Affluenza causes many imbalances in our society. For example, there are more cars than registered drivers (33), “more people [file] for bankruptcy than [graduate] from college” (20), and the average adult spends “seven times as much time shopping than playing with their kids” (41). Over two million Americans are homeless every year, yet nine million have second homes: this is more than just a distribution problem (79). Americans feel like they have to have the best new things and we spend eighty percent more—a fifteen billion dollar difference—on stuff than on higher education (13). We buy so much stuff, that we have no place to put it all: the United States storage industry has “expanded fortyfold since the 1960s,” making it larger than our music industry (32). We are a society that demands instant gratification, partially because our banks encourage credit usage with a “buy now, pay…whenever!” ethic that has caused national “credit card indebtedness [to triple] in the 1990s” (19). In the year 2000, the authors explain, the average American household had over seven and one-half thousand dollars in credit card debt (19). Dishwashers, dryers, central heating, air conditioning, color and cable television, microwaves, VCRs, CD players, cellphones, and fax machines…all of these things used to be “novelties that not everyone could afford” (28). Now, because Americans demand simplicity and immediacy, very few of us do not own all of these things. The authors quote columnist Ellen Goodman: “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car you are still paying for in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car, and house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it” (34).
Scientists claim that, “since 1950, we Americans have used up more resources than everyone who ever lived on earth before then” (4). We use and discard so much and at such a rate that if everyone in the world were consumers like the United States, we would need more planets to reduce pollution and restock products (4). Statisticians have calculated that in one year, Americans will use one-hundred and fifty-five billions gallons of gasoline and we will spend sixty billion dollars to ensure that supply. We will be taxed two-hundred billion dollars “for road construction and maintenance, snow plowing, subsidizing parking, and public health” (89). Every American spends over thirty-five hours a year in traffic, and this traffic causes one-fourth of the United States’ greenhouse gases and degrades air quality enough to “inhibit sleep and contribute to radical increases in asthma, emphysema, heart disease, and bronchial infections” (34, 89). Every year, we create seven billion pounds of unrecyclable material from automobile manufacturing alone (90). There are forty thousand fatal car crashes per year and six thousand pedestrian deaths per year. If these number are added together each year, it will total more than the recorded deaths in all of America’s war history (85). But these statistics only cover automobiles—just one of the many major Affluenza-encouraging businesses. The following section is a parody:
“Though flora and fauna are dwindling, the spectrum of goods available to consumers is wider than at any time in planetary history, and that’s something we can all be happy about…Any complex system, whether we are talking about the Amazon rain forest or the Mall of America, needs a rich array of species and products if it is to survive. That is why, in light of the crumbling global ecosystem, it is increasingly vital that we [diversify] the global marketplace by buying the widest range of consumer products possible” (90).
The authors include this in their argument because they believe it to be disturbingly accurate.
Not only does Affluenza affect us as a society, but it is detrimental to emotional health as well. “Futurists were predicting that by the end of the twentieth century, we’d have more leisure time than we’d know what to do with,” but instead, our generation is working more jobs and longer hours than any other generation preceding it (40, 42). “Our consumption has doubled and…working hours have risen. More than half of all Americans get too little sleep,” says sociologist Juliet Schor (43). “The longer hours we work, the more stressful our home lives become; and the greater the tensions at home, the more we try to escape into work” (48). Patients of Dr. Richard Swanson suffering from “acute stress” showed “physical symptoms: headaches, lower back pain, hyperacidity, palpitations in the heart, unexplained aches and pains… [and] emotional problems: depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, yelling at your boss or at your colleagues or at your kids” (38). “There were all kinds of behavioral symptoms,” he says of his stressed patients, “like driving too fast, or drinking too much, or screaming too much, or being abusive. They didn’t have any space in their lives, they didn’t have any reserves…there’s an addictive quality to consumerism” (38). Since 1945, the rate of clinical depression has multiplied by ten, possibly because people feel that their lives are empty and meaningless (72). “Americans,” says economist Wilhelm Ropke, “[lose] sight of everything that goes to make up human happiness apart from money income and its transformation into goods” (74). People who “keep up with the Joneses” lack “the genuine and essentially non-material conditions of simple human happiness” (74). Americans try to fill the emptiness with more money and more stuff. The authors quote Matthew 16:26: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” and explain that humans have “a purpose in life” that is essentially “to serve God by caring for God’s creations and our fellow human beings. Happy is the man or woman whose work and life energies serve those ends, who finds a ‘calling’ or ‘right livelihood’ that allows his or her talents to serve the common good” (70).
“The first TV cartoon shows were created explicitly to sell sugared cereals,” the authors point out, and today, “the average twelve year old spends forty-eight hours a week exposed to commercial messages,” but they only spend one and one-half hours in “significant conversation with [their] parents” (52-53). Marketing consultants have found that “anti-social behavior in pursuit of a product…, portraying parents as fools…who aren’t smart enough to realize their children’s need for the product…, and softening the parental vetoes” are all good tools for selling more of their products. Whether we think so or not, commercial advertising has a great effect on the younger generation: in the 1980s, obesity rates in children doubled. Crime also increased as a result of commercialism; children from poor homes feel that they need the newest stuff on the market to feel and look important. Because they are from low income families, some resort to criminal activities to get what they want (82). America has “ten times the rate” of citizens in prison than “most industrial countries”: California alone has more prisoners than France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Singapore, and Holland combined (82). Affluency has been proven detrimental to any society. Business management professor David Kopter shares that his career “was focused on training business executives to create the equivalent of our high consumption economy in countries throughout the world,” and wanted to bring “every country into the consumer society” by “[reshaping] values of children from the very beginning to convince them that progress is defined by what they consume” (83). Again, Affluenza is affecting the younger generation by convincing them that consumerism is normal and good in society. David Kopter soon realized that he was causing “more harm than good” and that “peoples’ lives were actually worse off” (83). He saw “the environment trashed” and “the breakdown of cultures and the social fabric” (83).
Affluenza, the authors believe, is a horrible disease that will cause more damage the longer we leave it untreated. It degrades America’s lifestyle by convincing us that we have to buy to keep up, and it affects emotional health because of the high stress levels induced from the level of work and debt we carry. It affects the environment through pollution, and—worst of all—it affects our younger generation by beginning at an early age to instill in their minds that this disgusting lifestyle is actually healthy.
Works Cited
De Graaf, John, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor. Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. San
Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002. Print.
Song: I Never Told You What I Do For A Living by My Chemical Romance
Quote: "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Suess
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