THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Unhappy People

  Consider that Americans reported the highest levels of contentment and happiness in 1957—that is, it was in that year that the highest number of us (about 35 percent) described ourselves as “very happy,” a level we’ve never reached since.22 Even though we’re making more money and buying more Stuff today than we did fifty years ago, we’re no happier. To be clear: it’s not that none of this new money and Stuff has made us happier—some has—but the extra happiness has been canceled out by greater misery on other fronts. When a person is hungry, cold, in need of shelter or some other basic material necessity, then of course more Stuff will make him or her happier. But once people’s basic needs are met (which happens, according to Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2004 report, when people earn and consume about thirteen thousand dollars per year, as a global average),23 the marginal increase in happiness we get from further Stuff actually decreases.24 In other words, our first and second pair of shoes provide more happiness than our fourteenth and fifteenth pairs. One hundred dollars buys a lot more happiness in the life of a woman living in Smokey Mountain in the Philippines, a community quite literally situated on top of a dump, than it does in mine.

  The beautiful women in the magazine and hundreds of other attractive faces flashing their perfect teeth from commercials and advertisements try to persuade us otherwise. They promise we’ll get a new dose of happiness when we acquire that new thing, even if it is only a tiny bit different than the one we already have. Yet when we get that thing, if it even gives us a brief buzz, the good feeling fades fast. It turns out more Stuff doesn’t make us happier, especially when we factor in the extra time we have to work to pay for it and maintain it, even the time we spend just looking for it in our Stuff-filled drawers and cupboards and homes.

  Meanwhile, increased unhappiness results from our deteriorating social relationships. Relationships with family, peers, colleagues, neighbors, and community members have proven over and over to be the biggest determining factor in our happiness, once our basic needs are met.25 Yet because we’re working more than ever before to afford and maintain all this Stuff, we’re spending more time alone and less time with family, with friends, with neighbors.

  We’re also spending less time on civic engagement and community building. In Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert Putnam chronicles the decline in participation in social and civic groups, ranging from bowling leagues to parent-teacher associations to political organizations.26 We end up with a situation in which we have fewer friends, fewer supportive neighbors, less robust communities, and near total apathy about our role within a democratic political system.

  As a result, our communities can’t provide the things they used to. One-quarter of Americans now say they have no one in their lives with whom they can discuss personal trouble; that number has doubled since 1985, when far fewer people reported being socially isolated.27 Alongside emotional support, logistical support has dried up too: if you need child care, help moving, a ride to the airport, food delivered to your door when you’re sick, someone to bring in the mail or walk the dog or water your plants when you travel, or a group with whom to play a game of basketball, softball, or poker, you’re likely out of luck. Increasingly we’re all too busy and/or too isolated for these things. Since we still need all these things, the market has filled the void. We can now hire someone to watch our pets, coach us through a rough breakup, or move our Stuff. We pay for child care and activities to entertain our kids. We can even buy computer games that simulate sports with live opponents. This is commodification at work: the process of turning things that were once public amenities, neighborly activities, or the role of friends into privately purchasable Stuff or services—i.e., commodities.

  Systems thinkers often talk about negative feedback loops—problems that cause an effect that adds to the original problem. For instance, when global temperatures rise, ice caps melt, decreasing the planet’s ability to reflect sunlight off that bright snow, so global temperatures rise further. The same thing is happening with our melting communities. We have to work harder to pay for all the services that neighbors, friends, and public agencies used to provide, so we’re even more harried and less able to contribute to the community. It’s a downward spiral.

  Almost every indicator we can find to measure our progress as a society shows that despite continued economic growth over the past several decades, things have gotten worse for us. In the United States, obesity is at record levels, with fully a third of adults over the age of twenty and nearly 20 percent of children between the ages of six and eleven considered obese.28 A 2007 report revealed a 15 percent rise in teen suicides between 2003 and 2004, the largest increase over a single year’s time in fifteen years.29 In 2005 we had ten times as much clinical depression as in 1945. The use of antidepressants tripled between 1994 and 2004.30 As many as 40 million Americans are now allergic to their own homes—to the chemicals in paints, cleaning products, treated wood, wallpaper, and plastics. We average 20 percent less sleep at night than we got in 1900.31 Americans work more hours than people in almost any other industrialized country.32 The debts of individual consumers have been growing at twice the rate of incomes.33 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2005 Americans carried approximately $832 billion in credit card debt, a number that is expected to balloon to $1.091 trillion by 2010. This works out to approximately $5,000 in credit card debt per cardholder (projected at nearly $6,200 by 2010).34 Despite the spending beyond our means, our country still faces devastating levels of income inequity, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and the lack of health insurance.

  According to Knox College professor of psychology Tim Kasser, who has written extensively about materialism, it’s not just that money can’t buy us love and Stuff doesn’t make us happy. According to comprehensive studies of people of all different age groups, class backgrounds, and nationalities, materialism actually makes us unhappy. In Kasser’s surveys, people were identified as having materialist values when they agreed to a number of statements along the lines of “I want a high status job that pays well,” “I want to be famous,” “It’s important to have a lot of expensive possessions,” and “I want people to comment on how attractive I look.” According to Kasser, “The studies document that strong materialistic values are associated with a pervasive undermining of people’s well-being, from low life satisfaction and happiness, to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as headaches and to personality disorders, narcissism, and antisocial behavior.”35 And Kasser goes even further to document how these afflictions (low satisfaction, physical and mental health problems, and antisocial tendencies) then fuel more consumption.36 We fall back on the conventional “wisdom” that a little shopping therapy is just what we need to lift our spirits. And so it becomes a vicious cycle.

  Unhappy Nation

  Even though we’re consuming way more resources like energy, paper, and minerals and more manufactured Stuff than most other countries, the United States scores lower on many indices of well-being. The United Nations Development Programme’s Human Poverty Index—which examines factors like poverty, longevity, social inclusion—lists the United States last among industrial counties.37 Another measure, the Happy Planet Index, looks at how happy a country is (measured by a combination of life expectancy and life satisfaction) compared with how many resources it uses: basically it is a measure of how well a country converts resources into well-being. Out of 143 countries evaluated in the 2009 Happy Planet Index, the United States rates a dismal 114th. Scoring above us are those Scandinavian countries, of course, as well as every European country except Luxembourg and all of Latin America, the Caribbean, and pretty much every other region except Africa. Of the 28 countries that ranked lower than the United States, 25 are in Africa. Even war-torn Congo comes in a couple of spots ahead of the United States.38 The country with the highest score in the 2009 index is Costa Rica, which, by the way, abolished its military back in 1949, freeing up all those funds t
o divert to education, culture, and other investments that contribute to a long, healthy, and meaningful life. In contrast, the United States has the biggest military budget in the world, spending $607 billion, or 42 percent of global arms spending.39 We could buy a lot of well-being with that kind of money, by spending it on items like health care, education, clean energy, and efficient mass transit.

  The New Economics Foundation, the think tank that produces the annual Happy Planet Index, explains that “it is possible to live long, happy lives with a much smaller ecological footprint than found in the highest-consuming nations. For example, people in the Netherlands live on average over a year longer than people in the USA, and have similar levels of life satisfaction—and yet their per-capita ecological footprint is less than half the size (4.4 global hectares compared with 9.4 global hectares). This means that the Netherlands is over twice as ecologically efficient at achieving good lives. More dramatic is the difference between Costa Rica and the USA. Costa Ricans also live slightly longer than Americans, and report much higher levels of life satisfaction, and yet have a footprint which is less than a quarter the size.”40 I find this data reassuring, because it means our poor score isn’t set in stone; we’ve been investing our resources in the wrong place, but that’s something we can change.

  Unhappy Planet

  While excessive shopping, acquiring, and consuming make us unhappy and anxious as individuals (assuming our basic needs are already met) and societies, they make for an extremely unhappy planet as well. The Global Footprint Network (GFN) calculates the Ecological Footprint of various countries and of the earth as a whole. It arrives at the Footprint by calculating the use of both natural resources and ecosystem services like climate moderation and water cycles and then figuring out how much land would be needed to support this use. Globally, GFN reports that we now consume the resources produced by the equivalent of 1.4 earths per year.41 That is 40 percent more earths than we have! It now takes the earth one year and five months (or very nearly five) to regenerate what we use in a year. How is that possible? Well, the planet produces a certain amount of natural resources each year; we’re not only using all of them, but we’re also dipping into the store of resources that have been accumulating since the earth began—but they won’t last forever. I was in a meeting recently in which people were debating if the number of earths’ worth of productive capacity we use annually is actually 1.4 or 1.6. Does the discrepancy even matter, people? Anything over 1.0 is a major problem, especially with population continuing to increase exponentially. This hard truth has inspired the term “one planet living,” referring to the goal of redesigning our economies and societies to live well within the ecological limits of our one planet.

  While the highest rates of consumption have historically happened in wealthy regions like the United States and Europe, most developing countries now have a rising “consumer class” that is increasingly adopting the same patterns of hyperconsumption. India’s consumer class alone is thought to include more than 1 million households. The global consumer class in 2002 included 1.7 billion people, a number that is expected to rise to 2 billion by 2015—with almost half the increase occurring in developing countries.42

  What would it look like if everyone on the planet consumed at U.S. rates? And what about at the rates of certain other countries in both the so-called developed and developing worlds? Here’s a list of how many planets’ worth of biocapacity we would need if we globalized the consumption patterns in nine different countries:

  United States: 5.4

  Canada: 4.2

  United Kingdom: 3.1

  Germany: 2.5

  Italy: 2.2

  South Africa: 1.4

  Argentina: 1.2

  Costa Rica: 1.1

  India: 0.4

  Global Footprint Network has also identified the day each year in which we go into “overshoot”—the point after which we are consuming more than the earth is able to regenerate in that year. The first year in which we used more than the planet could sustain was 1986, but just by a smidgen. Earth Overshoot Day that year was December 31. Less than a decade later, in 1995, the day we reached the limit had moved up a month, to November 21. Another decade brought it up another month: in 2005, it fell on October 2.43 So humanity is consuming more than the planet can regenerate each year. At the same time, millions of people actually need to consume more to meet even basic needs: food, shelter, heath, education (that’s an issue I’ll discuss more fully later in this chapter). This is not a good trajectory. In fact, in the most literal meaning of the term, it’s unsustainable.

  We need to chart a different course. Let’s start by challenging the fundamental assumption that producing and consuming Stuff is the central purpose and engine of our economy. We need to understand that the drive to overconsume is neither human nature nor a birthright. We need to object when we are identified as “a nation of consumers”; individually and collectively, we are so much more than consumers, and those other parts of ourselves have been relegated to subordinate roles for too long. To help us see a way out of this consumer mania, it helps to understand just how deliberately the culture and structures promoting consumerism have been engineered over the last century.

  THRIFT THROUGH THE AGES

  I’m certainly not the first to have argued for restraint in our resource consumption, even long before we were so seriously butting up against the planet’s limits. Consider for a moment these examples of how our revered sources of wisdom in cultures around the world, from ancient to contemporary, renounce materialism and embrace sufficiency as the right way to live.

  Buddhist: “Whoever in this world overcomes his selfish cravings, his sorrows fall away from him, like drops of water from a lotus flower.” (Dhammapada, 336)

  Christian: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)

  Confucian: “Excess and deficiency are equally at fault.” (Confucius, XI.15)

  Hindu: “That person who lives completely free from desires, without longing... attains peace.” (Bhagavad Gita, II.71)

  Khalil Gibran: “The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.” (The Prophet)

  Islamic: “The best kind of wealth is to give up inordinate desires.” (Imam Ali A.S.)

  Jewish: “Give me neither poverty nor riches.” (Proverbs 30:8)

  Liberation Theology: “The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.” (Gustavo Gutiérrez)

  Native American: “Miserable as we seem in thy eyes, we consider ourselves... much happier than thou, in this that we are very content with the little that we have.” (Traditional)

  Shaker: “Tis a gift to be simple.” (Elder Joseph Brackett)

  Taoist: “He who knows he has enough is rich.” (Tao Te Ching)

  Thoreau: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” (Walden)

  The Construction of a Consumer Nation

  A century ago, the economic, political, and social life of the United States was not so single-mindedly focused on consumerism. Yes, people bought things, but that was balanced more evenly with other activities and goals. What caused the shift to overconsumption?

  As Oberlin College professor David Orr writes, “The emergence of the consumer society was neither inevitable nor accidental. Rather, it resulted from the convergence of four forces: a body of ideas saying that the earth is ours for the taking; the rise of modern capitalism; technological cleverness; and the extraordinary bounty of North America, where the model of mass consumption first took root. More directly, our consumptive behavior is the result of seductive advertising, entrapment by easy credit, ignorance about the hazardous content of much of what we consume, the breakdown of community, a disregard for the future, political corruption and the atrophy of alternative means by which we might provision ourselves.”44

 
; In other words, in the United States in particular, there were a lot of resources to take, we thought it was our right to take them, and we figured out slick new ways to do so. As capitalism (see the introduction for more on capitalism), with its incessant need for profit, developed into the dominant economic model, a culture of consumerism became necessary to support it.

  Time Versus Stuff

  With the “technological cleverness” of the Industrial Revolution—the shift from hand-crafted goods to assembly-line mass production, powered by steam engines—industrialized countries became much more efficient at producing Stuff. In 1913, it took a worker 12.5 hours to make an automobile chassis; by 1914 it took 1.5 hours.45 The cost of producing one megabit of computing power in 1970 was about twenty thousand dollars; by 2001, the cost had sunk to two cents.46

  With this huge increase in productivity, industrialized societies faced a choice: keep producing roughly the same amount of Stuff as before and work far less, or keep working the same number of hours as before, while continuing to produce as much as possible. As Juliet Schor explains in The Overworked American, after World War II, political and economic leaders—economists, business executives, and even labor union representatives—chose the latter: to keep churning out the “goods,” keep working full time, keep up the frenzied pace of an ever-expanding economy.47

  Faced with the same decision, Europe veered towards the first option, prioritizing social and individual health and well-being over hyperconsumption. There were a number of historical and cultural factors that led to Europe and the United States charting such different paths. In Europe, governments were generally more socially focused (or people focused) than business focused. European trade unions, political parties, and other civic groups—influenced by their wartime experience and a more socially oriented culture—were similarly focused on public benefits rather than pure business interests. Remember this was the postwar era: much of Europe was decimated and needed to take care of its people (and by the way, Big Business—including IBM, GM, Kodak, DuPont, GE, and Shell48—had aligned itself with the Nazis, so it was a bit discredited at this point). Meanwhile, in the United States, factories were producing at an all-time high, generating employment and boosting national morale such that few wanted to question this economic model. Slogans like “Better dead than red” and McCarthy-era persecution further discouraged voicing alternative viewpoints on the economy.