Mown Grass and Cars

The thought of writing my next book looms over me. Rather, it’s the idea of starting to write. It always feels impossible to get started. I think part of that is the topic: how I want to address the grand idea of modern society and how life is lived. I want to highlight the impact of the modern world on our human experience, but it must be done in a way that is raw yet tactful, engrossing yet realistic, grand yet ingestible. In other words, I want the story to be good. I don’t want to write something that’s bad — naturally.

There are so many aspects of the modern world, thus, that stand out to me in terrible ways. I don’t have any solutions to propose, but the least I can do is point them out and why they are wrong (to me). Something I’ve wanted to write about for an extremely long time yet never felt ready to is what I call Mown-Lawn Syndrome. This is the conformist idea that lawns must be mown. For my entire life, I’ve watched in utter disbelief as people mowed their lawns. When I was kid, we had a family friend with a giant, unmown backyard, and I loved playing in that vast field of vegetation.

What reason is there to mow the lawn? It baffles me. If it’s a matter of being able to see or walk, then I propose two alternatives: either place stones or gravel, etc. so grass does not grow in specific locations, or design the lawn so that it does not need to be mown. I don’t know if that involves choosing specific vegetation to grow or a different layout or what, but why spend so much time, energy, and resources on lawn mowing? Yes, you can be proud of your mown lawn. That doesn’t change how I feel. I quite like flowers and trees.

The other topic is cars. Traffic in Reykjavík is a nightmare. Trying to get anywhere by car or bus around 9am or 5pm is practically impossible. And forget finding a parking spot within the entire country of Iceland. Cars have their advantages, undoubtedly, but does every single person alive need to own their own car? or two? Furthermore, does every person who owns a car need to drive that car, by themself, a mere 5 kilometers to work every day? I understand that this is simply how society works right now, but what if you took the bus instead? What if we shared our cars (perhaps by building or neighborhood, etc.) rather than all buying our own? Personally, I think discussing literally any of that is pointless because there’s an even easier solution: public transport. Where there is a three- or four- or five-lane road, there should instead be a train. Problem solved. We can save the cars for trips to the countryside or for those who live in such places where they are genuinely necessary.

All this is simply to say that the world needs changing. Individualism and consumerism are out of control. There’s an app here in Iceland that gives two-for-one offers at basically all restaurants. I enjoy using that with my girlfriend. Yesterday, we had dahl for the equivalent of $31.50 per bowl. It’s not so bad for Icelandic prices considering we had the offer, but what did we get? Some rice. Some sauce. Chopped almonds. Bay leaves. It was very good dahl, and the experience was also nice eating out. The price, however, like all the other restaurants in Iceland, is ridiculous. A friend of mine wants to open a cafe, and we were joking that he could buy a kilo of rice for $10, boil it, and sell the boiled rice for $100/kg. I don’t see a world where the slice of banana bread in the cafe across the street for $8 makes any sense. $8 is enough to make two or three (or four) loaves of banana bread at home.

My favorite jewelry store in Reykjavík sells silver jewelry that’s cheaper than my average grocery bill for two every few days. I’m going a bit off-topic discussing food prices, but the root issue is entirely the same: What is going on with the world? Why are we mowing our lawns and buying cars and going to restaurants and cafes with a 500% upcharge? Why are we not building community centers and organizing community events and bringing people together, hosting things like potlucks and having friends over for meals? I know these things are hard and that most people are opposed to such ideas, but the question remains of why?

My friend got promoted at my old workplace. It made me think of that place once again. I thought about the higher-ups. What are they doing with their lives? One day, they’re going to die very rich and very successful. Will they look back on their life with a great smile and one final tear, thinking to themselves, “What a great life I lived, churning through employees like expendable resources, extorting naive tourists, and putting in the bare-minimum effort to maintain customer satisfaction (at the cost of our employees’ mental health). What a great life I lived, having made my company so much in profits. We got so many awards. It was a great, satisfying, meaningful life.”

I’m not sure how to express how it made me feel to wonder what these people got out of their existence (other than my satire). But I can only imagine — for myself — how meaningless my existence would feel if the sole purpose of my life was to make money for a private company. I couldn’t care less about the company if it actually did anything to improve the world around it… such as by make the employees feel good. Or hosting events for the community or contributing to the community in some meaningful way. If they did that, then by all means, go ahead and make money and get rich. But to continue with such nonsense? What kind of life worth living is that?

I could go on and on about my experiences with the modern world, being face-to-face with the “elites” and seeing how they operate. From local companies to global manufacturers, the world is driven by money. The problem is that people who want money are sadly often bad people. Not always, but often. The best leaders are people who don’t want power. So those same bad people step in to lead because they want power. Therefore, we all drive our own cars that break apart because we can tax their sale, then repeat the process when we inevitably need to buy a new car. And tax the fuel along the way. We live in poor-quality, small, cramped, expensive housing because someone with more money can make even more money by not caring about your personal experience of living in that miserable space. The government doesn’t mind taking tax from your rent. The higher your rent, the higher that tax. It’s a cycle that never ends.

I don’t intend for this to be a depressing post. Rather, these are the ideas I want to explore in the book — according to how it all makes me feel, personally.