Life As Performance Art 8

We all have a strong tendency of treating people like commodities. I actually called a language partner from Madrid on this. In his marketing attempts he wrote a spiel that he ran by me for my approval. Since English was not his first language, of course I would look for casual errors and misappropriations, but what really got me was the way he referred to people as commodities. I called him out on this, explaining that commondities in English is used not for people but for merchandise, unless you are intending to refer to other people as merchandise. He took real offence, and apparently, referring to people as merchandise was exactly what he had in mind, without even the slightest tincture of irony. He got even more hostile when I tried to address him around his evident lack of ethics. That, by the way, was our final coffee visit, and we were both glad to see the end of this friendship, however brief. I think there are many reasons for our treating one another as objects. Capitalism has set a particularly dangerous precedent in the way that people relate to each other. We have been so corrupted by commodification that we tend to treat relationships as conusmer transactions. No longer interested in forming lasting relationships with persons, we appear to have no interest in other people as human beings. It is all about exploiting their utility to us. It all becomes a matter of what we can get out of them. We have transferred consumerism into our human relationships. My psychiatrist was especially bad for having this kind of attitude. When he didn't seem to like my choice of friends, he would ask me about what I could possibly be getting from the friendship. He meant well. But I am a Christian, and my choice of friends has little or nothing to do with utility, and all to do with the fact that I like them, that I even love them, and what I get out of then has nothing to do with it. It is really hard to convey this kind of thinking to a lot of people, because most of us have really lost our ethical moorings. We tend to see others in terms of their utility or entertainment value, or of what they can do for us, and I am frankly sick of this. When I recently heard again that claptrap about friendships having a shelflife and people going in different directions I just found myself gagging, because this comes across as really selfish. I tend to see friendship as a life commitment (for me, anyway), and for this reason, I have been rejected, ghosted or tossed aside over and over again because no one seems to share these values with me. It's like we have become a ravenous mob of greedy vampiritic zombies, or life supports for an appetite. This isn't to say that problems don't occur in friendships, and that people can really make life difficult for others, especially when they don't come clean about their bad behaviour (you know who you are, Gentle Reader!), and this can necessitate negotiations and time outs. But to erase someone from your life because you're tired of them, because they no longer do anything for you, because they're bored with you, or as in my case they are tired of having their poor ethics beingconstantly challenged, or because they have found other friends and interests? That kind of thinking, for me anyway, I have always found unconscienable. I have only ended friendships because of abuse or safety concerns. I know, it isn't the same as marriage, but really, marriage itself has become so user friendly, that no one seems to expect anymore to stay hitched for life. It takes two, I suppose. If I wasn't already so isolated, then maybe this wouldn't be important to me, but wait a minute. Even when I was in full contact with my family, I still felt this way about friendship. This doesn't mean that people have to always do things together. But whatever happened to loyalty? To actually caring for others in the longterm? This is a reflection of how we see community, and this is a sad reflection indeed, because without stable longterm relationships, not necessarily of a conjugal nature, there ain't going to be no community, and we will each be just staggering arouind in our empty selfish little hells, like perpetual bedbugs looking for the next host to suck blood out of.