Grandmother and a toster

Nowadays, the world turns our lives into toasters. Our reality is so complex, yet so cheap and unreliable.

Thomas Thwaites, in his Toaster Project (The Toaster Project, 2009), explored how it would be possible to make his own toaster. He followed the idea that the cheapest equals the simplest, but he found out that the toaster for £3.94 is quite over-engineered. At the end of his route, he calculated that the toaster that doesn’t work for longer than 5 seconds, but was made by hand from the very beginning, like getting iron from the earth, costs £1,187.54, just because of the scale of production.

“The smaller in scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go.” (Thomas Thwaites for TED Talk)

Actually, what was wrong with toasting the bread on the open fire in the first place? Or maybe the question should sound like: why do we need to toast the bread in the first place? Is it because we like the taste of it, or is it because it’s 8 a.m., we need to leave in 10 minutes to stay in a traffic jam for eternity just to manage to be on time for our 9-5 job, and the only bread we have is the one from 3 days ago, so by using a toaster we can raise it from the dead one more time?

Another aspect is that the bread your grandmother ate was good for over a week without a toaster.

“ ‘That one can eat this food but not taste or know whether workers produced it in adequately waged or even enslaved conditions’ is what Karl Marx famously called the fetishization of the commodity.” (Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, Jane Hutton, 2019)

Our reality is built on a scale that is no longer human. Lives are so complex and over-engineered that at the end of the day you lay in bed and understand that if you break down, no one would even think of repairing you, because it’s cheaper and more economical just to get a new one.


Things, people, and everything else gain value not because of their quality but because of the intentions that we fill them with.


Would you throw your grandmother away?

     

   
        Chasing impermanence

Cigarettes have always played the role of a symbol of experiencing the present, being a final signature stating that I am experiencing something that is not going to last.

I am chasing impermanence.

The motion of creating meaning in the moment arises from the poisonous stick burning itself down. Maybe that is the aspect of fire that makes it so nostalgic: fire resists control. We watch it burn; moreover, we allow it to burn, to pass, to slowly disappear. The funniest thing is that we don’t mind this impermanence at all—whereas in any other aspect of life, we would want to preserve it, to have control over it.

Looking at deconstructionism as a method of analysis, emphasizes the process. It allows the existence of the unstable, the greyscale. The route becomes more important than the destination itself.

“In a liquid modern world, we are all expected to be the artists of our own lives. But we paint on a slippery canvas.” - Zygmunt Bauman

All the philosophies, methods, and structures that we build upon our reality are merely pieces of the process. The goal of even asking questions lies not in finding an ultimate, universal solution to problems, because (following deconstructionism) truth is socially constructed, not universal or eternal.

If language is not a transparent vehicle for truth, then architecture is not a fixed method for living.

Therefore, we should all make our own meanings (shout out to Albert, for all of his positive input in shaping existentialism)—and later, be able to look back and adapt to what is current, to what is the apparent world.

Creating and questioning reality is a synonym for chasing impermanence.

Just finished my cigarette.