Things are not people

I am listening to Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, a popular book about a professor who gives a last lecture--a program where the professor talks about the wisdom they have accumulated over their career, as if it were the last talk they would ever give. Except in his case, Pausch really does have only a few months to live, so the lecture takes on a much more real urgency.

A chapter of his book talks about what he inherited from his parents. One thing that struck me was the ability to separate the importance of people from the importance of things. He tells a story about a time he has come to take his niece and nephew in a ride in his new convertible. His sister admonishes the kids to be extra careful in the new car, not to get it dirty. When he hears this, Randy does not agree, and expresses his own idea about the convertible being merely a thing by deliberately pouring a soft drink all over his new car's seat in front of the children. In another story, his wife has hit one of their cars with the other car, thereby denting both cars. She is nervous about telling him when he gets home, but after she cooks his favorite dinner, she nervously breaks the news. When he hears about both cars being dented, he reacts very little. He tells his wife that as long as the cars run, there is no reason to fix the minor dents. He believes in the utility of automobiles, is not captured by the general use of cars as status symbols.

Both these stories captured my imagination. I have been tied to the sex appeal of particular cars I have owned, and I am not alone among my siblings in this tendency. I liked Randy's lack of using ownership of things as a means to bolster social class and standing. If more of us were like Randy, the auto manufacturers would have a hard time selling anything more than the basic vehicle to get us from point A to point B with the least amount of gas.

But it cannot be blamed on industry, they are merely tapping into our tendency to use things as social status indicators.

I have no fix for how to counter this tendency to trap ourselves in our stuff. I do know that Benedictine spirituality would help us learn how to live more simply, which seems part of what is needed. More important, teaching our children the importance of people over things, as Randy's parents did, probably is the best way to do it. And as we know, it's not what our parents say but what they do that inculcate the right values into our children.