Like oil, commodities and capital can be viewed as compressed time.
In my most neurotic moments, I've found myself pacing about, helpless over some mess on the floor because I don't have a washcloth or paper towel at reach to clean it up with, which is an action that has largely become automatic.
Without money, which however imperfectly, does indeed represent labor time, one can't buy a towel to wipe up liquid. One would have to spend hours upon hours learning to weave and procuring the materials to weave. By then the liquid would have dried up, or grown some sort of mold, depending on circumstances. Perhaps one could take one's hand and wipe it up! And then one would be compelled to wipe on some other absorptive surface, say clothing, or furniture, all of which is still compressed labor ready for purchase.
The anxiety itself is predicated on economic and cultural processes underway. We are taught very young with the tools and materials we have to oversee our environments so that they are in order. With this ability shattered, one becomes anxious.
The maintenance and reproduction of life is largely built on a set of tiny repetitious actions that have been proven to work towards some end.
If I was to weave my own towel to order my environment with, it would have to be the case that I had access to or permission to access the raw materials, and then have access to the knowledge and techniques built up to properly weave a towel. As a person in a modern industrial and urbanized society, such a state of affairs is not currently the case.
So here my fictional composite sits, suspended in time, defenseless without basic items that are formed by generations upon generations of knowledge and labor. And further, the environment snaps into place those modes of labor. I can't just walk out of the house and find weaving materials in a state of nature. I'd more likely find dust, fragments of glass, and concrete. I'd have to buy some sort of fabric or thread. And it is less likely I am to come across someone in the street ready to teach weaving. I'd have to pursue some establishment, or tap into a social network, or read a book, or log on and retrieve the information on the Internet. All actions which take place within a multitude of cultural and economic forces.
The modern individual finds itself in an environment in which an acceleration of activity and expansion of activity has been the case for some time. One has to go out and buy a towel because one simply doesn't have the time or the means to weave it.
Buying a ready-made towel is so fast, because one is benefiting from centuries of refined towel manufacture, which has also been spatially located outside of one's community, where individuals far removed from one's life are squeezing all of their life's energy into producing the manufacturing infrastructure, the logistical systems, the towels themselves. That life energy - oftentimes of international communities of color - is squeezed, sacrificed, and ultimately compressed to reduce the amount of time it takes to procure the towel, so that those buying the towels have more time to squeeze and compress their own life energy into producing other things for others.
It is the hope of those upstream that their lives are a little less squeezed and compressed than those below them, those procuring the raw materials and producing basic commodities. Because to the modern citizen, producing a towel is not fun or interesting. So much more fun and interesting to pursue what the dominant members of society worship, whether it is the worship of certain facets of entertainment, high technology, athletics, statecraft, business, etc.
The higher these aspirations, the more these aspirations extract from the environment and lower general rates of return in resources and energy, the more the lower processes have to speed up, the more life energy they have to compress to maintain the ratio, or the pyramid-like shape of human labor, whose base, crushed under the weight of the superstructure, quivers and trembles to hold up the highest heights to the heavens.
Further it is this constant acceleration and mounting pressure that drives the proliferation of disposable products and greater flows of waste. As is the case throughout the rest of history, the benefits from this general process flow upwards to those with the wealth and power to eject waste, direct its flows, and flee unforeseen calamity.
One is already present in a historical material flow which takes time and energy to depart from.
And to depart, it means compressing one's own life, making gradually more room for those trapped at the bottom, and shedding unproductive burdens. Generally, re-negotiating the structure of one's life, which implicates everything one is connected to.
