How Sex, Politics, Money and Religion are Killing Planet Earth

Thursday, May 5, 2011

The American Consumer Culture vs. the Economics of Real Happiness

I love the way the trees move in wind,
not straining against the force,
but bending back in ecstasy to accept the warm embrace.
Wind in the leaves tickles the branches and they sparkle,
flashing the light of joy.

I want to be a tree,
stretching my limbs to let you run through me
until the light from your breath
shines out from every pore.

I walk through unexplored woodlands and happen across a tiny hummingbird sitting on a thimble-sized nest containing two jellybean eggs. My heart races with excitement, and I feel blessed to stumble upon such a miracle. I kiss my baby’s neck in the space between the ear and shoulder. He smells faintly of breast milk and caramel and his giggling laughter, unencumbered by any restraint, fills me completely.

Imagine the happiest moments of your life - the birth of a child, a camping trip, childhood memories of days outside climbing trees and playing stickball with the neighborhood gang. Chances are your happy memories are devoid of details such as what you were wearing or the latest gadget you might have been sporting. Joy is not contained in your first iPhone or pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes. Family, community and connectedness are universal hallmarks of human joy.

My treasure chest of joy includes a collection of quirky things my kids said when they were little that made me laugh so hard I cried, countless days spent at the beach or walking in the wilderness, a rained-out camping trip and days and evenings spent with friends and family.

No consumer good can make us happy. The momentary high we get from the initial purchase soon wears off and may even make us more miserable when we realize the promised boost of social status is not as much a reality as the increased balance on the credit card.

From the day a child is born into Western civilization, he/she is bombarded with the consumer culture. The television tells us that in order to be successful and to fit in, we have to look a certain way, dress a certain way and accessorize ourselves with the latest technology. Children and teenagers, desperately seeking connection and identity are particularly vulnerable to this aggressive marketing. By the time adulthood is reached, the subliminal brainwashing that insists our success, popularity and happiness is connected to consumer products is so engrained that few question the ulterior motives behind the smokescreen.

Sucked into the cleverly-crafted marketing, consumerism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The teenagers who manage to acquire the right accoutrements are universally admired by the rest and thereby do achieve popularity and social success. But this success is simulated and is not based on one’s true identity but on an artificial veneer. The possessor of the purchased persona does not feel secure in their success, but even more vulnerable, knowing that the purchased identity is nothing but a house of cards that will collapse into the empty heap upon the merest inspection.

While American purchasing power has increased threefold since the end of World War II, largely due to the reduced costs of manufacturing achieved by the exploitation of cheap labor markets abroad, The National Opinion Research Center, an organization that has been conducting polling over the same time period, has found that American happiness has not increased at all. Having more stuff has not made us happier.

Consumerism would be merely a sad testament to the shallowness of Western culture if it weren’t so utterly destructive. The rise of the consumer culture since the end of World War II parallels a widening gap between rich and poor, the loss of almost all U.S. manufacturing jobs to cheaper overseas markets, an explosion of solid wastes, rampant global resource depletion and the global toxification of land, air and water. Our stuff is killing us and killing the planet too. As the globalized marketplace expands to fuel its sociopathic need for exponential growth, the Western consumerist culture spreads its disease across the globe to unwitting populations who, once truly happy, now seek to emulate the cleverly-marketed promise of happiness by stuff.

How do you measure happiness? Once the basic needs of food, shelter and clean air and water are met, a person’s happiness rests almost entirely on the quality of interpersonal relationships, enjoyable work and leisure time. None of these things can be purchased from a store.

On the other hand, money is required to purchase stuff. While food, water and shelter were once readily obtainable from the natural world, consumer goods have always needed an infusion of cold hard cash. To acquire the things marketing tells us we crave, we must go to work. In today’s uncertain job market, Americans are spending more and more time at work. Productivity is way up, but salaries are not. The entire work week is sacrificed on the altar of employment with the weekend serving for some, if not all, as a kind of consolation prize.

In another year or two, the latest flat screen TV will be usurped by a newer, slicker model. The new car smell will have worn off. The battery in the iPod will have worn out. And, all the latest fashions hanging in the closet will be so last week. All the stuff will make its way to a landfill somewhere eventually, and all those hours spent working to get all that stuff could have been spent doing something meaningful that really would have made us happy. But we continue to persist in the insanity, selling our lives to others in order to fill our living spaces with meaningless crap, all the while wondering why we are so damn miserable.

Hug your spouse and kids. Smell their skin. Take a walk. Plant some food. Read a good book. Spend some quality time with a non-human friend. Then cut up the credit cards and be happy.

Recommended Sites
http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/
http://www.youtube.com/storyofstuffproject
http://www.storyofstuff.com/








5 comments:

  1. I've tried to hold back, killing Mother, since I am your biggest fan but don't want to seem too cult-ish, or anything, but I can't hold back any longer.

    Who wrote this?

    love the way the trees move in wind,
    not straining against the force,
    but bending back in ecstasy to accept the warm embrace.
    Wind in the leaves tickles the branches and they sparkle,
    flashing the light of joy.

    I want to be a tree,
    stretching my limbs to let you run through me
    until the light from your breath
    shines out from every pore.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh wait...that wasn't supposed to be published right now. Darn keyboard.

    I wanted to express my heartfelt feelings for this poem. I love poetry, but I don't love ALL (by any stretch of the imagination) poetry. But this captures the wind, the breath, the shining light, the embrace of it all. Wind in the leaves really does make leaves sparkle. They really do flash the light of joy. Oh my God, I love this poem.

    I held a hummingbird in my hand once. The tiny feathers, oh my God I held it as sacred. It had knocked itself out on a garage window. I held it and it finally flew away.

    I've never actually seen a nest though.

    I've noticed,lately, how television seems to be living up to its original intent as a sales tool. The FCC used to live up to its duties, but no more. I used to work in television and there used to be some rules. Not any more, though. For every 6 minutes of programming, there are 5 minutes of commercials. Over and over and over and over again. Audio levels? Forget about it.

    All regulation is out the window, don't kid yourselves. I used to get my butt chewed out for every little infraction. That's not the case anymore, I'm sure.

    Remember, after 911 how Bush instructed us to just go shopping? Keep shopping. Don't get me even started on our current president.

    I'm trying, Mother, to be happy---find happiness---and I do. But alongside that is a great deal of unhappiness and cynicism.

    I'm working on eating that fruit from the Tree of Life. I am.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tsisageya, I am glad you liked the notes on trees and wind. I am not much of a poet, but those few lines came to me as I watched the new green leaves on the trees outside my back door. The trees really seemed joyful to have the wind caressing them on a warm, sunny day. I almost envied their interplay.

    Anyway, I love having you as a fan. We are all just sampling bitterness and joy from the Tree of Life, trying to make the latter outweigh the former. Your enthusiasm makes me feel good, and for that I am thankful.

    ReplyDelete
  4. you do write beautiful poetry. :)

    I hate TV and commercialization so much. I see that everyone has their stuff, their newest toy or electronic gadget and are following fashion slavishly for no good purpose. I had to recently get new eyeglasses and I noticed that the shape of the frames are changing to an older style once again. Guess everyone now has rectangular glasses and now they need to buy the newest shape in order to stay in fashion. I notice we are asked to buy the same product, just only slightly different (new and improved), over and over again and golly gee, there are people who do it without thinking anything about it. I love the stuff video.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Lib, I do have a (very) few consumer toys that I am fond of, my iPod in particular, although I don't rush out and buy the latest one every time a new version comes out, much to Apple's dismay. Remember when Sony came out with the walkman? I was a teenager then and loved the sound of music banging around in my head, a sensation I have yet to outgrow. At least with the iPod I don't have to carry around a backpack full of cassette tapes anymore. Hopefully, that is saving the landfills a bit of junk on my behalf. The rest of it I can leave alone. My favorite clothes are years old and were never very fashionable anyway:)

    ReplyDelete