The Plastic Age
In prehistoric times, man built tools from stone in a time we cunningly refer to as the Stone Age. As time progressed, man started using bronze and eventually iron to shape the world around in, bringing about the Bronze and Iron Ages respectively. Nowadays, many consider that we are living in the Plastic Age due to the abundance of uses for the oil-based material that we see all around us; on this desk alone the telephone, stapler, calculator, laptop and power-pack are all made, in part, from plastic! However, as accurate a term as Plastic Age may be, I do wonder if we have misjudged just which kind of plastic is responsible for the world in which we currently find ourselves… I wonder if the Plastic Age wouldn’t be more aptly named the Credit Age…
For it is true that we have built our new world on plastic; the plastic in our wallets that has allowed us to live outside of our means for so long that we have come to take our country’s incredible economic growth for granted. It is this credit that has allowed us to build our lives; by all buying things that we can’t afford, we have created a land in which everybody has a lot of things, but still has no money. Of course the economy is going to boom for a bit in such a situation; when everybody goes around buying things all the time, the economy grows – simply put. Normally this is a sign of a prosperous nation and is something to be pleased by, but in the case of our latest boom, it is essentially down to the fact that we have been pretending that we are all very wealthy for so long that we have forgotten that, in actual fact, we are not.
But maybe the Plastic Age is a more suitable name after all; maybe it actually embraces the way in which we put things “on plastic” as a way of forgetting that we actually cannot afford them. By calling this age Plastic, perhaps we are paying homage to the deceptive credit-based plastic that we have used to build the oil-based plastic word that we live in…
Tags: credit cards