When is the Last Time you Made Something that Demands your Energy and Creative Capacity?

I don’t mean sticking a pizza in the oven or putting together that table from Ikea. I mean really making something—a craft, a work of art, a piece of furniture, or anything that demands your energy and creative capacity.

When visiting the public museum recently, my family and I made our way to the upper floor that featured artifacts from what would be considered primitive cultures. People in these parts of the world do not have the benefit of Western technology, and much of their lives are spent simply trying to survive—hunting, fishing, and cultivating crops. No doubt it is an exhausting life, with little time for entertainment or leisure, two things we consider indispensable in our modern lives.

But something struck me about the artifacts I saw: They were all complex and in many ways, beautiful. A spoon used to stir soup was intricately carved with patterns and designs. A blanket was intricately woven. Pottery was decorated with ingenious designs and markings. These artifacts no doubt took a great deal of time, effort, and creativity to make, and yet they were made by people who had far less leisure time than we do in the comfortable first world. Despite the back-breaking labor they endured to simply put food on the table, these people still found time to create, and to do so with great skill and ingenuity. Full Article

We live in a consumeristic society. We would much rather get on Amazon and order what we need, no matter how trivial, than make something ourselves. Then, once we’ve used it up or something newer is available, we throw away our former purchases and buy more. We have so much abundance that things mean hardly anything to us at all. It is a paradox—the more we have, the less we care about what we have. We don’t love the things themselves as much as we love the process of getting new things. As a society, we love to get and consume and throw away and get more. And if the process of getting and spending ever came to an end, we’d hardly know what to do with ourselves.

So what does consumerism have to do with porn? Pornography is consumerism applied to people. Get, use, dispose, repeat. Porn is the commodification of the human person. It makes people cheap and disposable, to be used up and thrown away. It makes us soulless consumers of humanity, of living souls that have been degraded and reduced for our pleasure.  And why do we reduce people to products? Why do we so easily reduce a person of infinite worth to a thing to be used and thrown away? Because it’s easier.

See, real relationships take hard work. Just like a work of art, they involve time, emotional energy, creativity, sacrifice. They require love, and love always costs something. It always demands an investment of ourselves.

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