My patterns of consumption are becoming increasingly relegated to the wilderness. The things I need or want, and the quantities I need them in, seem to be getting less and less available. This is a new state of affairs. Every other day now I go to buy something I’ve been buying for long enough to find it unavailable or replaced by another thing usually something so different it is unsuitable.

Recently for the first time in thirty years I was unable to get trousers my size and was told that although the manufacturers still make ‘em, buyers don’t take ‘em. And sure enough since then it has become a problem. Soon they won’t make my size at all. Obviously the waistline of the over-consuming-average-fat-bastard-male of Western civilisation is expanding faster than mine. And that’s the nub. Basically I simply don’t consume enough. If I did I would be fatter and then fit the trousers. Yet another example of being out of step with the world.

I wonder if that when one is out of step whether to accept the fact graciously is the thing or whether to mount a moral attack on the fucked-up world that made is so. I suspect probably the former but my attack were it to be so would go something like this:

There may be a sinister and more worrying dimension to me not getting my trousers. It seems like analytical businessmen and their marketing sidekicks scheming away in hidden offices and boardrooms are slowly taking over the world. They produce and market the things they can sell the most of and to hell with everything else. This is leading to a homogenous world where similar types of taste are being subtly globalised to suit an ever more narrowly defined kind of human being - alas one that is materialistic, consumerist, and obsessed with money and possessions.

Ironically, capitalism and market economies were supposed to be about choice and allowing individualism to thrive. This contrasted the failed command economies which were said to be coercive and ineffective. But in the hands of unimaginative businessmen (they’re usually men) choice is becoming a sham. These company blokes are not entrepreneurs. They are not creative types or visionaries who through sheer innovation and drive manage to produce stuff that is truly useful and move things forward. What they do is more abstract than that. They analyse patterns and implement systems which cater to what they’ve analysed. Who but such a type could come up with that utterly vilified edifice of modern life, the call centre, something universally loathed by workers and customers alike. A world dominated by men like this is a world of reduced potential where its citizens are confined to numbers and statistics, passive recipients, the very scenario Orwell’s bleak vision was supposed to mitigate against. In this world what was supposed to represent freedom and choice has itself become oppressive.

LATER:

Within a few months of writing this I had started using broadband and with that was embracing all the Internet has to offer including its phenomenal search and find capacity. Suddenly everything was increasingly available no matter how obscure. Despite corporate businessmen remaining as contempt-worthy as ever some things do actually get better.