It’s the most wonderful time of the year.
—Andy Williams
Love people and use things. Because the opposite never works.
—Joshua Fields Millburn
We still have tree-covered slopes to deforest
and subterranean lakes of oil to tap with our gushers.
—Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens
Materialists Maximus
Let me preface what I am about to say about the annual spending orgy that remains a fundamental part of the holiday season (and the U.S. economy) by sharing that I am not a variant of the Ebenezer Scrooge prior to his visit by the ghosts (ironically no one ever talks about the post-ghost, reformed Scrooge of whom it was said “that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” But I digress). I understand the need for celebration with family and friends and the joy of it. I understand the psychological need to actively resist the darkness of ever shorter days. I appreciate that there is a time to kill the proverbial fatted-calf and to feast with abandon.
However, there is an old aphorism that parents shouldn’t worry about whether or not their children are listening to them; they should be worried that their children are watching them. Hence, I have been busy thinking about what we are teaching our children with our choices about consumption—and not just at this time of year.
The troubling reality is that over 70% of the U.S. economy depends on consumer spending (which means it depends on people purchasing, destroying or discarding, and purchasing again), and so deeply ingrained is this habit of consumption that folks who have burned through their savings in the recent purchasing surge of this past year are now starting to put their holiday gifts onto credit cards, even as the Federal Reserve is causing the interest rates on those cards to skyrocket in its attempt to combat surging inflation in the cost of those very same gifts. Economists are predicting a mere 6-8% growth over last year’s spending and are using this fact as indicative that the U.S. economy might be heading into recession.
Yet, this entire socio-economic process is utterly unsustainable (we are a finite “blue dot” floating through space). I is quite literally burning through the energy that is causing the climate crisis (how many of us have already forgotten Hurricane Ian?), and it is trashing and poisoning the earth’s ecosystems (something we don’t always see firsthand here in this country because we’re trashing somebody else’s environment to feed our own consumption [check out The Story of Stuff]).
So why do we do it? Why are we so busy actively contributing to our own potential demise (as a culture if not as a species) and why are we so busy teaching our children by example how to contribute through our own consumptive behaviors to the problem? Where did this whole thing come from?
The answer is the rise of a new business paradigm in the post-war era following World War Two: planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence (otherwise known as artificial “need”). The massive consumption of the war effort had caused the American economy to boom because as bullets, guns, etc. rolled off the assembly line, their nearly immediate physical destruction created the demand to make more of them, and the expansion of the war to more and more parts of the globe simply caused this demand to grow ever larger. However, once the war ended, all that need abruptly went away, and corporations found themselves asking (and asking quite openly! This was not some secret conspiracy): how can we artificially keep perceived need up and cause it to grow? In other words, how can we keep consumer demand high and keep it growing ever higher? Enter planned obsolescence and artificial “need.” Companies would simply engineer things to eventually consistently break, and advertising would create a perception of need where in fact there wasn’t any.
And it worked! Today, like fish in water, large majorities of us consume voraciously without thinking—especially during the holiday season—and you might think that our homes and domiciles would be positively bursting with stuff by now. Yet, the average lifespan of a new item brought into our homes is 6 months, and our landfills are starting to resemble small mountain ranges. Thus, the cycle continues.
A Danger to the Republic
Interestingly, though, what we have started to consume more and more today is no longer physical stuff; it is digital—in the form of entertainment, social media, and on-line content. We are awash with information, misinformation, and disinformation, beamed into our homes and devices 24/7 by our “5G Networks,” and we consume it even more voraciously than we do our stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, the thinking behind the Sheldon & Arens quote at the start of this post is alive and well in corporate culture around the world, and the ecological reckoning that is coming because of it will be absolutely biblical in character. However, as our consuming-simply-to-consume habits transition to what has been called “the attention economy,” we find these habits beginning to impact our civic life, where I fear we face an entirely different kind of reckoning. Each new app we purchase and each new service we pay to stream lay claim to our ever-divided attention, and with an increasingly disrupted attention, many of us find ourselves feeling more and more stressed, more and more anxious, more and more fretful, and consequently, more and more open to simplistic solutions to the larger problems confronting us today.
This is especially true for those whose digital diet consists primarily of misinformation and disinformation. Thus, large swaths of people in this country and around the world have begun to mistrust the civic principles and structures that are the foundations of democratic society. Conspiracy theories and authoritarianism are actively at work right now in no small part because our material consumptive behaviors have carried over into our digital consumptive behaviors—consuming without thought, consuming simply to consume—and while our republic may have survived this last election cycle, we must soberly remember that there were still tens of millions of our fellow citizens who voted for the Big Lie embracing candidates.
Moreover, as the great educator Horace Mann reminds us:
A Republic…devoid of intelligence…will only more closely resemble an obscene giant who has waxed strong in his youth and grown wanton in his strength; whose brain has been developed only in the region of the appetites and passions and not in the organs of reason and conscience…Such a Republic, with all its noble capacities for beneficence, will rush with the speed of a whirlwind to an ignominious end; and all good men of aftertimes would weep over its downfall.
Be the Change You Seek
So what’s a citizenry to do? Well, first, become informed of the consequences of your own consumptive behaviors. To learn more about the impact of our material consumption in this country, a good starting point is the Planet Money T-Shirt Project. For the impact of digital consumption, a good starting is my own, That Pesky Brain.
Second, educate the children in your life—lead by example. Give to a charity in their name at this time of the year and explain to them why. Consume less yourself and make home-made gifts that use fewer resources. Gift a sweater and lower the thermostat in the house. Make a “no phone” rule at dinner and talk about each other’s day. Give children your undivided attention when they ask for it and always clearly close and set aside any digital device you might be on when they do. Take your child with you when you vote or let them see you filling out your mail-in ballot and walk it together to the mailbox. When age appropriate, read the constitution together, and if you yourself are of a certain age, volunteer to be an election official and take your grandchild with you if permitted.
In short, practice in front of the young people in your life what needs preaching in a world in desperate need of healing and actively embody the words attributed to Ghandi, “be the change you wish to see in the world.” By doing so, you teach and empower the children of this world to do the same and create the conditions for a better quality life for everyone.
After all, what could be more fitting for the “Season of Hope?”
References
Gershon, L. (April 10, 2017) The Birth of Planned Obsolescence. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/the-birth-of-planned-obsolescence/.
Mann, H. (1891) Life and Works of Horace Mann, Vol. 1-3. Google Books. https://books.google.com/.
Mirabella, L. (Nov. 26, 2022) On Black Friday, Habits Shift as Traditions Remain. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?edid=7ab93cd3-eb2d-43d1-884a-bfb4f1147b01, p. 1.
Sheldon, R. & Arens, E. (1932) Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity (Getting and Spending: The Consumer’s Dilemma). New York: Harper.
Light a Candle 