Affluenza

“Did we Americans choose the consumptive way of life, or were we corralled into it with drumbeats of patriotism, social engineering, and economic fundamentalism? You already know what we think: that overconsumption has become the dominant trait of our culture. We Americans in particular try to meet individual needs like identity, expression, creativity, and belonging by owning and displaying our stuff. To find a mate, get a job, or be included in a certain circle of friends, we are expected to buy or have access to specific consumer goods—clothes, laptop computer, stylish car, magazines.”

In this passage, the authors provide a helpful formulation of some of their central claims in Affluenza. Overconsumption has come to define our collective and individual existences in the modern, developed world, and especially in the United States. Having certain things is the key to accessing a number of social and professional benefits; possessions are the common currency of everyday life.

“‘Possession overload is the kind of problem where you have so many things, you find your life is being taken up by maintaining and caring for things instead of people,’ [Dr. Richard] Swenson says. ‘Everything I own owns me. People feel sad, and what do they do? They go to the mall and they shop, [which] makes them feel better, but only for a short time. There’s an addictive quality in consumerism. But it simply doesn’t work. They’ve gotten all these things, and they still find this emptiness, this hollowness.’”

Dr. Richard Swenson is a Wisconsin-based medical doctor interviewed for the initial 1996 Affluenza documentary. In this passage he provides a succinct description of some of the more deleterious consequences of affluenza. By “possession overload,” he means the rule of things over people, a situation in which individuals devote more time and energy to their material possessions than themselves or their personal relationships. Like all addictions, Dr. Swenson says that this intense pursuit of goods brings only temporary satisfaction and quickly leads to feelings of sadness and emptiness. The authors will echo this point throughout the book.

“‘Stress is ubiquitous,’ says [Dr. Sarah] Speck. ‘It can do great harm to us. The way we work is all out. We basically work too much, and we have too many demands on our time. Stress causes us to constrict our blood vessels just like nicotine and tobacco does. It is as important in developing heart disease as having uncontrolled blood pressure or being medically obese; that’s the biochemical power of being overworked and overburdened and feeling stressed.’”

Dr. Sarah Speck runs the Cardio-Vascular Wellness Program at a Seattle hospital. She is describing the analogy between the harmful effects of tobacco use and those of high stress levels. For Speck, stress is a growing silent killer in the United States that places the body in a state of heightened tension. Though we may not actively perceive its role in our lives, the level of stress that attends overwork and financial problems is just as bad for our health as smoking

“‘Too often, [Edward Luttwak] says, ‘so-called conservatives make speeches lauding the unrestricted market (as the best mechanism for increasing America’s wealth), while at the same time saying ‘we have to go back to old family values; we have to maintain communities.’ It’s a complete non sequitur, a complete contradiction; the two of course are completely in collision. It’s the funniest after-dinner speech in America. And the fact that this is listened to without peals of laughter is a real problem.’”

This remark from former Reagan advisor Edward Luttwak shows that opposition to the dangerous influence of affluenza is not a partisan political issue. While criticisms of unfettered market capitalism are a hallmark of left or liberal thinkers, Luttwak provides an exception. Traditional conservative values like family and community are just as threatened by affluenza as they are by typical Republican foils like big government or coastal elites.

“Along with his coworkers, [Michael] Lerner originally ‘imagined that most Americans are motivated primarily by material self-interest. So we were surprised that these middle-class Americans often experience more stress from feeling that they are wasting their lives doing meaningless work than from feeling that they are not making enough money.’”

This remark from writer and rabbi Michael Lerner is drawn from his work in a community stress clinic in Oakland, California. Lerner found that the average American is not obsessed with material gain or greed, and therefore constantly dissatisfied by a relative lack of money. On the contrary, most of the people Lerner became acquainted with also felt the emptiness and meaninglessness of their work to be a key trigger of unhappiness and an unhealthy lifestyle. 

“‘[T]he production of standardized things by persons also demands the production of standardized persons.’” 

This comment from conservative philosopher Ernest van den Haag refers to the phenomenon of de-individualization. This is the process by which each of us is absorbed into an increasingly homogenous consumer society with little possibilities for authentic personality. We become functions or expressions of a society that demands complete conformity in the interest of economic prosperity. Everyone is a consumer, a mere bundle of market preferences without a kernel of originality.

“‘Industry moves, mines, extracts, shovels, burns, wastes, pumps, and disposes of four million pounds of material in order to provide one average middle-class family’s needs for a year,’ write the coauthors of Natural Capitalism.” 

This figure, provided by Natural Capitalism authors Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, is one of numerous pieces of evidence presented in Affluenza in order to demonstrate the clear environmental unsustainability of our current levels of consumption. The average American lifestyle simply requires too much of our planet for the situation to continue.  

“‘If all people lived like the average American with thirty-acre [ecological] footprints, we’d need five more planets.’” 

Like the preceding quotation, this comment from engineer Mathis Wackernagel shows how far existing consumption habits outstrip the capacity of the planet. The spatialization of our ecological footprint (i.e., thirty acres per person) allows us to see just how extreme overconsumption has become. 

“We typically assume that somebody else is minding the shop, making sure all these chemicals are nontoxic. Yet the truth is that out of 84,000 chemicals in common commercial use, only about 1,500 to 2,000 have been tested for carcinogenicity. In fact, of the 3,000 chemicals produced at the highest volume, roughly two-fifths have no testing data on basic toxicity.” 

This startling fact from the authors demonstrates the insufficiency of current government regulation over the chemical industry in the United States. Although federal agencies have long been in place to look out for the health and safety of consumers, the implementation and enforcement of these rules is often woefully inadequate, exposing the public to unforeseen health hazards. The users of these commercial chemicals (corporations) have no incentive to protect their customers apart from profit.

“What kind of a deal have we arranged as a national culture? In exchange for some hundred thousand hours per lifetime of commuting and jobs that often fail to inspire us, we often settle for houses too big to maintain, superficial connections with people, easily broken gadgets, and nutrition-free processed food: counterfeit rewards that can’t possibly meet our needs. So why do we cling to them? Apparently because that’s the way our culture is programmed and because we are physically, psychologically, and socially addicted.” 

This scathing judgment of American culture from Chapter 10 acts as a kind of summary argument for Part 1 of the book, which considers the dangerous symptoms of affluenza. The work that each of us puts in to maintaining the current economic and social system is simply not worth what we get out of it in exchange. The problem is that we have become collectively addicted to the garbage given back to us by our culture in return for our lives. By waking us up to the actual consequences of our social framework, Affluenza hopes to ignite a different way of thinking in its readers. 

“‘The love of possessions is a disease with them.’” 

This remark, attributed to the Lakota Sioux chief Sitting Bull in reference to European colonists in North America, shows that affluenza runs deep in the DNA of American culture. In this chapter, the authors point out numerous different cultural traditions that have expressed opposition to affluenza. Although there is a long tradition of American objectors to the disease, the authors frequently ask the reader to consider the perspective of other peoples in order to show that a different way of life is possible.

“For Marx, Thoreau, and many other oft-quoted, but more often ignored, philosophers of the mid-nineteenth century, industrial development could only be justified because, potentially, it shortened the time spent in drudgery, thereby giving people leisure time for self-chosen activity.”

For early critics of capitalism like Marx and Thoreau, the true use of the technological advances unleashed by capitalism was to free human beings from work. A phenomenon like automation describes a situation in which work previously performed by people is taken over by a machine. But instead of liberating us from monotonous jobs, capitalism has found different ways of tethering us to an employer for most of our waking hours. For the authors, this need not be the case forever. 

 “‘After all, people don’t buy things to have things. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods.’” 

This remark, attributed to an anonymous business promoter from 1923, is one of many comments from advertisers and marketers culled by the authors in order to explain the methodology of modern advertising. For the authors, overconsumption arises not from true need but from the illusory hopes and desires implanted in us by advertising. The industry makes no secret about this, yet we continue to ignore this brute fact of our social and economic framework. 

“‘The true economy is not of money but of time, just as the true waste is not of money but of the irreplaceable materials of nature.’” 

This remark is from the 1929 work This Ugly Civilization by American philosopher Ralph Borsodi. One of the central arguments of Affluenza is that the immense economic development of the United States during the 20th century could have led to a decrease in work for the average citizen. Instead, our culture has accepted more and more work in order to fuel our addiction for more and more possessions, with disastrous effects for our environment and natural surroundings. 

“During World War II, Americans accepted rationing and material deprivation. Wasteful consumption was out of the question. In every city, citizens gathered scrap metal to contribute to the war effort. Most grew some of their own food, in so-called victory gardens. Driving was limited to save fuel. Despite the sacrifices, what many older Americans remember most from that time was the sense of community, of sharing for the common good and uniting to defeat a common enemy.” 

The authors define the Age of Affluenza as the increase in economic productivity and consumption that developed in the postwar United States. By contrast, during the preceding war years, citizens in diverse situations banded together and made personal sacrifices in the name of a common good. For the authors, this shows that we are capable of moving beyond our own self-interest and working for a greater goal. Curbing affluenza and confronting climate change can be thought of as comparable challenges for the 21st-century United States. All that has to happen is for people to be properly organized and motivated to cut back on their personal consumption. Affluenza is clearly intended as a contribution to that process. 

“‘Greed is good.’” 

This famous remark by Wall Street figure Ivan Boesky, later convicted of insider trading, captures the attitude of the financier class in the 1980s before the stock market crash of 1987. This is the time of accelerated affluenza during the Reagan administration, a period during which conspicuous wealth and spending became a kind of virtue in American culture.  

“‘The best PR is never noticed’ is an unwritten slogan of an industry whose arsenal includes backroom politics, fake grassroots activism, organized censorship, and imitation news. The weapon of choice is a kind of stun gun that that fires invisible bullets of misinformation.” 

It is not enough, the authors argue, that the advertising industry uses well-tested and advanced psychological techniques to manipulate consumers into buying things that they do not truly need. Certain companies whose products cause significant environmental harm—for instance, Monsanto GMOs or oil and gas companies—also employ advertisers to disseminate what we would now call “fake news” about their operations. There is an entire apparatus of shadowy public relations projects designed to convince the public that corporate interests are aligned with their own, a tactic that the authors aim to mitigate by educating their readers about its use. 

“‘Are you making a living or making a dying?’” 

This quote from Joe Dominguez, co-author of Your Money or Your Life from 1992, puts the stakes of an infection by affluenza into sharp relief. The authors praise Dominguez as a valuable example of someone who has successfully reduced the role of consumption in his life and feels much more fulfilled as a result. Dominguez, also a successful public speaker and personal consultant, asks us to consider what we truly want out of our lives when we come to grips with the amount of time that most of us spend working and in pursuit of material acquisitions. Is our stuff the most important thing that we will leave behind when we die, or is there a different route that the remainder of ours days can take?     

“‘One person I know calls what we’re doing the “self-deprivation movement,” but it’s not,’ [Cecile Andrews] argues. ‘The way to fill up emptiness is not by denying ourselves something. It’s by putting positive things in place of the negative things, by finding out what we really need, and that’s community, creativity, passion in our lives, connection with nature.’”

This comment is from Cecile Andrews, author of the 1992 book The Circle of Simplicity, and one of the key figures in the voluntary simplicity movement discussed at various points in Part 3 of Affluenza. Andrews claims that voluntary simplicity is not about depriving people of things that they need; rather, the movement attempts to instill different positive values in us. This perspective is very much in line with the general argument of the book: most of consumption is hollow and unnecessary and distracts us from different, more important sources of meaning and fulfillment.   

“‘The measure of a civilization’s growth is its ability to shift energy and attention from the material side to the spiritual and aesthetic and cultural and artistic side.’” 

This is how Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity (1981), formulates the “law of progressive simplification,” which was developed by British historian Arnold Toynbee. For Toynbee, the strength of a great civilization lies with its ability to supersede its material interests in favor of an increasing focus on non-material values like culture and beauty. Civilizations that cannot accomplish this task are doomed to decline. The authors claim that we are at a similar crossroads in the trajectory of the modern United States.

“Nature isn’t just something pretty to look at, not just a backdrop for our busy lives; it’s where we live and what we are. It’s what flows in our arteries and endocrine systems, and it’s the whole-grain cereal that gives us energy to start the day. But the more sidetracked we get chasing possessions and the money to buy them, the more distant nature becomes from our everyday lives.”

The exploitation and exhaustion of nature and its resources is one of the major themes of Affluenza. But the authors also argue that a proper appreciation of nature is indispensible to our physical and psychological health. Affluenza alienates us from nature, turns us against it, when it should be an abiding source of comfort and energy for us. The authors advise that each of us should re-connect with nature in order to experience these easily forgotten benefits.

“‘When ownership rights are in the hands of those whose self-interest depends on the health of the forests, the fish, and the land, they have a natural tendency toward stewardship. Self-interest and the interests of the whole become one and the same.’” 

In her book Owning the Future, Marjorie Kelly sketches some promising examples of democratic forms of economic development. She concludes that smaller, more local enterprises display a deeper respect for the environment than larger, multinational corporate entities. A more sustainable future for the human race thus entails more transparency and accountability on the part of economic actors, something that is sorely lacking in our current social and economic model.   

“Research psychologists like Leaf Van Boven of the University of Colorado and Ryan Howell of San Francisco State University have come to similar conclusions. In their view, stuff simply doesn’t offer as much bang for the buck as experiences do in promoting lasting well-being. Their research suggests that taking a vacation […] leads to more lasting pleasure than buying a product. Other resource-minimal experiences—theater or live music, for example, can also be far more satisfying than resource-intensive consumer purchases.”

If, as the authors argue repeatedly, material possessions are inadequate sources of happiness, then where does true fulfillment come from? The research mentioned in this passage suggests that experiences, though temporary, are more significant sources of well-being than permanent possessions.