Consumerism: Solving Problems You Didn't Know You Had

I was at a well known retailer the other day and I saw a brochure for a "quiet dishwasher". It said how much my loud dishwasher can ruin my day to day functioning and how this dishwasher was so quiet, that you couldn't even hear that it was running. It even came with a graph that had estimated values for when you bought your current dishwasher and how you paid for it which gave you the estimated decibels of your current machine.

Have we relied on products to make our lives better so much that we have run out of problems to solve? I didn't even know that my loud dishwasher was ruining my life. Sure enough, that night, I ran the dishwasher and all I could hear for 30 minutes was the swish swish of incoming cleanliness. And our dishwasher sucks. You have to pre-scrub half the items that go into in order to get them clean enough for the machine to clean properly. It came with the apartment but if it was actually mine, I probably wouldn't be able to stand it.

I think the basic root of the problem is we have become so numbed to the real problems in our lives that the small victories, the quiet dishwashers and automated ovens, give us reason to go on. Wife hates your guts and wants to leave you but won't because it would ruin the kids life? Screw talking to her, get her a new dishwasher! A quiet one so she can hear herself think. That might be a bad idea. You don't want her thinking!

Why does the rest of the world hate America? Because loud dishwashers are our problems. Perspective people, let's buy some more of that.