Affluenza

As with influenza, Chapter 18 recommends some potential sources of “bed rest,” or treatment, for affluenza. The authors focus on a few examples. The first is the couple Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, authors of a 1992 book on financial sustainability called Your Money or Your Life. The pair was first interviewed by the authors for the Affluenza documentary.

Dominguez, a former Wall Street broker, was able to retire at age 31 by cutting back on his expenditures and relying strictly upon the interest generated by his savings for income. With Robin, a former actress, the pair began advising people on how to best handle their money, a successful venture that ultimately led to a publishing deal. The authors of Affluenza offer a few of the tips from Your Money or Your Life as simple, immediate steps that can be taken to ameliorate overconsumption. After taking close inventory of time and money spent on working and other expenditures, Dominguez and Robin recommend plotting a “fulfillment curve” that rises with necessary purchases (i.e., food, housing) and falls with luxury items. The top of the curve is “enough”: the point at which spending should stop and saving should begin.

Journalist Amy Saltzman has referred to this process of reducing consumption in order to save more and work less as “downshifting” (168). Bill Powers and Collin Beavan provide two more examples. After living in Bolivia, Powers decided to live in a 12x12 home without electricity. He found that life without the background interference of useless electronics allowed him to cultivate his “inner acre,” the internal space of meaning and self-actualization neglected by affluenza. In his book and documentary of the same name, No Impact Man, Beavan and his family attempted to eliminate their ecological footprint by living without electricity, public transportation, and non-local food for one year in New York City. Though perhaps daunting models for most of us, the authors argue that people like Dominguez, Robin, Powers, and Beavan serve as positive examples of how to overcome affluenza. 

As the reference to Alcoholics Anonymous contained in its title suggests, chapter 19 offers some suggestions for how people who want to recover from affluenza can find community and support. The authors mention two kinds of study or reading groups as examples.

The first, run by Cecile Andrews after her reading of Duane Elgin’s 1981 book Voluntary Simplicity, encourages the development of small-scale, local organizations dedicated to helping its members reduce consumption and find non-materialistic forms of personal fulfillment. The second example is the Northwest Earth Institute (NWEI) in Portland, Oregon, which was started in 1993 by Dick Roy, a former corporate lawyer, and his wife Jeanne. Over the years, the NWEI has offered seminars and workshops about environmentally-sustainable living in a variety of settings, from churches to the offices of major corporations like Nike and Hewlett-Packard. The authors note that the increase of information on the internet and the development of social networks like Facebook and Meetup have made it easier than ever before to find like-minded individuals looking for support in their fight against affluenza (174).

The chapter closes by interviewing Duane Elgin himself, who urges cautious optimism about the growth of the voluntary simplicity movement since the publication of his book. More and more people, he argues, are coming together to confront the dangers of affluenza, something that has become imperative in light of pending environmental and climatological change. 

Chapter 20 discusses a simple remedy that, the authors claim, confers a number of physical and psychological benefits upon its practitioners: fresh air. For example, the authors cite a study that correlates faster recovery rates for hospital patients who have a view of trees outside their rooms as opposed to those who have a brick wall. A similar study of prison inmates found that visits to health care facilities were reduced by 25% if cells looked out onto farmland. Spending time in nature has been associated with improved personal relationships, breaking addictions, and an overall sense of greater well-being.    

The authors deplore the alienation from the outdoors that they see as characteristic of our work-obsessed, technology-driven lives. This separation from nature can even manifest itself as the phenomenon that educator David Sorbel calls “ecophobia”—a fear of nature (182). The authors report anecdotes from other teachers who claim that children presently receive less and less unstructured exposure to nature, with the result that they fear plants and think that insects run on batteries.

In order to overcome our cultural estrangement from the natural world, the authors recommend a few simple steps, such as committing to protecting the environment, encouraging children to play outside, taking regular walks, starting a garden, and buying nature-friendly organic products (179). These are easy, daily practices that can help to both heal the environment from the ravages of affluenza, and provide us with some of the much-needed advantages of connection with the great outdoors.