Abundance: Pink's Purpose

Abundance, from Pink’s A Whole New Mind, takes on a jesting, yet slightly astonished tone as he delves into the mind of the average human and attempts to unveil America’s obsession with all things material and the inability to actually be fulfilled by those possessions. An outlandish amount of space is dedicated to holding meaningless objects that will soon be owned by the public. Staples, “a 20,000-square foot box”, while huge, has nothing on Best Buy, which happens to be larger than an entire neighborhood block. It seems outlandish that such space could be needed for a simple store, but apparently Americans not only need items from these places, but they need a choice of twenty different brands of said items. Pink’s choice of words to describe these stores, especially the phrase “arms race” to describe the selection of TVs at Best Buy, intrigued me, and led me to agree with his slightly taunting manner as he expressed the preposterousness of today’s demand for product. Better yet to express humor, even wastebaskets and toilet brushes can now be purchased designer! The extraordinary abundance spread through the country has led to desire for the aesthetically pleasing, simply because the greater supply there is and the more money people have, the more they look to appearance rather than function. In fact, beauty has become so important that even candles, which serve no actual purpose now that electricity is the “norm”, bring in a whopping $2.4 billion annually. But unfortunately these eye-catching knick-knacks carry little significance, because even as the population has acquired a great number of possessions, “pursuit of purpose and meaning has become an integral part of life.” We long to know our purpose, why exactly we were put here, but alas, even as we buy out the entire country, our questions are never answered.