by John De Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H. Naylor, David Horsey (Illustrator), Scott Simon

My wife and I live in a house that’s 891 square feet on one and a half stories in the third oldest neighbourhood in the city.  Not much to look at, it has raised numerous families over the decades.  When Wendy and I moved in three years ago, the house was largely empty.  The basement had a couple of boxes and my desk in a corner.  We just didn’t have that much stuff to store.  Now five years later, our basement is full of stuff that we don’t even use but somehow need to collect.  Jackets, toys, coffee tables that neither one of us like.  Let’s not forget about the wooden eagle and ram made by a chainsaw (and people say art is dying on the prairies).  Sadly, we have what most Americans have and it is being called "Affluenza."  It is an all-consuming epidemic and is the topic of a book by the same name

Here is what the authors are saying we are stricken with.

America's 102 million households--the author's among them--currently contain and consume more stuff than all other households throughout history, put together. Behind closed doors, we churn through manufactured goods and piped-in entertainment as if life were a stuff-eating contest. Despite tangible indications of indigestion, we keep consuming, partly because we're convinced it's normal. Writes columnist Ellen Goodman, "Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothe, car, and the house you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it."

 

Erich Fromm reminds us about the potential risk of settling for normal: "That millions share the same forms of mental pathology does not make those people sane." An Jim Hightower defines the "status quo" as "this mess we're in." As compared to what a sane society would be--grounded in natural rhythms, social cooperation, and trust--the Dream we are dreaming is so abnormal that is keeps behavioural anthropologists working overtime, trying to figure out what we think we are doing.

What we are doing is expanding our lifestyles at an amazing rate and it is reflected in our living conditions.  Apparently my basement isn’t the only one that filled up.

Take houses for example. The average size of a new home is now more than double what it was in the 1950s, while families are smaller. LaNita Wacker, who owns Dream House Reality in Seattle, has been selling homes for more than a quarter century. She takes us on a drive through the neighbourhoods near her office to explain what’s happened.

She shows us houses built during every decade since World War II and describes how they've gotten bigger and bigger. Right after World War II, Wacker points out, 750 square feet was the norm (in Levittown, for example). "Then in the '50s," she says, "they added 200 square feet, so 950 was the norm." By the 60s, 1,100 square feet was typical, and by the '70s, 1350. Now it's 2,300.

 

LaNita Wacker started selling homes in 1972, "right about the time we moved from a single bath to the demand for a double bath." Two-car garages came in then too, and by the late '80s many homes were being built with three-car garages. That's 600-900 square feet of garage space alone, "as much square footage as an entire family used in the early '50s." Wacker says. "It would house an entire family. But we have acquired a lot of stuff to store."

 

To drive the point home, Wacker takes us by a huge home with a four-car garage. Expensive cars and a boat are parked outside. The owner comes out wondering why LaNita is so interested in his place. "I own Dream House Realty," she says "And yours is a dream house." "It was built to the specifications of charming wife," the man replies with a laugh. "So why four garages?" asks LaNita. "It's probably because of storage," the man replies, explaining that the garages are filled with family possessions. "You never have enough storage so you can never have enough garages," he adds cheerfully. LaNita asks if he has children. "They're gone now," he replies. "It's just me and the wife."

 

The four-car garage is an exception, no doubt. But everyone expects larger homes now." A master bedroom in the 1950s would be about 130 square feet." explains Wacker, "Now, in even moderately priced homes, you're talking about maybe 300 square feet devoted to the master bedroom."

In recent years more than ever, homes have become a symbol of conspicuous consumption, as beneficiaries of the recent stock market boom and unparalleled economic expansion have begun, in many communities, to buy real estate, bulldoze existing (and perfectly functional) homes and replace them with the mega-houses of 10,000 square feet and more. "Starter castles," some have named them. Others call them "Monster Homes."

 

On America's Streets of Dreams, the competition is fierce. McMansions... Double McMansions... Deluxe McMansions... Deluxe McMansion with Cheese... Full Garage Deal... each one a little bigger and glitzier, popping up like mushrooms in a frenzy of home wars. In places like the spectacular mountain towns of the West, many such megahomes are actually second homes, mere vacation destinations for the newly rich.

A quick drive around developing neighbourhoods around any city will show the same thing.  Massive homes dominated by garages the size of my house (without a front porch or any common area).  We aren’t just building homes anymore, we are building warehouses to store our stuff with a little space to live in.

It isn’t just the possessions that change how we live, it is the debt that comes along with it.  North American’s are not living within their means and too many of us are carrying too much debt.  The reason we are in debt is for the most part, our lifestyle is beyond our take home pay because our society is dictating how we should be living.

"TV shows a very inflated standard of living relative to what the true standard of living of the American public is. People on television tend to be upper middle class or rich, and people who watch a lot of TV have highly inflated views of what the average American has. For example, people who are heavy TV watchers, vastly exaggerate the number of Americans with swimming pools, tennis courts, maids, and planes, and their own expectations of what they should have also becomes inflated, so they tend to spend more and save less."

 

Schor says as the gap between rich and poor grew during the 1980s, people with relatively high incomes began to feel deprived in comparison to those who were suddenly making even more. "They started to feel 'poor on $100,000 a year' as the well known phrase puts it, because they were comparing themselves to the Donald Trumps and the other newly wealthy." It happened all the way down the income line, Schor says. "Everyone felt worse compared to the role models, those at the top." Polls now show that Americans believe they need $75,000 (for a family of four) just to lead a "minimum" middle class life.

We live in an age where comparison living is much more possible.  The Internet, 200 satellite television stations, magazines.  Let’s be honest, who really cares about Wendy’s and mine lower, middle class life when you can see what’s up with the Kennedy’s, the Osborne’s, or for some unexplainable reason, the world’s fascination with Michael Jackson.  In Canada we just saw the effect of that during the Heritage Classic, an outdoor National Hockey League hockey game in front of 50,000 people.  Montreal Canadien’s goalies Jose Theodore comes out on the ice with a really cool looking toque (you read it right, it’s a toque, not a cap) over his goalie mask and all of a sudden the entire country wants one.  It’s fed by our desire to be like those with more than us but also our desire to fit in with a sociological group that we want to be like instead of being who we are and living within our means.

Then again, look at all the things we have to have that we didn’t 20 years ago.

Consider, also, the kinds of goods that were deemed luxuries as recently as 1970, but are now found in well over half of U.S. homes, and thought of by a majority of Americans as necessities: dishwashers, clothes dryers, central heating and air conditioning, colour and cable TV. And back in 1970, there were no microwave ovens, VCRs, CD players, cell phones, fax machines, compact discs, leaf blowers, Pokemon, or personal computers. Now, more than half of us take all of these goods for granted and would feel deprived without them. Well, OK, so you wouldn't feel deprived without Pokemon.

 

There always seems to be a "better" model that we've just gotta have. Writing about Compaq's new iPaq 3600 Pocket PC, Seattle Times technology reporter Paul Andres warns that the iPaq, with its "sleek Porche-like case" and striking color screen," costs $500 more than an ordinary Palm Pilot. "But without the color display, music, and photos of the iPaq, life seems pretty dull," he laments.

 

And take travel. We drive twice as much per capita as we did a half century ago and fly an amazing twenty-five times as much. Middle-income Americans seldom ventured more than a few hundred miles away from home, even during two-week summer vacations. Now, many of us (not just the rich) expect to spend occasional long weekends in Puerto Vaelarta, or (in the case of New Yorkers) in Paris. Everywhere, humble motels have been replaced by elegant "inns," humble resorts by Club Meds. Now, "I need a vacation" means I need to change continents for a few days.

I have lived in western Canada my entire life and in the province of Saskatchewan for 19 of those years (don’t laugh, it’s not that bad… in the summer).   After my dad split, we never had any money for vacations or much material stuff.  Vacation was an overnight trip to Edmonton or Calgary every couple of years and some picnics at one of Saskatchewan’s great northern lakes.  By some standards that was pretty lame but we all really enjoyed it and it was the life we lived.

After my mother died and I started a different job, all of a sudden the trips were not to Waskesiu but to Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Toronto, and Las Vegas for work and from trips for my father.  All of a sudden Edmonton and Calgary looked pretty lame to Wendy and I, the idea of a northern holiday seemed like punishment when compared to spending a week in Treasure Island or hanging out at Navy Pier. 

I look at some weblogs I read and think, “Why am I not going to Finland?” and wonder if because I am thirty and haven’t been to Europe if I have done something wrong.  What was beyond even considering when I was a child and a teenager had become the norm just a couple of years later, even if I couldn’t forget it.  The idea of a “once in a lifetime vacation” became almost ordinary. 

It isn’t just us people in lower middle class either.  Even our politicians seem to have caught Affluenza.

Quietly, like some sort of unseen mind-snatcher, the virus has entirely consumed American political dialogue. Consider Al Gore. In 1992, while still a Senator, he wrote a popular book called Earth in the Balance. America, Gore noted then, is holding ever more tightly to its habit of consuming larger and larger quantities every year of coal, oil, fresh air and water, trees, topsoil and the thousand other substances that we rip from the crust of the earth, transforming them into not just the sustenance and shelter we need but more that we don't need. ... The accumulation of material goods is at an all time high, but so is the number of people who feel an emptiness in their lives.

Americans, Gore suggested, had become addicted to stuff. Our civilization, he wrote, promises happiness through "the consumption of an endless stream of shiny new products. ... But the promise is always false." A year later, Al Gore was inaugurated as Vice President of the United States. During the ceremony, a soprano sang the beautiful old Shaker hymn, Simple Gifts--("'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free..."). During the song, Gore nodded in agreement. Then, in the next couple of years, something happened. The mind-snatcher came and took Al Gore.

In the 1996 vice-presidential debate, Gore's opponent, Jack Kemp, vowed to "double the size of the U.S. economy in the next fifteen years." Yet Gore never questioned whether it would be a good thing for Americans to consume twice as much. By the 2000 election, the transformation of Al Gore into an agent of affluenza was complete. In a presidential debate, he vowed to increase the size of the U.S. economy by thirty percent in ten years. And what happened to Al Gore seems to be happening to all of us.

It isn’t just Al Gore either.  During the debate on the U.S. energy policy, it was noted that there was almost nothing to help Americans to conserve energy.  Vice President Dick Cheney, noted that "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”  But consuming more than what we have at the expense of future generations is.  Right…

What’s the way out?  The book has a myriad of solutions from study groups (they do make a difference) to churches leading the charge, to getting involved politically.

The solutions they list are complex and multi-faceted.  Co-housing, campaign finance reform, rethinking how we calculate the GDP.  Others are easier but still require some effort.  Sending back junk mail to the source until it stops, aggressively recycling, composting and being a smarter consumer.

In the end, I think some of the most important things the book does is help us deconstruct our desire for things and why we lunge after them like we do as a society.   For most it is an almost unconscious thing but we buy to live.  Until we realize that and start to seek an alternative, things won’t change.  It comes down to a choice: time or toys.  What is more important?

The issues the book brings forward are awkward issues in churches.  How we use our money is not a topic most of like to be challenged on.  It feels like we all have a plank in our own eye.  Not only that, Affluenza seems to have affected many of our local churches.  Stewardship in many churches is linked to the preservation of the material assets (buildings) or an expansion of programs that people can consume.  A couple of years I remember sitting in a seminar with a church giving consultant and I heard these words over and over again.  It isn’t an expenditure problem, it is a revenue issue.  The assumptions that churches need more and more and more money wasn’t even thought about.

As hard as a topic as Affluenza is to talk about, the book is a good start and while doesn’t have the classical discussion questions built in, every page begs to be thought and talked about.  The examples that get used are both over the top and close to home and can make you laugh and feel a little ashamed at the same time.

I didn’t like the entire book.  I wanted to dismiss the solution parts of the book as being unrealistic and easy to dismiss as being impractical.  Sadly I could not.  The steps that the authors are calling for are not all easy but are doable.  They challenge my comfort and convenience but are not totally unrealistic.  Some are hard but deep down ones that we all need to take if we are going to serious in our stand about the all-consuming epidemic.

How serious we are will determine how much one will like the book.  While the book talks about the macro problems of our culture, it also places a lot of personal responsibility squarely upon the readers shoulders and in my opinion, right where it belongs.

For Wendy and I meant just getting rid of stuff we aren’t using.  Giving to goodwill and the Salvation Army.  Re-evaluating what we buy, looking at ways to do without it and putting it off to see if we can live without it.  We follow this tip from Affluenza’s website:

Do I need it? Do I want to dust (dry-clean or otherwise maintain) it? Could I borrow it from a friend, neighbor or family member? Is there anything I already own that I could substitute for it? Are the resources that went into it renewable, or non-renewable? How many hours will I have to work to pay for it? (Note: Before you do this, you may find it useful to figure your real hourly wage. Take your annual net income and subtract your work-related costs like clothing, transportation, child care, parking and lunches out.

It’s a start.

FOX Chicago TV is looking for a family currently dealing with affluenza. If there is anyone in the Chicagoland area who has it all and then some and is interested in talking with us about it, please e-mail me ASAP.
Thank You.
--Niena D. ( ndrak938 at foxtv dot com ) on 10/20/2004; 3:42:01 PM