Whatever gets you through the day

OURS is now a world of things. Everything around us now is commodified, meaning—produced or made, sold, bought, and consumed. Every single day, we consume—we eat [food], we use things, we burn up [the life of just about] anything, everything. In fact, we consume too much—for there is no satisfying our desire to acquire, to fill ourselves with everything until we tell ourselves we want more.

In particular, the mall culture rules us these days.

Who can resist the itch of malling and shopping when midnight sales and bargains come almost every week? Backed up by television and newspaper, these business strategies do not only deplete our ATM funds; they all the more intensify our desire to constantly acquire. Consumerism—our chronic tendency to have and have more—will be Shelf Life’s concern. Shelf life, per se, is any commodity’s life in a shelf, or how long it lasts—its potency or durability as a product. Compared to a person’s life, one product’s shelf life is an individual life span, or lifetime. Or life’s purpose, if we may.

In every shelf is a life—from a life, about a life, for a life. From every shelf—say, a CD rack in AstroWorld, a bookshelf inside a mall’s bookstore, or a ledge of Taiwan-pirated stuff exposed in J. M. Basa Street, we will take something and talk about it because it primarily concerns us. We [need to] talk about them because we know it is our life. It says much about who we are, what we want, how we want them, why we want such things, and perhaps what we live for. True.

Nowadays, what we live for may, in fact, depend on what we have. And, therefore, what we also don’t. To the extent of spreading ourselves thin, we have required so much of ourselves that our gauges for success or worse, happiness and contentment are mountains of things which we have to acquire and possess and burn up and use up, until it is time for us to have another one and another one and another one and more and more and more and more.

It’s ridiculous that even one newspaper ad reads—“It’s your watch that tells most about who you are.” Taking it quite literally, though, this is not true—you are not your watch. It’s a pity that you depend on a mere wristwatch to say much of yourself. It’s a pity that it is a thing that might just sum you up. Truth is—you use the watch for a purpose, not to tell you essentially who you are. Even then, you are worth more than your watch. Among other things, you’re a human person with a soul; your watch is not.

It’s hilarious how consumerist propaganda can persuade us to think this way about our lives; funny how this sensible persuasion has so pervaded our modern life. We now perceive that everything that is of value is on the shelf and so we should buy them; otherwise, we cease to live—as if not being able to buy them lessens our value.

“Shelf Life” takes on the task of making us think otherwise. We will go out there in the mall, in the flea markets, every stall we can find. We will look for the things we usually look for. To satisfy ourselves. We will browse and read books. We will read ads. We will fit clothes. We will also watch movies and read product labels. We might study just about anything we find on the shelf. And those are what we will read and choose to consider.

In any merchandise we will take out from all types of shelves—books, CDs, DVDs, shoes, store products, anything, or everything—we will benefit from them much more than by just consuming or using them. For one, we might see these things are simply our means to get to where we want to go, or we ought to be. We [just have to] use things, so we as human beings survive, and prosper, and as one friend puts it, “elevate.”

“Shelf Life” will make us see we can use things beyond their normal end. It will make us see we can desire to acquire other things, those things beyond the usual purpose of the tangible things we normally acquire.