Eugene Peterson once observed, “We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people into either problems or consumers.” He warned that once this exchange is accepted, even politely and unconsciously, it begins to hollow us out from the inside, until we are no longer neighbors or fellow travelers. We become commodities circulating in an endless marketplace, valued not for who we are but for what we can produce, purchase, promote, or perform. It is a slow erosion, the kind that happens quietly enough that we barely notice what has been lost until we find ourselves standing on ground that no longer feels solid.
When Soul Is Replaced by Self
That warning feels especially apt when Black Friday arrives each year, not so much as a surprise but as a certainty, like a secular feast day that demands its own observance. For all its cultural dominance, Black Friday did not begin as a celebration. The term emerged in mid-twentieth-century Philadelphia. Police officers used it to describe the chaos that followed Thanksgiving, when suburban shoppers flooded the city ahead of the Army-Navy football game, clogging streets and overwhelming stores. It was black not due to profit, but because of strain. Retailers later attempted to redeem the phrase by reframing it through the language of accounting, suggesting it marked the moment when businesses moved from operating in the red to operating in the black, finally turning a profit for the year. What began as a warning was rebranded as a promise, and in that transformation something distinctly American revealed itself.
The Curious Origins of Black Friday
Over time, Black Friday expanded from a single day into a season, from a pragmatic shopping moment into a cultural phenomenon complete with doorbusters, countdown clocks, and carefully cultivated urgency. It is no longer simply about buying things, but about participating in a shared performance, one that signals adequacy and belonging through consumption. The message is subtle but persistent. This moment matters more than most. Missing out is a failure. Wanting is a virtue.
So on Black Friday this year, my wife and I drove up to Chicago to walk the Magnificent Mile, drawn by the cold clarity of the day and the knowledge that snow was coming. Michigan Avenue was already alive when we arrived, crowded with people moving with purpose, propelled by lists, sales, and the low-grade anxiety of falling behind. As we moved in and out of anchor stores and smaller boutiques, warming ourselves under artificial lights before stepping back into the cold, I became increasingly aware of how choreographed the experience felt. Every surface invited desire. Every sound encouraged lingering. Even the architecture seemed designed to usher us forward into the next opportunity to want something more.
Walking the Magnificent Mile on a High Holy Day of Consumption
Black Friday has become a kind of capitalist liturgy, complete with its own rituals and promises of redemption through acquisition. We passed the Wrigley Building, luminous and stately, a reminder of an earlier era of commerce that still believed in permanence. We passed Tribune Tower, its stone seriousness offering a quiet counterpoint to the frenzy below. And then there it was along the river, the building emblazoned with the name TRUMP in letters so large they feel less like identification and more like proclamation, a monument to ambition where identity itself becomes a product, elevated and on display.
It is tempting to stand beneath that sign and imagine oneself as an outsider, as someone immune to the values it represents, but that illusion does not last long. I am shaped by this world more than I care to admit. Easily, I measure my own worth by productivity and visibility. I know how quickly I begin to think in terms of platforms, audiences, and engagement. Even faith is not spared. Churches become brands. Sermons become content. People become data points to be retained or lost. When the soul is replaced with the self, even the sacred becomes transactional.
When Even Christmas Is for Sale
As the afternoon wore on and the light began to thin, Michigan Avenue took on that strange twilight glow, and the cold sharpened. On our way out of the street, we passed a pop-up venue called Santa’s Secret, a place attempting to capitalize on the merging of the Christmas season with cheap sexual thrills. After all, if sex sells, why not sell it at Christmas too. Nothing about it felt especially shocking, which may have been the most revealing detail of all. Even the sacred calendar has become fair game, another surface onto which desire can be projected, packaged, and sold.
By then, the day had caught up with us. My feet were hurting in that slow, honest way that only comes from too many miles on hard pavement. We stepped away from the crowds and slipped back inside one of the high-rise malls that loom above the avenue like glass fortresses. There, tucked into a forgotten corner of the food court, we found a quiet table sharing some genuinely bad Chinese food that tasted better than it should have, mostly because we were tired and hungry. Beyond the glass, the river kept moving, steady and indifferent, sliding past buildings that will outlast most of our ambitions.
For a brief stretch of time, nothing was being sold to us. Nothing was being optimized or measured. There was no urgency, no performance to keep up. Just sore feet, lukewarm noodles, and the simple grace of sitting still. It felt small, almost insignificant, and yet it carried a quiet weight. In a culture that trains us to keep moving, to keep buying, to keep wanting, choosing to stop can feel like a minor act of resistance.
Resistance Has a Receipt
And then, inevitably, we returned to the parking garage, fed the machine, and paid over fifty dollars for the small patch of concrete our car had occupied for those few hours. We drove away into the darkness, the city lights receding behind us, amused and slightly chastened by the irony, reminded that even our quiet moments of refusal come with a price tag and a printed receipt.
Even resistance has a receipt because capitalism is not something we occasionally visit; it is the air we breathe. It shapes our habits and instincts, our sense of time and value, even our attempts to step away from it. We can choose presence over performance, refuse the sale before us, linger at a quiet table, and still find ourselves paying for the space we occupy and the pause we take. There is no clean outside anymore, no untouched corner where the market has not already left its mark. The lesson is not that resistance is futile, but that it must be practiced with humility. We resist not to prove our moral clarity or to imagine ourselves above the system, but to remember who we are within it, flawed and embedded, trying to live with soul in a world that keeps asking us to reduce ourselves to self.
Still, the receipt does not nullify the moment. It does not erase the quiet table, the bad noodles, the river moving steadily past glass and steel. If anything, it clarifies the stakes. As Eugene Peterson insisted, soul cannot be fully priced or purchased, no matter how efficient the system becomes. Dignity has a way of lingering, even after the transaction is complete, long after the lights fade in the rearview mirror and the city disappears into the dark.
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
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