The word “substitute” is often preceded by “cheap” for good reason. Though restaurants and other businesses have cheerfully marketed the idea of substitutions and endless options to consumers under the assumption that the mere existence of more and more choices is somehow inherently good, the fact remains that any and every substitute only is in relation to the real thing that the substitute stands in for. Every substitute is a stand-in for something real, something actual, or something original.
That substitutes are stand-ins by nature positions them by default as a second or third option. Marketing campaigns do their best to portray substitutes as, “even better than the real thing!” and while such a claim may generate sales, the truth of the matter is more or less always the opposite. Consider just about any example of things for which substitutes have been found:
Fast food and microwaves have been marketed as cheap, time-saving alternatives to meals prepared at home or by a chef at a sit-down restaurant. Endless entertainment from television, computers, and other devices has been made readily available as a stand-in for recreation—of course, without the need for the skills that various forms of recreation require and without the engagement and rushes of joy and excitement that flow freely during recreation. Pornography and promiscuity have been offered as easy, readily available substitutes to genuine intimacy, committed relationships, marriage, and having and raising families.
These substitutions are sold to people (literally and figuratively) as having specific advantages: microwaves work very quickly compared to real cooking methods and require no skill—anyone can use one; entertainment generally does not require individuals to dedicate time to training or developing any skills, nor does it require getting together or coordinating with others; like entertainment, the substitutions offered in place of intimacy, marriage, and family are offered as things that “spare us the burden” of having to get together with other individuals and coordinate not just a particular activity, but our lives.
The relevant question now is whether or not these so-called “advantages” are actually anything of the sort and, moreover, what are their opportunity costs? What is given up for the sake of these alleged “advantages”?
Microwaves require no skill in order to use—anyone can press a few buttons. But is being an unskilled person advantageous? Not hardly. Being able to work a microwave will not make anybody stand out as particularly useful or worthy of greater respect, but the mothers who win baking contests, the bakers who work the local bakeries, and the chefs at the best local restaurants are all admired and deeply appreciated for their skills by the people around them. Skills are often developed out of necessity—various things need to be done and done well. If we get complacent and accept it, microwaves will erode the necessity in our homes of skillful cooking and baking. If we accept what microwaves offer in saving us time and effort and the need for skills, then we will to the same extent be beholden to accept what microwaves offer in terms of what we will eat; microwaves will heat things up in short time, but what comes out can hardly be called a warm meal.
Entertainment, too, promises that we may indulge and luxuriate without the need for any skillful engagement. One show, movie, or video will run into the next in an endless stream, requiring nothing more from us than to pay the electric bill and place ourselves in front of a screen. Such streams do not require friends, nor, generally, any sort of skillful engagement. Indeed, it is often taboo in such “living rooms” to be social and engage with others while a movie is playing or a show is on. To the degree that we accept such entertainment into our lives, we accept a lesser degree of worldly engagement and socializing,
Pornography and promiscuity proposition individuals with the promise of pleasure detached from the requirement of making any promises of ourselves. The alleged “advantage” is that they do not require any sort of commitment to other people. In the case of the former, other people can be avoided altogether, in the case of the latter, oneself and others can be treated like fish in a catch-and-release pond. The result of accepting said “advantage,” of not committing to others, is that one will be profoundly alone—no matter how frequent the fleeting company of others.
The list of cheap substitutions made readily available to people goes on forever, but the few already mentioned will have made perfectly clear that substitutions are not just cheaply available but also deeply impoverished and unsatisfying compared to the real things they are offered in place of. Certainly none of them could be sincerely defended as “even better than the real thing!”
When substitutions show themselves to be impoverished, the richness and poignancy of reality, of what is real, is simultaneously revealed. Seeing substitutions as what they are—cheap—primes one’s eyes to see what is real in all its richness and splendor. Seeing the richness and splendor of the real things makes any return to substitutions sad or even altogether unbearable—and that is a good thing. One should not settle for substitutions, and awareness of their nature naturally drives us away from them, in the opposite direction toward what is real.
Indeed, the more we commit ourselves to the real things that we’ve been offered substitutions for, the more we find ourselves living in real life. The fast food, the movies and TV shows, the pornography and one-night stands are all intuitively known to us—and commonly referred to—as not real. Everyone knows fast food hardly counts as “real food.” Children who cry in the face of some scary thing on TV or in a movie are consoled with the reassurance that what they see on screen is not real. The grotesque inversion of intimacy found in pornography and any cheap charade of intimacy played out in promiscuity hardly resemble real acts of love and are far cries from the reality of intimacy in the context of a loving relationship.
A life filled with such cheap substitutions is merely an imitation of life.