One of the perverse consequences of this paradox is that the path back to Eden is littered with ruins, corpses, and destnucrion. Our attempts to re-create Eden amount to an assault on creation. That is the danger of the era. Precisely because our frenzy is fundamentally aimless while remaining driven, we set ourselves goals whose main purpose is to keep the frenzy going until it consummates itself in sloth. If at present we are seeking to render the totality of the earth's resources endlessly available, endlessly usable, endlessly disposable, it is because endless consumption is the proximate goal of a production without end. Or better, consumption is what justifies the frenzy of production, which in turn justifies consumption, the entire cycle serving more to keep us busy than to satisfy our real needs. Martin Heidegger describes this syndrome with great acuity in his otherwise portentous and abstract prose:

The consumption of all material, including the raw material "man," for the unconditional possibility of the production of everything, is determined in a concealed way by the complete emptiness in which beings, the material of what is real, are suspended. This emptiness has to be filled up. But since the emptiness of Being can never be filled up by the fullness of beings, especially when this emptiness can never be experienced as such, the only way to escape ir is incessantly to arrange beings in the constant possibility of being ordered as the form of guaranteeing aimless activity. [Pp. 106-7]

There is nothing objectionable about consumption per se, which is directly related to the biological rhythms of human labor. It's when consumption enables or necessitates hyperactive production that it signals a distinct pathology. If Heidegger is right, then the goal of creating an earthly paradise on earth is not so much the teleological end that guides our activity as the fiction thar sponsors our blind demand for endless activity — a demand that arises from our unacknowledged suffering from, and denial of, the emptiness of Being. If one understands boredom as fundamentally related to that emptiness, then the attempt ro escape from the emptiness of Being could be seen as another symptom of our boredom. Or perhaps boredom is the consequence of our inability to experience that emptiness in a genuine way. Be that as it may, the endless productivity mandated by endless consumption, and the endless consumption mandated by endless productivity, becomes in the present age the only way to "escape" — but not to fill — that emptiness.

Pp. 165-6

¶ 7:44 AM