The Overstuffed Freezer Analogy

So we as a nation are waiting for the system to break down so we're forced to empty the overstuffed freezer and start over.

A friend recently made a comment that reflected something larger than he intended. It was an offhand comment along the lines of, "I hate to say it, but I wish our freezer would fail so we'd clean out all the old food no one will ever eat."

This struck me as an analogy for wealth, waste and rot in America. As a nation, we're so wealthy we can stuff millions of freezers with food that is never consumed because it's buried beneath a mountain of more recent food, and we're wealthy enough to devote vast quantities of energy to keeping this food that no one will ever eat frozen for years.

Eventually, the freezer fails or the owners move, and all this once perfectly good food is tossed out as garbage to rot in the landfill. There are other forms of rot in this analogy.

There's the rot of vast wealth inequality: there are millions of households wealthy enough to keep overstuffed freezers full of old food running for years and millions of households worrying about paying their utility bills. For the wealthy household, the utility bill is such a modest percentage of monthly income that it's not an issue. The annual utility bill is an inconsequentially trivial percentage of the household's net wealth.

Then there's the rot of legacy systems we're paying to keep frozen long after the utility-value of the old system has expired. Just as no one recalls what's at the bottom of the freezer, and no one wants to expend the effort required to empty the freezer and actually decide if anything in the bottom is worth saving, we as a nation continue paying for legacy systems that are wasteful to maintain and provide no value.

Since no one is paid or rewarded for doing the tedious work of emptying the freezer and assessing the value of each layer of old stuff, this task is never done. We as a nation just keep paying the bills to maintain systems that cost real money to maintain but provide no value. And to the degree they take up space that could have been devoted to things that have real value, the old layers are costly obstacles to improving the quality of life by reducing needless, wasteful expenses.

So we as a nation are waiting for the system to break down so we're forced to empty the overstuffed freezer and start over. Is this ideal? No, but that's the only way overstuffed freezers are ever emptied.




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