Lars Eighner's On Dumpster Diving

Lars Eighner’s essay, On Dumpster Diving exhibits his profound experience of Dumpster diving as a basis of survival of modern society during his period of being homeless. Additionally, he provides an ethical perspective of people about the items that are necessary to reflect upon. Considering this, it proves his credibility of his ideas implemented into his story through differences of materialism and wealth.

For instance, many groups within present society does not exhaust items to their fullest potential and ends up being tossed away that they take for granted without realizing the hardships one may face . Specifically, one of the groups that display this behavior is college students, who “tend to throw everything” away even if they are in a financial crisis(Eightner 110). Considering, college is typically a time where students are desperate for money because of the tuition, yet they don’t give a second thought about what goes into the trash. As a result, Eighner’s opinion on this matter is that they are wasteful and to review upon

it. Dumpster divers face the challenges of scavenging for food everyday and it is difficult not knowing when the next meal is. It comes to display the differences of social classes in society.
Furthermore, the rich are usually eager to spend because of their abundance, while the penniless must save in order to eat.

By the same token, these two groups can be easily compared to a similar position of Thomas Carlyle in The Surgeon As Priest of when Carlyle demonstrates the perspective of himself as a “priest” when bestowing patients his medical attention in hopes to not “anger the gods”. That is to say, they cooperate through priest using the ability to “heal” people, a power only of the gods. Similarly, this divine interpretation is functioned homogeneously with the wealthy and the poverty-stricken because poor can only obtain money and items from the prosperous. Eighner is living due to Dumpster Diving, while the rich are the ones supplying them. Eighner, who experience and discover the dumpsters with better items are the rich. It shows that the rich and poor can be compared with his idea that they both function

together.
As a final point, readers can agree along with Eighner’s ideas through his reasoning of materialism and wealth. It gives the people a broader idea that people at times can be really wasteful, but there are others that need to live off that trash as a necessity. In the end, it reveals that society is never really equal and, yet they are able to operate very compatible with each other.