Trashing impairs our ability to embrace transformations

Most of our housing options rely on the segregation of old people from young ones. This encourages everyone to regard the old people as discarded

Susan Strasser, historian of American consumer culture, Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and Richards Professor Emerita of American History at the University of Delaware (Photo @US Embassy Vienna)

My maternal grandfather was a farmer and, on his way back home from the fields, he used to stop at the local landfill to rummage amongst the stuff that people had dumped. With a knack for nicknames (that I have inherited), he christened the landfill “The Damaged.” To my disdain, he used to bring home chipped trays, mismatched glasses and other objects that would enter the house independently of their origin. As a child, I looked at this process with horror and refused to touch or use any of these goods. As an adult, I give credit to my grandfather’s history and I smile both at my naivety of that time and at my acquired delight today for giving a crafty second life to fabrics and objects.

I felt an immediate attraction for the book Waste and Wants - A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser. Professor Strasser is an award-winning historian, Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and Richards Professor Emerita of American History at the University of Delaware. She wrote about some of the less acknowledged aspects of our industrialized world: housework, mass-market and the consequential creation of waste. 

What has waste to do with aging? I feel more than what we would think at first. Waste implies the fact that we consider what we discard as useless, valueless and fundamentally old. Not to talk about the environmental issue, waste makes us divide our world between things to keep and things to throw away and it prevents us from seeing an alternative function for the things we get rid of. I recognize that my grandfather and I grew up in two different worlds. His world was made of recycling and re-using, fueled by the curiosity and the intelligence necessary to find a new use for old, flawed and broken things. My world, instead, is made of buying and discarding, fueled by a market-induced thirst for novelties. There’s also a sort of cultural inability - or even inhibition - to imagine a second or third life for both the things we own and for ourselves. So, that’s how I asked Professor Strasser to apply her lens to the “side-effects” of our consumeristic culture, halfway between economy and history.

What prompted you to write Waste and Want?

Waste and Want makes a trilogy with my previous books, Never Done: A History of American Housework and Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. They examine a fundamental transition in American daily experience as factory-made products transformed human relationships to the material world, turning producers into consumers. All three books attempt to comprehend the historical changes that accompanied the commodification of daily life and the creation of a consumer society. All concern the boundaries and borderlands between the public and the private, the economic and the domestic. And while I have written about both earlier and later periods, all focus on the technological and cultural transition that took place in the United States between the 1870s and the 1920s, a period of fundamental changes in daily life and of major economic and social transformations that affected intimate relationships and routines. 

You noticed that there’s a cultural component in what we consider trash. Can you tell us more about it?

People in all cultures rid their living spaces of corpses and bodily wastes. We all consider rotting and rancid organic matter impure – though the line between edible and spoiled, pure and impure is a matter for cultural and personal debate. But we of the developed nations in the twenty-first century have additional reasons for throwing things out – reasons that, while not entirely new, operate on an unprecedented scale. More often than people in less developed economies, we discard stuff simply because we do not want it. And we buy goods and packaging made to be thrown out after one-time use. 

Ours is a consumer culture in the anthropological sense of “culture;” its artifacts and rituals are for sale, or sponsored by businesses and designed to get us to buy other things. Literally consumers rather than producers of the necessities of daily life, most of us do not sew clothes, build houses, make music; we cook less than ever. And as shoppers and media consumers, we are the constant objects of persistent, well-crafted indoctrination, created in the interests of concentrated economic, political, and cultural power. 

Is it possible that our market-induced appetite for new things has a negative influence on our perception of aging women and men?

I’m accustomed to thinking about the material world, and I find the analogy intriguing, but I’m not prepared to make causal statements about this. I’m also not certain that an attraction to novelty is entirely market-induced, though it is without doubt magnified by the market. 

We consider obsolescence a feature embedded in the things we buy. Is this a way we look at older bodies? 

We do understand obsolescence to be embedded in things we buy, and this is true of contemporary products – electronics, fast fashion, Ikea furniture – in a way that is relatively new. But when functionality isn’t visibly increasing, many people don’t feel happy about that understanding – how often must we upgrade? And our own older bodies surprise us: how can it be I can’t lift what I used to lift, can’t walk as fast, can’t maintain my balance as well? Even if I can look at myself in a mirror without flinching, doesn’t that photo make me look surprisingly old?

We are brought up as consumers and never question the cycle buy/use/discard. Do you notice a similar pattern in the way our society deals with the different stages of life?

Some people are questioning the buy/use/discard cycle, especially in response to concerns about climate change, though they may not have a sense that their individual responses or personal boycotts add up to much, in comparison to the activities of corporations and governments. 

I believe that there actually are stages of life, so I’m not sure what questioning that would mean. In my lifetime, there has been a substantial change in how older people in the United States have lived, as the proportion of older people has increased, lifetimes have lengthened, and new kinds of housing options have been developed for old people. The fact that most of those options rely on the segregation of old people from young ones encourages everyone to regard the old people as discarded. 

We are trained in the act of trashing instead of reusing or transforming. Does this impair our ability to embrace the transformations that comes with aging?

I think it impairs our ability to embrace transformations in general.

Have you ever heard the word Kintsugi? It’s the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. The underlying philosophy treats the breakage as part of the history of the object. Would this be a more holistic approach to consumption and to aging, and a way to value imperfections and personal history as a form of unicity? 

I have heard the word, and have an image in my head of a beautiful blue bowl I once saw with gold filling a crack. I love this image for the human being and the human body, and especially the notion of embellishing the places where our bodies have been scarred (I think of photographs I have seen of tattooed mastectomy scars) and where our personalities and our souls as well as our bodies have had to respond to difficult events and scenarios.