Wasting our lives

I used to give out stickers to my music students for each piece of music they completed.

One little boy earned a few stickers in one day. “I wasted these ones,” he said, pointing to the empty spaces on the sheet where the stickers had been. I smiled at his subtle mistake. “Yes, you used them,” I said. What’s the point of stickers, anyway?

For her “virtual red carpet” appearance at the 2021 Screen Actors Guild Awards, Kerry Washington donned a stunning silk velvet gown embroidered with Swarovski crystals, plus a matching cap.

And then she took a dip in her pool.

The gown, made by Etro, is hardly sustainable fashion in the first place. But we might feel a pang of alarm to see it ruined, just as many of us did when that Banksy painting shredded itself upon its sale. It’s hard to reconcile the extensive effort and care that goes into creation with the ease of destruction.

In general, humans have a hard time understanding sunk costs, and we’re not always clear on what the purpose of something is. The point of the dress, arguably, is the photograph itself. Celebrities exist to share their images. Actors don’t get all dolled up to hang out in their backyards if they’re not going to post a picture to Instagram. Once the picture is made, who cares what happens to the dress?

You could argue that it’s a waste of resources to make such a dress in the first place. But then, you could make that argument about just about anything. We can live without weddings and galas and airline flights—we’ve certainly proved that this year, quite miserably. But where do we draw the line? Is such a small, sad life preferable to making choices that increase consumption while also producing joy?

Most of the children I worked with in Atlanta over the years were neurotic about “wasting paper.” They scrunched their math problems into tiny boxes and refused to use bullet points in their notes, preferring to fill an entire line before going on to the next one. They didn’t understand that they weren’t wasting paper—they were using it. Their anxiety was out of scale with their actual consumption, but the indoctrination was total and unconditional. What’s more, it actively harmed their education. They felt so constrained by fear of wasting paper that they didn’t feel comfortable making sketches or filling up a whole piece of paper trying to figure out a math problem. Consequently, their reasoning skills were hampered.

The thing is, humans are not just a destructive force in the universe. We are also creative and constructive. We add meaning to our lives and the lives of others through love and beauty and art, and improve our living conditions through science and technology. Our consumption of natural resources is not the only metric that matters. What do we do with what we have? We’re capable of great things. We can acknowledge the damage we’ve done to the planet and each other over the millennia, but we can also acknowledge the ingenuity that allows us to make things better and the drive we have to innovate. We can solve the problems we’ve caused.

As individuals, we might look around and see the pointlessness of doing anything when it seems like someone else has already done it. We might think we’d just be adding to the noise. But that discounts the value of what we uniquely offer just by being who we are. The miracle of a human life is far too complex to reduce down to its superficial characteristics. We’re not just machines that turn oxygen into carbon dioxide. We have souls and hopes and dreams. We matter—each of us.

You could say that Kerry Washington’s pool photo shoot is frivolous and wasteful. That her swim is disrespectful of the craftspeople who painstakingly sewed the crystals onto the gown one by one. But the gown was made to be worn, and she wore the heck out of it. I wonder if some little girl—maybe Washington’s own daughter—will look at these pictures and see some possibility for herself. Who can say what that’s worth?