We simply buy too much stuff. I have more t-shirts in my closet than I could wear in several lifetimes. Yet someone always wants to give me another one. I have an iPhone, but the newest upgrade looks almost irresistible. In fact, so does the MacBook Air. Shoes, cars, cameras, and clothes almost never wear out before we replace them. We are painfully addicted to buying new stuff. And with each new purchase we consume more non-renewable resources, pollute the planet, and create lots of garbage.
How did this all get started?
Orion magazine’s excellent article by Jeffrey Kaplan, titled, “The Gospel of Consumption,” sheds some essential light on the problem’s history. In the late 1920s, after the war, America had excess manufacturing capacity. So we began to invent needs rather than fulfill them. Kaplan writes:
“In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that ‘the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year’ and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, ‘It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.’
“Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods — the big stuff such as cars and appliances — was thirty-two times higher. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.”
“President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices…a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”
We know our unsustainable rate of consumption impoverishes the planet; it also does the same to our souls. All the “stuff” we lust after does not tend to make us happier.
“We have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.”
Kaplan reminds us that time is also a non-renewable resource. Perhaps, by conserving time, we’d have time enough to realize what makes us truly happy.
To read the full story in Orion magazine, click here.