Essays From West of 98: Society of the Microwave

A society focused on convenience loses much more along the way

If you’re of a certain age (read: my age or older) and spent much time watching cable television in the 1990s, you probably remember the television ads for a company called J.G. Wentworth. If you were receiving a series of payments over a long period of time (from an insurance settlement, lottery award, etc.), you could sell those to J.G. Wentworth and receive back an immediate lump sum. Of course, they would take a significant cut of the money as part of the deal. Their ads memorably/infamously included people shouting out their window, “I want my money and I want it now!” They were catchy ads. They were also quite a fitting cultural statement.

Have you ever lived without a microwave? Many of older readers likely have, but many younger folks in America have not. I have. For two years in college, I lived in a travel trailer. It had a microwave, but if you ran the microwave, air conditioner, and television simultaneously, it would blow a fuse in the trailer. I discovered this the hard way. It took me a while to get the fuse replaced. Afterwards, I rarely used the microwave, so as to not inadvertently cause another outage. This experience taught me two things:

1.     Chef Boyardee and Wolf Brand Chili can be cornerstones of a balanced diet.

2.     A microwave significantly alters our entire mentality about life.

I will leave the first point alone for now, but I reserve the right to address it in a future newsletter. The second point was jarring. Have you have ever examined the directions on packaged food and compared the microwave cooking time to that of the oven or stovetop? It can be a shocking time differential. Food almost always tastes better when choosing the slower option, but the constraints of life (or our lack of patience) push us to choose speed over taste. That’s a lesson about life. When posed with a slower, higher quality option and a faster option of mediocre quality, how often do we choose speed (and convenience) over quality?

Is that any way to live, to default to convenience as our overriding priority? I’m hardly a fan of making life intentionally hard merely for the sake of it, but as I get older, I see the damage of choosing convenience merely for the sake of it. We only get one life. Do we really want to speed through every meal, every task, and every experience, just to finish them and move on to the next one? I don’t. And I see how speeding through everything rewires our brain to expect and demand convenience in everything.

Before microwaves, people thought nothing of waiting longer for a meal to be prepared. It was the only option. now, life without a microwave is unimaginable for many. Succumbing to the pressures of convenience is easy to do. It is not always bad, either. Wendell Berry has a great rubric for determining whether a tool should be adopted. This is much too long for an aside in this essay and it deserves full-length treatment one day, but the general idea is to ask whether the tool benefits us or if we’re being used by the tool to benefit others. The latter is rampant in life and it all flows downhill.

A society built and rewired for convenience becomes accustomed to cheap goods, technological efficiency, and convenience above all, even our individual and collective happiness. Such a society is build around the J.G. Wentworth model: get your money and get it now, no matter the cut that the overlords take. It is a society that fails to fully appreciate the value of work or the value of the workers who do good and meaningful work of all kinds. It is a society that misses the precious moments of its children’s lives in the name of being busy, while spending those days at the office longing for retirement. It is a society that bankrupts its farmers and ranchers in the name of cheap food. It is a society that undermines rural prosperity and then criticizes rural communities for falling behind. It is a society that is deeply unhappy and dissatisfied. It wants to get everywhere quickly, but no matter how quickly you get there, it will never be never quick enough.

It is difficult to rewire society as a whole. That is definitely too big for one person or even a group of people. It is not too difficult to choose a different path for ourselves and our families. Take a step back from the microwave. Use tools, but don’t let them use you. Choose to savor life. Don’t let convenience control you, even if the wider world thinks you are crazy.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.