In conclusion, I have used as my title ‘Buying Time’, which phrase, when used colloquially, means that one is stalling, trying to fend of the inevitable progress of time, at least for a while. If my explanation of these two paradoxical forms of consumption is correct, then certain routines and rhythms of consumption are, in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, precisely ways in which we try to hold a stance against our annihilation either by linear time or by the anonymity and massivity of modernity. We achieve this through a devotion to circulations of humanity either as the past or as the present. Distressed blue jeans for the youth and flea markets for the older generation are ways in which we try to resolve our sense of the profound gulf between the striving for personalization and individuality in life and our consciousness of the crushing anonymity of death and global ubiquity. In that case the phrase ‘Buying Time’, in its colloquial meaning as fending off time, would be entirely appropriate as a description of the phenomena I have tried to understand in this chapter.
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• Daniel Miller