When life gives you cream crackers, make lemonade

Musings on transforming compacted wheat dust into joy

The cream cracker, in its simplicity, becomes a site of rebellion. Illustration by author.

Warning for my regular readers. The following is an experimental piece of writing compared to my usual product management and technical musings. Proceed with curiosity.

Eating the first cream cracker from a packet is one of lives greatest pleasures.
No matter how bad, stressful, joyful or purposeful life gets, biting into that pristine, non-stale cracker from the packet somehow always recalibrates me.
There is palpable joy at the tipping point before it reaches my lips; it forces a reset of my senses.

Finding joy in a cream cracker is the perfect metaphor for the human condition: endlessly chasing crumbs of happiness in a world that offers us the whole cake.
I don’t know why such a simple thing gives me such momentary pleasure.
There is no hunger, nostalgia or Proustian moment where I can ground these feelings.
But we all experience them—small, seemingly mundane moments that drive so much unappreciated pleasure—moments of quiet celebration.
A moment to reflect, even briefly, on the beauty of small things.

Your cream cracker may be chocolate, a walk, a hand wave, the sound of a gong, or an aeroplane flying overhead.
They are things that scream an inverse correlation between an activity’s usefulness and its enjoyability; they should not command such power.
Yet, these small triggers can take us out of ourselves, make us fully present in a moment, and life worth living.

The cream cracker, in its simplicity, becomes a site of rebellion against modern life’s dictum that more is better.
Yet, in this act of defiance, we are still trapped within the same system that dictates our desires.

Some may say that by elevating the consumption of a cream cracker to an event of joy, we reveal our own complicity in the ideological machinery that keeps us perpetually unsatisfied.
A fetishisation of ‘authentic’ experiences in an inauthentic world.
It’s a trick that we play on our own minds that we are so evolved in our thinking that we can rise above the noise of distractive digital modernity and appreciate such moments.
That in our celebration of the first cream cracker, we see the tragedy of modernity: the profound moments of life are not lived but eaten.
Still savant to the capitalist consumption machine that produced it.

That all said.
Enjoy your cream crackers.
Let every bite give you joy, desire and meaningful inquiry.