You got a box. Another instantly gratifying piece of shit shipped from China, where it was made in a factory that produces mostly effluent but some products manufactured by children working in such physically but worse, emotionally toxic conditions that little kids with their whole lives ahead of them commit suicide to escape their servitude and now it’s here for your minute of dopamine as you tear open the package and then, crestfallen, realize that it’s exactly the piece of shit you insisted upon by choosing a product that could only be shit at the price you paid but don’t get too down on yourself because you’ll soon throw it out where the wind will carry it from a landfill site into a stream and thence eventually to the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre where it will be firmly out of sight and out of mind for the century it will take to break down into microplastics that just may kill the last wild fish though you’ll be dead by then but in the interim you might wonder why you’re broke and if you do, a big part of it is that you buy this shit you don’t need but frankly you, all of us—even those kids in China—would have been better off if you’d just taken that amount of cash and burned it. But you got a box.
I’ve been thinking about Pirsig. For years when I thought about him, I was usually angry that he’d made me read a 172,000-word rant that’s half a step away from the Unabomber’s manifesto. Yeah, that it’s self-indulgent. But lately I’ve realized how lucky he was to die before Amazon became Walmart on steroids and finally completed the shitification of Life in America.