Tuesday 7th March

Everything is becoming disposable.  I will give you just four examples.  Music – when I was growing up music was a rarity, very little of our generation’s music on the radio and even less on telly.  Hardly anyone I knew had a record player even, I can remember a couple of Upper sixth formers (when I was in the Lower Sixth) sauntering in with Bob Dylan albums under their arms, nothing to play them on at school of course, but these were exotic artifacts.  We devoured the sleeve notes and gazed in awe at the cover photos.  When I started collecting records, it was one album a week at the most – I would slip them into clear plastic covers to protect them, handle them with care and treasure the very few records I had.  Then came cassette tapes, and I started taping and selling my albums and using the money to buy even more second-hand records, building up my collection at a faster pace. Then CDs came in, supposedly indestructible and I would haunt second hand record shops and buy CDs and CD singles – but I still treasured everyone.  My collection is now pretty big and I still love to look at the rows of CDs….but now there is Spotify and Youtube and downloading and music has no value at all, it is so disposable that you can even have access to almost everything but only while it is playing.  Ownership of music is old-fashioned and actually a waste of money.

Photographs – I used to enjoy taking photo’s.  I had a small Leica which took excellent photo’s, but you had to think about it, working out distances and estimating light exposure before taking a photo.  I have a few albums of pictures I have taken, mostly of my young children – and I treasure them, they are real artifacts.  I can remember collecting the developed films from the photography shop and rejecting a few failures and mounting the others in albums.  Then came autofocus and digital and now every phone and computer can take photo’s, Facebook is inundated with images and nobody values any of it at all.  I have hundreds of photos on this laptop and rarely ever look at them; it is as though I don’t even own them, they have no value, if I lost them I wouldn’t even be upset, they have become completely disposable.

Stuff in general – we all have far too much stuff in our homes, and can’t quite stop ourselves from buying more; we replace furniture and ornaments and pictures on the wall and quickly forget what we once had.  But I can remember lugging a sofa and a few chairs and a table from flat to flat, never dreaming I would be without them – but I had very little back then and things meant something.  Now almost everything is disposable; when we die our kids won’t want them, their houses are cluttered already, and even the second hand shops will give you a pittance to clear your home.

People are disposable too.  Friends we once thought would be inseparable are now just one among many on Facebook, some we remember and some we don’t even know, friends of friends or maybe they say they were in your class at school – but really…. Like almost everything, even friend are becoming disposable – if you don’t hear from an old friend, well there are plenty more on Facebook.

And I am not really complaining about all of this; it is just the world we live in.  Our only role is to be consumers, and the more disposable everything is the more we will consume.  Got to keep the wheels of Industry turning…