We move through the streets among empty boxes that overflow from the containers designed for recycling, but which have exhausted their capacity daily since the end of November, that Black Friday ghostly and omnipresent, until extended sales end in February until Valentine’s Day. Wrappers are the empty shells of everything that clutters our homes.things made with the different evolutionary grades of plastic, from the polyester in New Year’s dresses to the elastomer in children’s toys. That’s what we based our empire on, on the domain of plastic and cellulose, that’s what the legacy we leave is built on.
The leaves of late autumn fall on the Black Friday boxes, as if encountering the ghost of their Christmas past and, to some extent, the specter of their Christmas future: as if they recognized the tree that once made up the fibers that now they are a red box. And the unforgiving and generally ugly Christmas lights, which have already been turned on everywhere, They complete the landscape of absurd, exorbitant spending, which measures our unhappiness as citizens. and as consumers. Some will remain there until the sad and blue Monday, the third week of January, which is fought, as we have been taught, with new purchases, chocolates and series. Self-care has been effectively redirected toward individual spending.
Five years have been enough for the two terms to be handled with ease, Black Friday, Blue Monday. Traditions die quickly, habits change even faster. In five more years we do not know what part of the year the boxes will colonize or if there will be boxes left in the world to wrap more plastic, more technology, more objects that are strictly useless tomorrow, but oh, so necessary today. I don’t know how to get out of it either. As almost always, I am late to the solution.