It’s becoming more obvious to me the extent of the world’s insanity. Flipping through the channels, I’m inundated with advertisements for products that not only do I not need, but also I can’t understand how anyone could justify needing, let alone buying. In particular I’m most annoyed at the home cleaning products, whose rate of unceasing development is a cause for amazement. How can so much development money be focused on making the task of keeping a house clean any easier than it already is?
Look at the recent rash of new paper-towel-plus-cleaner products, like Procter & Gamble‘s Swiffer and SC Johnson‘s Pledge Grab-It, that take the concept of paper towels to a whole new level. Now not only can you clean, you can disinfect like you’ve never disinfected before! And when you’re done you can just throw them away, environmental consequences be damned!
There’s such an obsessive-compulsive desperation to the pitches for these products that I half expect to see a commercial in the future that goes something like this:
Pan to shot of Brendon crouched in the corner of his bathroom, scrubbing his body with Scrubbo™-brand personal body cleaning towels while rocking gently back and forth.
Brendon (mumbling): Still not clean, must get clean…
As if diapers weren’t bad enough for filling our landfills, now we’ve got Helen Homemaker nuking every bacterium that dares to step into her household, only to throw away the toxic results and create even more garbage. With the super-duper cleansing power of these new products it’s no wonder bacteria are becoming more resistant when we’re throwing every disinfectant at them at every opportunity.
These aren’t the only environmentally irresponsible products coming from these companies. There’s also the new rash of facial cleansing cloths, and disposable containers competing for our global garbage can. What ever happened to reducing our waste output?
What’s more disturbing is the amount of technology and funding thrown at solving problems that don’t exist, while real problems remain unsolved. Christ, I’ve got toothpaste and laundry detergent that gets my teeth and clothes so white they’re positively luminescent, and we still haven’t got an electric car! Part of me wonders if somewhere in the world researchers wring their hands and wish aloud, “If only we could get some of the Colgate or Sunlight funding, then we’d have this cancer thing licked!”
Don’t get me wrong, I like things clean and orderly. But after a while it seems to be counterproductive to clean things when you’re creating more garbage than you’re cleaning up. There’s a point of diminishing returns when you’re expending so many resources on keeping things clean instead of doing worthwhile work. Could it be that we’re turning into a race of people who need to wash our hands so often and so thoroughly that we never actually accomplish anything useful?