on Steinbeck and Progress

   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

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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.