stopped using AliExpress. I know the suggestions from Amazon are based on algorithms that aim to predict my desires before I know them. But I am always intrigued by the person Amazon thinks I could be as it offers suggestions for new purchases. A tweed jacket? No thank you, Amazon. I don’t think I am visiting the English Moors any time soon. A Roomba, the self-propelled vacuum cleaner? Not with my skittish cat and a one-year-old who thinks her job is to smash and destroy.
In this endless cycle of days locked up behind doors, I find that I want to be seen. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte found people became conscious of themselves through the eyes of others. If I see my colleagues or friends, I risk infecting my elderly mom should I visit her. I miss seeing and being seen in a way that I miss my old way of life. Companies like Amazon see me, or rather they see me as bits and bytes and form an idea of how I think I want to be seen. Amazon, better than Alibaba, uses science and technology to convince me to buy whatever it is they are selling. Intellectually, I know this. Yet, I cannot resist the site. The pandemic offers no future to plan unless a vaccine or cure appears on the horizon. I am anxious these days and Amazon’s data stalking soothes me weirdly and expensively. This is the reason why there are six wigs of barely discernable differences in my online shopping cart. And I plan to add more.
Before my Amazon tryst, I would watch the daily COVID-19 death counts starting on the news or look it up online. I started with what was immediately surrounding me, like my zip code and then broadened geographically to city, county, state, region, and lastly country. Minding the growing count of the dead and infected was my rendition of Taps. If you want to ensure a completely sleepless night, go look at the paucity of COVID death and infection rates in New Zealand, or the entire continent of Africa. It’s as if COVID-19 only exists there as a nonsense word made up in a game of Scrabble. I cannot turn away from the death count, and, in some twist of this strange time we inhabit, I find solace in the retail websites.
My relationship with Amazon is strange. No one asked for this, but years ago I vowed to ignore Amazon. It was a success. I am thrifty by nature and will avoid products or sellers if I find their values not aligned with mine. It wasn’t quite an Amazon boycott, though I am a good boycotter. I once stopped eating Dole and Chiquita bananas for 20 years because of the Banana Wars of ’99. A quick primer: it was a trade quarrel the US had with the European Union to get them to stop buying bananas from former colonies in the Caribbean. This devastated the small economies and the gross domestic product plummeted. I give bananas a wide berth when ordering online at the grocery store, but swoon over the pandemic banana bread people bake and post on Instagram. My anxiety and boredom hijack my attention and encourages excessive consumption. “At least I am alive to do this,” I say to myself. I know that I have a choice in all this. I choose to experience the dopamine hits in the guise of Amazon boxes at my door. In exchange for this, I grant Amazon and TikTok the ability to harvest my data to make suggestions harder to resist. In exchange for some semblance of normalcy in this pandemic, I give over to the parts of capitalism that push me to want things I don’t need and to find perverse joy in producing things to display online allowing tech giants to profit from viewership.
Nothing exemplifies this more than the gastronomical exhibition that sprouted up shortly after lockdown. A glance at the news or social media meant seeing people displaying their homemade sourdough bread made from their homemade sourdough starters. The charcuterie platter was quite popular as was trompe l’oeil cakes and pastries. Is that a pair of muddy shoes? Nope, just a German Chocolate cake fashioned to look as such. Why do we engage in this activity with strangers while a pandemic rages out of control? Perhaps being Generation X or Z makes us more susceptible to these trends. I lose track of what my birth year is supposed to say about my values or if I am more inclined to follow a TikTok trend, post stylized plates of food on Instagram, or tweet-rage against whoever needs canceling. Disclaimer: I have done all of that but would never touch Facebook. Even I know that’s for old fuss-pots.
This pandemic-era need to constantly produce and consume certainly comes from being privileged enough to be bored. It’s a liberty I recognize I have when I talk to family and friends who lost jobs or contracted the virus. I am not out there worrying about a lost income or making the gut-wrenching decision about keeping a job or risking my health for a paycheck. My husband and I can both work from home. I cannot recall how I leaped from never buying from Amazon to constantly checking the door for boxes. Or, paying for Amazon’s streaming service Prime, just to binge the comedic drama, Fleabag. We get used to things quickly I think. Or maybe my values are harder to stick to when faced with so much suffering.
I already get buyer’s remorse for everything, including groceries. I know the producers of the stuff I buy are invisible and the channels of distribution are set up so I don’t see the ecological cost, the human cost, or the real costs. The almonds I like to snack on happens to be one of those cash crops that use a lot of water. One almond requires 1.1 gallons of water. It’s a silly way to waste the ever-dwindling supply of desert aquifers. When I eat a handful I consider not showering for the day. Balance, I guess.
I shouldn’t ignore any of the costs associated with commodity fetish, but I do. Before the pandemic, I vaguely recognized this enough to slow my consumption. I knew my purchases were more than an exchange of money for goods and services. The spending researchers and gurus at Credit Karma say more Americans are stress-spending, that is, buying items as a reaction to corona virus-induced anxiety. Nearly a third of the Americans polled said they are impulse buying as a reaction to the pandemic. The respondents blamed shelter-in-place orders as the motivation behind the need to spend. I understand this all too well.
Spending days inside as I try to avoid people makes me think about things that I always wanted but somehow deemed too frivolous to own. Things like a spätzle maker. Other people can keep feeding sourdough bread starters and eating trompe l’oeil cakes and pastries: I’m perfecting spätzle down to the irregular rope-like look and chewy, dumpling texture. You don’t need a spätzle maker to make the German noodle, but it helps. Over the years, nothing justified the $25 price tag for a basic spätzle maker. I probably wouldn't have bought one had I not stumbled onto Food TikTok which is better and less complicit than cartel TikTok. Then my Amazon recommendation had it in on display for under $15. Two days later I was putting the spätzle maker to use and making the sticky dough.
Amazon’s suggestions are crafty. And sometimes too sneaky. Perhaps all the cooking TikToks I watch and Amazon marketplace orders made the algorithms suggest a waist trainer. I have gained weight, but Amazon’s suggestion of purchasing a waist trainer—a modern-day corset and a constant reminder of unrealistic beauty standards—reminded me that my consumption lives long after my life. Indeed, the polyester fibers of the waist trainer will dwell in a landfill long after I am dead. It won’t decay even after my great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren are dead and buried. Or, cremated. I don’t want to impose my burial beliefs on them this far into the now. I still have the waist trainer in my cart just in case I can’t lose the 20 pounds from those sourdough loaves of bread my friends have learned to make during the pandemic.
“Jeff Bezos is invading your mind space,” my husband says as he finishes his cold turkey sandwich. He hasn’t been affected by any buying sprees and tells me that my anxiety fuels my consumption. “It’s an example of a relationship that is a direct variation,” he adds. He is a math teacher and prone to talk in math terms. I ask him what that means and he says as one thing increases it makes something else also increase at a constant rate. My husband has no social media presence and spends his time agitating about the conditions of our political parties. I would take him more seriously but this is a guy who still wears clothes from 1993 and considers T-shirts formal attire. I look him over and head to Amazon: there’s a pull-over I saw that is just his size.
Photo/Soni Brown.
Soni Brown is a sometimes writer and snark behind @NeonScrawl. She documents food, culture, art and other mostly true stories especially if it involves the absurdities of our beliefs. Her work has been featured in Desert Companion, Salt Lake Weekly, and the New York Daily News. Soni finds cocoa butter essential in her work as an elbow model.
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