Oracle Online

It’s rumored that Hallmark invented Valentine’s Day to make up for a lag in card sales between Christmas and the spring holidays including Easter, Mother’s Day, and others. Certainly, there are various traditions dating back ages, but in its present incarnation Valentine’s Day is largely a cynical manipulation of the ideas of “holiday” and “love” in order to sell us more crap.

This shouldn’t be surprising given today’s commoditization of everything. Holidays are losing their meaning as holidays, and are instead having new meanings associated with consumption successfully attached to them. Every holiday is now an opportunity for businesses to sell products and services, and for consumers to do what they do best-consume.

This reflects a larger trend, one in which we are increasingly viewed-and view ourselvesčas primarily economic agents. Our well-being is measured on a national level as Gross Domestic Product, and individually as per-capita GDP, as though you can determine personal happiness on the basis of how much someone buys and the national happiness by how much we collectively produce.

And it doesn’t stop there. The government puts a price tag on us, using a complex set of calculations primarily based on our productive capacity.

This alone wouldn’t be so important, but policy is based on cost-benefit analyses of this mechanistic, quantitative view of the public. It is the same type of equation auto makers and other manufacturers use when they decide if it is cost-effective to issue a recall notice for defective products, or in other words, to determine if it is cheaper to pay out settlements when their products hurt, maim, or kill people than to pay for a recall.

Does anyone remember the government response to 9/11? The first reaction was not concern for the public health, but concern for the economy. We were told that the best way to respond was to go out and buy more crap. Keep the economy going, keep buying cheap plastic crap and greasy hamburgers that result in depleted water tables and third-world deforestation, even though, as I have argued before, Western overconsumption is a large part of what drives foreign policy and often results in anti-Western terrorism.

That is our purpose, and that is the purpose of Valentine’s Day: to consume. To keep the GDP growing. The most recent issue of Adbusters points out, “While 79 percent of university entrants in 1970 said their goal in life was to develop ‘a meaningful philosophy of life,’ by 2005, 75 percent defined their life’s objective as ‘being very well off financially.’ what happened?”

What happened is Hallmark won. But it’s time to fight back. We don’t need to ignore holidays to do so. We can take holidays back from economic interests and “deconsumerize” them. This Valentine’s Day, instead of buying cards, chocolate, and jewelry, make a card for someone you care about. Go for a walk with them or go sledding. If you’re single, make cards for your close friends and family, or just spend time with them. Make Valentine’s Day a holiday again, and not an excuse to purchase and thus consume resources.