Weekly Short Story: Cost of Living by Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley was one of the twentieth century's best science fiction short story writers...and one of the most overlooked.  His story Cost of Living, published in 1952 and appearing in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 14 (1952), was one of his first as well as being frighteningly accurate at predicting the current state of affairs in our early twenty-first century...

Carrin lives at some time in the not-so-distant future, when the life expectancy has increased to well beyond 100, the society has progressed into one almost totally oriented toward the consumption of creature comforts, and credit is nearly universally available and unlimited, transferable to the next generation upon one's death.  He and his wife spend much of their time buying stuff...always the latest and most expensive model...some of it they haven't even ever gotten around to unpacking.  His job is mind-numbingly simple, requiring simply pushing a single button on inspected washing machines.  He has already put his son Billy in debt for thirty years, but still feels that he is behaving responsibly...after all, one of his friends has grandchildren heavily in debt.  Carrin hears of another friend who committed suicide and can't imagine why he would do such a thing...and his son is starting to sound discontented...

The problem that Robert Sheckley exposes in Cost of Living is the dangerous disconnect in our society between one's attainment of money and his or her spending choices.  The notion of being able to charge on credit, combined with materialism intensified to the level of idolatry and the desire to "keep up with the Joneses", has resulted in debt being passed on to the future.  And look at our government with its compulsive deficit spending...a huge chunk of our national spending is now the simple payment of interest on our national debt, which is bound to keep increasing.  And that is too close to the author's nightmare scenario of debts being passed on to future generations.  The terrible irony, at least on the individual level, is that if people were to base their spending on what they actually had to spend, then most could fashion very comfortable lifestyles without feeling the need to resort to credit. But sadly, a lot of folks are badly stuck with the desire to collect "stuff"...and with that increased life span comes a higher, much more expensive level of medical care: how will we deal with this as a people without aggravating debt?

One other important thing that Robert Sheckley brought out in this story that came out 65 years ago is that the hedonistic, fanatically consumer-oriented society that he projected us degenerating into also resulted in us never ever having gone to Mars...the notions of real-time endeavor, risk-taking, and exploration had disappeared.  I see the same sad thing going on today: people would rather follow Star Wars than follow and support our REAL space program...

That venerated, ancient Internet website Project Gutenberg has Cost of Living on it...here's a link to it so that you can read it for yourself: [link]...