AP Lang Essay #4

 
In a 2019 interview, award-winning poet and memoirist Jimmy Santiago Baca asserted: “In America we value possessions. We would much rather talk about a new car than talk about a story that happened between grandfather and me. We’d much rather get on the computer and play video games and enact some cataclysmic epic than to talk about the epics in our own lives.”

Write an essay that argues your position on the extent to which Baca’s claim about the value of possessions is valid.

From Ariana Grande’s “buy myself all of my favourite things” in hit song “7 rings” to the Weeknd bragging about his “twenty thousand dollar table cut from ebony” in Starboy, at first glance it is easy to call out modern society as materialistic and obsessed with goods. However is the opinion that modern people prize goods over all else, often touted disparagingly by the elderly, true?

Well, it is firstly important to consider what people, what society discusses. In the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin’s father remarks about how many conversations centre about movies and TV Shows, finding common ground in the lives of fictional people and narratives. And this trend has only become more prominent since Watterson’s time, as with the prolific nature of Netflix and other streaming services, we have so much common ground in pop-culture. Dialogues from shows insert themselves in the form of memes into our most mundane conversations. Our culture has a great affinity for stories, not just in the form of talking about books and movies, but more importantly our individual, personal stories.

Moreover, the modern world places great value on stories even in very formal spheres. Even people crunching numbers, in jobs most would believe to be the antithesis of all things literary, are encouraged to present compelling stories. Furthermore, social media, the hub of most interaction these days, is focused on curating our stories- long vacation montages to be posted on Instagram, pictures of idyllic family reunions to be posted on Facebook.

The modern world is obsessed, but with stories- not goods- and our lives are a reflection of that possession. We require ourselves, and our obsession with stories culminates with our obsession with goods, which are props to the play we stage. Goods are advertised to sell stories, Rolexes are marketed as signalling heritage and timelessness, brands selling sweets are marketed as signalling home and family. Baca’s comments- that people spend time playing out epics in video games while not discussing our own- are untrue, as increasingly, we spend almost all our time discussing our own epics and stories, except we do it by displaying and discussing goods- which are stand-ins the values we wish to project- whether they be class, sophistication, eccentricity.

Thus, the modern world’s obsession with goods is merely a symptom of its obsession with stories. Our obsession with buying things taps into a deeper need to to project a personal story. To pull out materialism at its stories, one must address the root of the problem, a culture that worships the flawless personal narrative, and advertising that convinces us goods are essential to this flawless personal narrative.