- Joined
- Dec 16, 2017
It will have to be at a cultural level because we live in a consumerist society where we are conditioned into wanting and the latest iPhone. Our culture tells us that we must have all these plastic trinkets and voraciously consume the latest MCU offering to feel fulfillment in our lives. When I examine Bob's consumption habits, I get the impression that he is looking for even the tiniest sliver of fulfillment in his otherwise wasted life. He has no significant other to share his life and his family are what pass for friends to him. Valhalla knows that we never see him hanging out with other people aside from Chris and you often find him hunched over his phone when he's surrounded by other people. Twitter acts as the filter for the majority of his interactions, which explains--in part--his distorted world view because the majority of if users are nearly psychotic. He will likely sire no children (thank god) and he hasn't produced anything worthy of note in his forty years of life.
The grandest "tragedy" of all this is that Bob will never live a fulfilled life because the underlying philosophy of consumerism is never having enough and that your life is meaningless if you don't consume the latest product. What makes it worse is that the West basically exports its most polluting industries to countries with nonexistent environmental or worker protections. It honestly perturbs me how the materials in our phones and electronics was likely mined in Africa using child labor, then shipped to China to be refined and manufactured at near-slave wages, and then shipped overseas again to market. Yet most western environmentalists don't give a damn as long as it's not done in our backyard and rail against easy targets. Bob and Chris are essentially a personification of everything that is wrong with western culture with their endless consumption and willful ignorance.
