The satisfaction curve of blogging, for the vast majority of bloggers, in fact looks exactly like the pattern of purchases — because for the 1.16M LiveJournal users who abandoned their blogs, and for the tens or hundreds of millions of others whose blogs now languish in the dark entropic corners of the Internet, all blogging was ever about was self-expression.
And it turns out that self-expression, strangely enough, is not ultimately satisfying — because the selves we have to express, in an era of purchases, turn out to be depressingly shallow. Even the personally engaged, creative act of blogging, if engaged in without discipline, is as banal and boring as a pop song that’s been on the charts for a few weeks too long.
There is a real possibility — given human nature, probability — that all the current enthusiasm for participation and creativity, described so accurately by Chad Hurley, will lead to just the same kind of aimless anomie as consumer culture. But this time it will carry with it a core of narcissism that will make the consumer culture seem vibrant by comparison: “What our users want to watch is themselves.” We will watch ourselves, and because we have done nothing to cultivate or shape our selves, what we watch will be as initially titillating and ultimately empty as any consumer purchase ever was.
Without practices, even creativity is in the long run unsatisfying. Millions of former bloggers will tell you so.
CHOOSING OUR WAY
So here is the opportunity of our moment: to capture our neighbors’ dissatisfaction with the consumer culture, and our own, and take up a long-standing invitation to a more excellent way.
In the pattern of practices, we find an inescapable parallel to one of the essential elements of the ministry of Jesus. Another word for practice, of course, is discipline, and those who embrace disciplines are disciples. The pattern of practices is perfectly and profoundly summarized by Jesus for his disciples in Mark 8:34–35 (TNIV): “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.” In Mark’s story, Jesus has just performed two remarkable miracles that have everything to do with consumption: he has taken a few loaves and fish and fed crowds of five thousand, then four thousand. Hunger has been instantly and miraculously satisfied — a kind of divine drivethru window — but Jesus immediately serves notice that his way is not the way of consumption but discipline. The feasts for thousands are not a pattern — there will not be a daily free meal served up with no expectations and no questions asked — but a gift and a sign. The meals and their leftovers are a down payment on a future abundant life, a glimpse of the joy that is coming, but the way to that life is going to be sacrifice, not self-fulfillment.
What is behind the pattern of purchases, after all, but the belief that the best way to save our lives is to grab all the satisfaction we can, as quickly as we can? And what is the pattern of practices but the willingness to lose our lives, to abandon short-term satisfaction, trusting that eventually our lives will be saved and we will be more deeply satisfied than we can imagine? As the writer to the Hebrews puts it, Jesus, “for the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and” — only then — “sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2, TNIV).
So what is at stake, ultimately, in our culture’s embrace of the pattern of purchases is our ability to recognize the invitation of Jesus as good news. To people whose lives are built on the purchase model of satisfaction, the invitation to practices seems like — and is — an invitation to lose our lives. We recoil at the thought that Jesus might not be all that interested in our self-expression, but might rather be inviting us into a costly life of practice that could ultimately form us into the kind of people who would have a self worth expressing. And Jesus’ costly life might prove to be the only real path to satisfaction, the only way to keep our heads and hearts sane in the midst of a riot of consumable goods — able, like Jesus himself, both to feast and to fast joyfully, without becoming captive either to excess or asceticism.
If there is one worry I have about the enthusiastic response so far to Culture Making, it is that too many of its readers (and very possibly its writer) will race off to become culture makers — hurrying along to embrace the call to creativity without counting the cost. Along the way, we will cheapen the true glory of creativity in much the same way that the grave and glad duty of citizens has somehow been reduced to the mass mechanical role of voters. We will join our neighbors in orgies of self-expression, gamely trying to bring a Christian creative presence into our culture, without allowing Christ to be formed in us, allowing our selves to be taken up into his incomparable life. We will skip over the hard work of practices — whether the spiritual disciplines of fasting, solitude, and silence, or the cultural disciplines specific to every vocation that require years or decades of preparation and training.
But perhaps some of us are ready to hear Jesus’ call. We are weary of the constant drumbeat of consumption or the constant effort to gin up our own creativity. Perhaps we have tasted the bitter fruit of addiction, so sweet at the start and so soon stale, and are ready for something more real and lasting. Perhaps we were lucky enough to be schooled in a practice early in our lives — the hours of practice on an instrument, the wind sprints on the field behind the school at 7 a.m., the rehearsals over and over of a line, a piece of dialogue, a scene — and can still recall how good it was to live that way, how much better that was than our consumptive distracted lives have become. Perhaps we have glimpsed Jesus incomparably alive in the most unlikely places, the places we would never go among the people we would consider the most unsatisfying. If we are willing to follow him there, we could still become the citizens, the creators — and even the consumers — we were meant to be.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. In what ways are Christians tempted to organize even their spiritual lives around the “pattern of purchases”?
2. What practices have shaped your life? What do you find most challenging about maintaining them?
3. How could your church become a place that persuades people that true long-term satisfaction is found in practices, not purchases?
4. Andy Crouch suggests that even much of what we call “creativity” can follow the same pattern of declining satisfaction as consumerism. Blogging is one example. Where else have you seen this pattern in your own life or in our culture?
5. What practices do you believe would make you a more genuinely culturally creative person over time? What kind of support would you need to embrace those practices? What would you have to give up to begin practicing them?
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