Steinbeck and Progress
Book report on travels with Charlie
By Carly Mathiot
Steinbeck
went on his journey to get back in touch with America but when he went, he realized
how much it had changed. Technology had changed culture, people and attitudes towards
others. The world seemed lonely and had an everyman for himself feeling. He found
that so much had changed because of progress.
When
Steinbeck when on his journey he found wastefulness was masquerading as convenience
and convenience was masquerading as progress. These three things cause a vicious
cycle.
Wastefulness,
which is considered convenience, makes the need for cleanup of wastefulness
stronger. See a need fill a need. This creates opportunities for new ideas and
inventions to help clean up after our “convenience” and we call this “progress”.
I think
when Steinbeck sees this he is saddened. “Convenience” takes away from our
social interaction in our daily lives. Instead of going into a dinner for lunch
and interacting with your waitress/waiter and the people sitting around you,
you can simply go through the drive through with as much interaction as handing
over some cash and saying “you too.” Automatically to the person on the other
side of the window, even if they never said “have a good day.”
Then
you take your bags and container instead of reusable dishes and napkins, eat
your food without a word and throw away the trash, not even considering the
option of recycling.
Steinbeck
reflects on the social impacts of this lonely cycle when he meets a cold, lonely
woman at a hotel. Self service made it no longer mandatory for her to interact
with the guests. How many times a day do you actually have a real conversation
with someone, with no phones, no computers? How many times do you actually talk
to a stranger?
Convenience
takes away from our human interaction. How many times did Steinbeck reflect on
his loneliness due to the lack of social contact? Now if you were to say hello
and how are you to just anyone, would you get strange looks? Cold shoulders?
Because
of convenience the way we talk to people, and the amount we talk to them a day
has changed drastically. In the story, Steinbeck talks about truck drivers. Truck
drivers are a convenience. They cause lots of bad impact to the environment,
and their social lives are reduced to talking to other truck drivers at rest
stops
.
It’s all cause and effect. But there’s one last arrow and it points
to work. Our time is spent working our jobs and then our family is squeezed in
at the very end of the day. Like a last after thought.
So our jobs call for convenience.
Instead of making breakfast and sitting down with our families in the morning,
we rush out and go through a drive through, say “you too.” Drive off to our
job, eating a wasting ever minute. We don’t have a social life because we’re
working to pay off the breakfast we pick up every morning.
When Steinbeck notes this spiral he feels lonely and depressed as if that was all life had to offer him now. He wanted to see things and people. He wanted to write about what he experienced, but his expectations were caught up and sucked away by the spiral of the modern everyday life.
