Of Loyalty and Longing

I turned 44. Cosmically, it was at 2223 last evening, 1 October.

The age seemed less an issue after 40, and perhaps, because by then, most of your friends are hovering around the big Four-O, and cannot be too quick to solemnize your aging or mid-life phenomena. Fortunately, everyone is also aging better these days, and we are not popping off like flies because of cardiac arrest just three decades ago, like the typical Monday morning executive death syndrome. Unsaturated fat and an improved understanding of what that does is all to thank for.

This birthday, I noticed that the bulk of junk mail I greeted with glee (in lieu of opening absent presents), are the mass of loyalty mailers that flood at this time. "To celebrate your special day" one offered foot scrubs and food discounts all on the same page. Another tempts with 50% off full price items. Another, a $389 dollar fitness and spa deal at just $38. There is something superstitously convenient about those dollar numbers, if you are into numerology.

But the thing is that these stuff do work. A good deal is a good deal and all you have to decide is to let yourself be seduced into whatever weak motivation might exist for you to be "pampered" by a sale, a purchase, or another book on the shelf.

What was therapeutically positive was having envelopes in the mail which felt thick and solid, and from "leading brand names" that make you feel remembered, while especially knowing that these were not bills or from the credit companies. But careful there. If you are not careful, you will get to hear from those bill collectors, coming approximately one solar month after your indulgence to bring you straight back into therapy.

You might just long for that break from all this, right.

Well, here is the catch which we all learnt from the Screwtape Letters. The devil knows just how to turn the screw, and get us all aleaping into the fire from the pan. The belief is that we all "need a break", need a treat.

The trick - we have all yet to learn - is just to need less, and live less. Live with less. Can't be that hard, right. Well, when you do, you just find all these loyalty messages and mailers are just great jokes that come by annually, and take them for exactly what they are: automatically generated by some computer programme while using up some energy and material resources just to help the world's economic cogwheel which runs on vanity to turn one more round, and with your help in lending it the next turn. Is there an opt out option? It's in the longing, but meanwhile, we are like that tight spring within the heart of the whole mechanism of economic life that needs to give a twist and turn. Otherwise, like the wound-up clock, we will fall silent and forgotten, being of little "economic" use.