Psychologists might assume that one measure of good mental health would be happiness. The dictionary has many definitions of happiness, including that it is “characterized by a spontaneous or obsessive inclination to use something.” To be accurate, today that definition would have to be modified to read “an obsessive inclination to “buy” something. Our obsession with consuming has evolved into a disease and it’s literally killing us.
Have you noticed that often when there is a media “expose`” on some aspect of self-destructive human behavior, the newspaper or magazine series or the TV or film documentary often ends on a positive note as if now that we know what’s happening we will stop our denial and do something about it. Anyone paying attention and or tracking the aftermath of these revelations soon finds out that most of us tend to go back to sleep as if the whole episode were as significant as a dog barking and interrupting our nightmare. And make no mistake my friends we are living a nightmare and most of our energy is spent pretending that we did not hear the dog barking. We want to be left alone to indulge our escapist snoozing.
For the so-called “positive thinkers” the perennial optimists who assure the rest of us that humanity is turning the corner and heading away from that nightmare neighborhood, the dark threatening streets where unimaginable horrors are lurking, we can only say, who are you kidding?
That dark neighborhood, the global village itself, was created by those self-destructive habits that are “dis-eases” many of us cherish and are not about to “cure” and which have reached pandemic proportions, like “affluenza.” All of our behaviors, which we know deep down are bad for us, were created for the express purpose of enabling our denial of reality. Most of us can’t find the courage or take the risk of waking up because we imagine we will find a chaos very much like the nightmare we have chosen to create. The paradox for those who awaken from the common delusional slumber is that they find not chaos but paradise. If this all seems a bit crazy, we are beginning to see the light, but the end of the tunnel is still far in the distance for most of us.
For the doubting Thomas, the deluded person who clings to the identity of “the creature that reasons,” we offer the following example. The year is 1997 and Scott Simon of National Public Radio is hosting a documentary listed in the TV guide with the title “Affluenza: Western consumerism and materialism.” Simon ends the one-hour documentary with the aforementioned “positive note.” “Affluenza tells us that although no vaccine exists, the cure for this plague has already begun as a gentle evolution of people questioning the commercialization of the good life.” Here we are, it’s 2013 and we are still questioning the “commercialization of the good life.” The gentle questioning in 1997 was wishful thinking as we shall see and the plague of affluenza has gotten worse in the last 16 years with no end in sight.
The whole phenomenon of affluenza has spawned many aphorisms and interesting definitions. Affluenza has been defined as “an unhappy condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” Another apt phrase used by Simon to introduce the documentary was “never has so much meant so little to so many.” The good life has become the “goods” life. Let’s look at the specifics of how affluenza was expressed in the past and is being expressed today to make our case that it is only getting worse.
From the 1997 television documentary we learned that the acquisitive Americans had over time increased the average size of their homes in which they could store more stuff.
American House Size in Square Feet
1950 – 1100 sf
1970 – 1400 sf
1990 – 2000 sf
2011 – 2480 sf
“In a study published last year [2012] titled “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,” researchers at U.C.L.A. observed 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and found that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent dealing with their belongings. Seventy-five percent of the families involved in the study couldn’t park their cars in their garages because they were too jammed with things.”
Affluenza appears to be getting worse over time. “The millennials have developed a reputation for a certain materialism. In a Pew Research Center survey in which different generations were asked what made them unique, baby boomers responded with qualities like ‘work ethic;’ millennials offered ‘clothes.’”
What is the relationship between our materialism and happiness? There must be some benefit to the pursuit of more and more. “In a recent study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen linked consumption with aberrant antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen found that ‘Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.’ Though American consumer activity has increased substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have flat-lined.”
Not only do our addictions make happiness illusive, they drive us more deeply into the realms of mental illness, which if you haven’t noticed, is increasing. Addiction in America is now systemic, built into our worldview, our identities and finally expressing in our tortured behaviors. Let’s now turn to a personal example which always makes a thesis more vivid.
“Writing about her own substance abuse, [Dominica] Ruta shows that the true horror of drug dependency is the loss of self that accompanies it. In addition, she demonstrates that overcoming addiction necessarily includes the full acceptance of one’s past and present selves. She implies that the inability to take action and risk failure is also at the root of much psychological torment: ‘Every single decision I made, whether it was what to eat or where to go, felt not only wrong but catastrophic, a turning point that would lead to a path of imminent destruction.’”
American greed impacts our friends around the world and may strain those friendships. “The bad news extends all the way to the global level. Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population [1997] but use nearly a third of the planet’s resources. Since 1950, we’re told, Americans have used up more of the Earth’s riches than did everyone who ever lived before that.”
Why haven’t we gotten control of our senseless spending habits? First, there is always the possibility that despite our best intentions we are not capable of change. Maybe our conditioning to express the false-self security center which flows from our anxiety around survival issues is too strong. Perhaps accumulating stuff, no matter how illogical, is the only way we feel safe.
Secondly, we may be overwhelmed by the physiological results of our habits “Our ingrained habits change us. Neurons that fire together, wire together, neuroscientists like to say, reflecting the increasing evidence that experiences leave imprints on our neural pathways, a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Any habit molds the very structure of your brain in ways that strengthen your proclivity for that habit.” This brings to mind the scary image of mindless zombies shuffling through the shopping mall, programmed to live the same shopping trip over and over like a “Groundhog Day” nightmare.
Thirdly, we have the issue of humanity’s general lack of awareness. Being as unconscious as we are we might be unable to find the courage to face the reality of fundamental change. We choose to remain mesmerized by all of our stuff and the process of acquiring it because it keeps us distracted from our existential suffering and the world we see collapsing around us.
There are, however, those of us who have found a way to move toward a less “fevered” consumerism and actually like it. Graham Hill finally realized that, “The many things I consumed ended up consuming me. I have come a long way from the life I had in the late 90’s, when, flush with cash from an Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff—electronics and cars and appliances and gadgets. [Now] I live in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall.”
We have patiently waited for the good news in this mostly dark essay. The principles inherent in the Simple Reality worldview transcend all excuses and offer humanity a fourth choice, a proven cure for affluenza. Courage and discipline are called for but maybe it would be worth it. As Graham Hill says about simplifying his life and downsizing, “My space is small. My life is big.”
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
