When I am empty, please dispose of me properly

Going to the local Whataburger, this phrase on their cup stood out to me. There is no other phrase that has jumped out to me more recently than this one, except perhaps “you reap what you sow.”

In any case, I got to thinking about Whataburger and the many things the brand and its place of origin, Texas, symbolize.

First of all, when I think of Texas, I think of big oil companies and non-central electrical power grids and everything super big. ERCOT, or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, provides about 90% of power to Texan customers (https://www.ercot.com/about). Apparently, due to its decentralized nature, while the power grid in Texas apparently is able to provide competitive pricing, it also means that during crises, it’s difficult to connect to other state’s power grids which are either connected to the Eastern or Western Interconnection grids. Here, we can see the paradox – that while independence, at least according to ERCOT, provides better options to customers, it also isolates them from life-saving support when the electric grid goes out. If we take the 2021 power grid failure as an example, we could say that this independence resulted not only in extreme losses to customers in terms of damages to homes, buildings and infrastructure of ERCOT customers, but also serves as an example of how extreme independence eventually leads to suffering from isolation and lack of support.

This made me think of neoliberal capitalism. I’m sure someone who reads this is going to fry me on this brief and not particularly in depth explanation of how I conceive of this. Heck, I could just go and ask ChatGPT, but that’s not my style. So anyway, on the one hand, I conceive of capitalism as a linear system in which growth is continual – financial, spiritual, whatever – so the epistemology of capitalism is based upon infinite expansion/improvement/betterment. However, the neoliberal variety puts the onus of this expansion/improvement/betterment on the individual. Liberal rights, when talked about by the Enlightenment philosophers, such as Locke, Kant, and Voltaire, are based in individual rights and liberties. For instance, in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and the co-signers, believed in the right of man to individually partake of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. So, under a neoliberal capitalist paradigm, the onus for systemic failures falls upon the individual. In her book, The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed states in the introduction that self-help books are the epitome of neoliberal capitalism’s placement of the onus of happiness on the individual – i.e. the system creates a problem that we are then individually responsible for solving. Problematically, our current system operates on the idea that being anything but happy is problematic, we must always be happy and if you go to the self-help section of any bookstore, you’ll find this to be the case.

Going back to the quote on my Whataburger cup, “When empty, please dispose of me properly,” I got to thinking about how this phrase summed up capitalism to me. Pursue something that is supposed to make you happy – happy objects – and then when you find out that the thing that’s supposed to make you happy doesn’t (cruel optimism, Laruen Berlant), go on to the next happy object. Consumer culture creates dopamine hits when we consume stuff. When we make purchases and buy things. So I think of how this applies to not just material objects, but also relationships. Our culture of immediacy burns us up and leaves us empty. Whether it be ourselves or others, there’s always the possibility that we will be used up and consumed by those around us because consumer culture is all about consuming. We consume ourselves, we consume others. And then we leave them (and ourselves) empty.

So, my one request is this: when I am empty, please dispose of me properly. (If you need some proper disposal procedures to follow, just let me know!)