nothing: it’s what you’ve been looking for
i just ran across this again:
Af-flu-en-za n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth.
http://affluenza.org/
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/ – (have you seen this PBS special? i haven’t. i want to.)
the happiest people i know think the american dream – as generally defined; i know we all have our own idea – is bullshit and wrote it off as a “life goal” years ago. the unhappiest people i know are still looking for that white picket fence.
i particularly like definition #3. i was watching some interview – part of the movie “The Party’s Over”, which was really pretty good if you haven’t seen it – i think it was Billy Baldwin in the interivew, or maybe it was Eddie Vedder. .. anyway, Philip Seymour Hoffman asks him what he thinks is wrong with America in 10 words or less or something like that, and the answer was: “Americans have been fooled by prosperity”. or maybe he said “blinded by”. but the point was, Americans have been educated to associate prosperity with goodness, with truth. and, told that the pursuit of prosperity is a noble one, worth investing your life into and worth risking and taking lives over. to the point that we dont’ know when to stop, when to draw lines. to me, outsourcing jobs to asia in the name of cheaper disposable consumer goods has crossed a line. to others, it’s a global market strategy that will allow affordable goods to reach everyone in the world.
religious traditions teach quite explicitly that good people will obtain wealth, and the reason that the poor remain poor are because they are sinners and they don’t work hard enough. so America must be doing good, right, because we’re the richest and we work hard?
“addiction” is a strong word, but ask someone to stop buying things they don’t need some time, and see how hard it is for them to stop. (that someone may be you.)
i’m rambling.
anyway – affluenza. don’t catch it. live simply so that others may simply live and all that.
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By my reading, most of the major religions have some version of the aphorism “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Evangelists of many stripes have had to work hard for untold centuries to explain that away. Not that I’m going to bat for Christianity, for instance, but I think the modern American fundamentalist idea that the faithful will be rewarded with SUVs and homes in gated communities is a pretty blatant distortion of the teachings of their messiah.
Seems to be most popular among preachers who drive BMWs.
i didn’t mean to say that religions value wealth, but that many insinuate that being poor is one’s own fault. not unlike certain governmental parties who do not feel that social services are their responsibility. it’s not so much that “rich people are good” but that “poor people are bad”. of course, that’s a huge generalization but it’s something that i believe persists in our culture.