post-consumer dreams
please don’t get me wrong: i feel for the people who have lost their homes and jobs. except for those on top who caused the problem in the first place – i don’t feel bad that they’re out of a job.
i am not a nihilist. or an anarchist. or a communist. or a defeatist. but i agree with the assessment and sentiment that this economic downturn might be just what the doctor ordered to change the negative consumer behavior patterns in this country. like other addictions, sometimes you need to hit rock bottom and be forced to sweat it out with some DTs to get it out of your system. a fast. a cleanse. an intervention. a forced change.
oh, suddenly you can’t buy your kids a bunch of crap for christmas? i’m sorry, i don’t really feel too bad. if you’re having trouble paying the bills and eating, yes, i have sympathy. but that you didn’t get the huge flat screen TV you wanted isn’t keeping me awake at night.
the american economy has been riding on a wave of bubbles: the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, natural resource bubbles, financial market bubbles….and now they’ve all burst.
some people have some terrific big ideas about what needs to happen, and much of them revolve around recognizing limits: natural and economic. take this interesting analogy:
The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth, the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state – a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of better stuff (or at least different stuff). The remaining natural world is no longer able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy – much less a growing one. Economists have focused too much on the economy’s circulatory system and have neglected to study its digestive tract. Throughput growth means pushing more of the same food through an ever larger digestive tract; development means eating better food and digesting it more thoroughly. Clearly the economy must conform to the rules of a steady state – seek qualitative development, but stop aggregate quantitative growth.
for example:
Ninety-nine percent of the things we buy end up in the landfill within six months of their purchase. — alternet
does that sound healthy? it seems a holistic diet is good for the economy as well as the body, and all the processed junk needs to go. are we post-consumerist yet?
(please watch The Story of Stuff if you haven’t already.)
related: recycling used to be a lucrative biz, now no one wants your trash
Filed in culture and random linkage, environment, politics and news | Tagged with economics | Comments (5)5 Responses to “post-consumer dreams”
Leave a Reply
“oh, suddenly you can’t buy your kids a bunch of crap for christmas? i’m sorry, i don’t really feel too bad. if you’re having trouble paying the bills and eating, yes, i have sympathy. but that you didn’t get the huge flat screen TV you wanted isn’t keeping me awake at night.”
I think until you have kids that you can’t get things for for Christmas AND struggle on a monthly basis to keep them warm, fed, healthy, clean, clothed and housed you would feel differently. I read your posts all the time about all the shit you do and all the “phat” clothes, parties, fashion shows, concerts, bar hopping, eating out…..kinda easy to pass judgement from waaaaay up there on your pedestal isn’t it? Is this harshness steming from your past when your parents COULDN’T give you all the things you wanted or have you supressed that?? Do you remember all the years you woke up on Christmas morning and didn’t have shit under the tree because I know for FACT you had MANY of those years. Remember how that made you feel? Do you think that had anything to do with the type of person you are now? Does it make you a better person to not have a “bunch of crap”? I’m not here to air your dirty laundry, Amy, but this HOLIER-THAN-THOU attitude is getting to be a bit much for those of us who know your past. You take every holiday as an opportunity to be angry and say something negative….WHY?
Different things have different value to different people. I know I wouldn’t look twice at half of the clothes you have in your closet, but you’d saw you’re arm off for some of the beautiful “rags” you wear in your little fashion shows. But that is ok because it makes YOU happy? I want to buy my kids “crap” that will make them happy and somehow that isn’t ok? This all seems very self serving.
I call bullshit on the quote from alternet. There is simply no way that 99% of things I buy are trashed and in a landfill within 6 months. I doubt it is even 25%. But even that is way too high. This is why I try to buy quality not quantity. Good things last, crap breaks and has to be replaced and costs more in the long run.
As for getting my kids too much stuff they don’t need, yeah, I’m probably guilty of it. Nowhere near so much this year but they already have enough toys to last a lifetime. Will this stop me from getting the more things as they grow up? Nope, not in the least.
But what we do try to do is pass our toys down. There are always other families with younger kids that love getting new things to play with. And good toys last much, much longer than 6 months.
well kenda, this isn’t exactly how i want to spend my christmas eve, but i appreciate and understand your comments and so i’ll respond to them.
i actually had a very long conversation with a friend just last night about this very topic – about how growing up poor has affected how we feel about certain things, like christmas and shopping, and it was really interesting because while some poor kids grow up wanting everything and when they come into money of their own, they go a bit crazy buying THINGS, we have both grown up to actually try to avoid having too much stuff, or buying things we don’t need, and are very spendthrift.
and for the record, i don’t remember EVER having a christmas without gifts, and i think my mother would be pissed that anyone would ever say that. they might not have been the most expensive super awesome gifts, but we had gifts. and if i had children, yes, i would take great care to make sure they had gifts too, but i would do like i do now whenever i buy anything: find handmade ones, homemade ones, gifts with meaning. i take great care and consideration when i do buy something to ensure that it is either made by someone local or that it’s something i will use a thousand times, not just something i’ll use once or twice and then throw away, and i would use the same when buying gifts for children. i know, i know, you say “well you don’t have a 4 year old screaming for XYZ toy”. children are teachable. they’ll learn. in fact, it’s part of being a parent to teach them.
i think yes, part of the reason i’m very anti-consumerist is that i didn’t have a lot of things growing up. and so i learned to grow up without them, and my parents did a pretty good job of teaching us the difference between WANT and NEED. and so when i hear about people racking up huge amounts of debt in order to have THINGS, i do get a bit judgmental. i’m sorry it hit a nerve with you. YOU CAN CELEBRATE THE HOLIDAY HOWEVER YOU FEEL LIKE IT. I DON’T CARE. don’t rag on me for not wanting to celebrate it.
and while i do have an interesting wardrobe etc., i WORK for most of them, i don’t buy them. i get the clothes in exchange for a service. if you think it’s easy to do a 9 hour photo shoot, or spend 6 hours getting ready for a fashion show and then getting on a stage 30 seconds, think again. i couldn’t even count how many work-hours i’ve put in in exchange for my clothes. a lot more hours than the clothes are worth, i can tell you that. AND the same with the parties. we THROW the parties. we work our asses off to throw the parties. i’m talking 24 hour days + manual labor for some of these events. in my community it’s called PARTICIPATION.
so while i understand you might think i have a “holier-than-thou” attitude, i’m not just talking out my ass as you suggest, and i don’t think you know me as well as you think you do. ask my mom – i’ve asked her for years to stop sending me gifts, and i don’t buy gifts for holidays (except sometimes birthdays). jay and i don’t exchange gifts for christmas, and i don’t expect to give or receive a single thing this year. and i’m fine with that.
i spend a great deal of my time and energy making sure that things i purchase and are from a place i support and are sustainable. i believe it would make the world a better place if people stopped buying so much shit. i’m sorry if that offends you.
yeah erik, i don’t know where the alternet quote came from.
hey! i’m not a journalist.
and i take back the sentences “oh, suddenly you can’t buy your kids a bunch of crap for christmas? i’m sorry, i don’t really feel too bad.” that pushed kenda’s buttons. i do feel bad when little kids suffer because of things like this. i meant for the emphasis there to be on CRAP – plastic toys that just get thrown to the side – not that i don’t think little kids deserve presents on christmas. they do. good ones.
a couple more points on this, because i think it’s very easy to be miscontrued on a topic like this.
i am not “angry” about christmas, but i am CRITICAL. as i am about everything. i see our culture sliding in a direction i can’t stand, and i see the greed and entitlement bleeding over into everything, including sacred holidays. i know this doesn’t mean EVERYONE, but it’s a lot of people, and that DOES make me angry that America has basically sold our culture for the sake of things, from outsourcing our jobs to china to sending our men off to war so we can each have our own car and drive everywhere we go (“freedom”). that does make me angry, yes it does.
i know what i write here can seem harsh sometimes, i think it’s also hard when people are only reading me online and don’t know me in person. i am extremely compassionate about the choices people have to make, but i also think people could be making more conscious choices, and if we don’t start taking a harder line on some of these things, our world is going to hell fast. i honestly i believe every word i say and i try to live by it – walk the walk, not just talk the talk. and it’s not like i don’t struggle with these things too. i do. very much.