Everyone's For Sale

I was reading in a local newspaper recently about how user and consumer friendly friendships and relationships have become in our society.  There is now very little occasion for allowing for  friendship to deepen over time, not as something to consume or experience but to share in a sacramental act of two lives touching each other in meaningful and constructive ways.  With websites everywhere facilitating every kind of relationship imaginable (and unimaginable) we can all treat others like items in a store.  I think I'll try this one.  Maybe that one.  This one's getting a bit boring so I'll see if I can find something better.

I have especially noticed this since I began searching the Conversation Exchange Page for language partners.  It is all well and good to maybe have coffee just once with this one, Skype twice with that one, maybe see if this one is hot enough to take things to the next level.  I have had mixed success with meeting others through this website.  I think because I am probably one of the few people in existence who is at all serious about friendship without agendas.  A handful of contacts have developed into friendships of varying quality.  But really, to get beyond the sense of merely being useful to each other and actually spending time because with or without the benefit of language support we actually love each other, or at least like each other?  That takes time, luck, experimentation, patience and trust.

Not everyone is equal to the challenge of friendship.  Most just want their own needs and desires met but to actually put themselves out for others, to actually open and offer their lives?  Too much work.  I blame this on global capitalism.  Everyone is treated like a consumer item, like an object to buy or barter.  It's all about means to an end and no real relationships of quality, no community.  With the advent and constant upgrading of communications technology we are also digitalizing each other out of existence.  There is an app for everything but what about friendship?  I see many alone and lonely people so engaged in their tech toys who have no time or interest in each other.  And everyone complains about being lonely.

This ruthless Darwinist competitiveness has seeped into every facet and fibre of our lives and being.  We are always holding out for something better, because persons have been degenerated into objects of use.  It has infected and corrupted every cell, every molecule of our humanity.  Everyone is expendable, dispensable.  Everyone can be replaced.

Ever since they divorced the economy from human beings it has been all downhill.  We are all getting slowly flushed down the same toilet.  We are the economy.  There is no price on our value and it is time that we learned this and reclaimed our shared humanity.  To stop using one another as items of commerce.  To rip off the price tag, as it were.  We have to reclaim our value and to learn to value others, not for our utility but because we simply are, and that this makes us worthwhile.  How are we going to do this?