Addict Nation (5 page)

Bucking the consumer mentality, becoming a free thinker and achieving emotional sobriety from overconsumption requires taking yourself out of that cult at the risk of being shunned or ridiculed! If there’s one thing we know about addicts, they really don’t like to use their drug with
sober
people staring at them. It puts their desperation to escape into sharp relief and brings up shame over the toxic behaviors in which they are drowning. That’s why alcoholics at a party will often push cocktails on other guests. The addict feels his or her addictive behavior will be less noticeable if everybody’s doing it. That’s why your family, friends, and neighbors may push you to consume, even when you don’t want to.

Pressure to conform to the consumer culture can be felt when a neighbor brags to you about their new purchase: “I don’t know how I functioned without this self-cleaning oven” . . . or feigns shock when they learn you have failed to purchase a certain hot, new must-have: “I can’t believe you don’t have high def!” The unspoken message is “get with the program and buy this or you’ll become a second-class citizen.” Sometimes questionable consumer trends will come disguised as righteous concern for family: “I needed this SUV. I’ve got kids.” Even though there’s nothing inherently better for your family about an SUV except more space. The tradeoff is that SUVs are gas guzzlers, which negatively impacts the environment, which presumably should be preserved for the very benefit of those children sitting in the SUV. Are you really protecting your kids by buying an SUV, or are you an addict using your family as a justification for getting something you crave because you’re swept up in a cultural contagion?

“We are being promised by a techno consumer culture that if we only take in more then we could be more ‘ourselves.’ And in the very process of pouring in more goods, more information, we are being depleted of ourselves.”

—Eugene Halton, author of
The Great Brain Suck

You Need That? Really? Seriously?

While buying something that you
actually need
is not addictive shopping, the culture has played a shell game with us, creating all manner of artificial
needs
that are really not needs at all. You can make a reasonable argument for
needing
a toaster, but do you really need a high-tech coffee maker that spits out a small, disposable, plastic coffee-grain container after every single cup it brews, a container that’s extremely hard to recycle because it’s filled with wet, used coffee grains? These environmentally insensitive individual-cup coffee makers are now popping up in homes and offices everywhere.

Birthdays, baby showers, weddings, the ever-growing number of holidays, and all other special occasions are opportunities to enforce the rules of the cult. You
need
to get a wedding gift! You
need
to send a card on Mother’s Day. You
need
to buy everyone you know some kind of present for Christmas or Hanukah. NO, YOU DON’T! Not if you don’t listen to the cult. There are many other ways to say “I love you.” In fact, you can just
say
, “I love you” and mean it. You can make a donation to a charity in someone’s name. You can re-gift things you’ve been given but can’t use. I have a friend who keeps a big box where she puts all the stuff she can no longer use. She carefully matches up these items with the needs of her friends and is always bearing gifts, albeit previously owned ones. Now I’m starting to do it too. It’s a fun way to get rid of clutter.

The First Step Toward Freedom from
Any Addiction Is to Admit You Have It

We simply cannot continue living the way we are without destroying our physical world. But to change, we must first acknowledge the truth: America is addicted to stuff. The mob psychosis that demands material gifts for all these occasions is wreaking havoc on our finances and on the environment. The wrapping paper alone is an ecological disaster, with Americans piling up 4 million tons of waste every year just from wrapping paper and holiday shopping bags. Four million tons!
²
That’s a lot of forests destroyed. For what? Something you look at for five seconds before ripping it away? In fact, paper products are the second most frequently purchased packaged goods found in American homes, right after bread and other baked goods.
³
With the exception of toilet paper, lots of those paper goods are totally unnecessary. Gee, what did people do before they had paper towels? A simple switch to dishrags would save forests and dramatically reduce pollution from manufacturing sources. Absent that, a simple switch to recycled paper towels would do wonders. The recycled paper company Seventh Generation lays it out right on its paper towel wrapper, noting, “If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 120 ct. virgin fiber paper towels with a 100% recycled one, we could save:

933,000 trees

2.4 million cubic feet of landfill space, equal to

3,700 full garbage trucks

350 million gallons of water, a year’s supply for 2,700 families of four

and avoid 59,600 tons of emissions.”
⁴

We all know the truth in our bones. We Americans are using way more than our fair share of the world’s finite resources. The United States accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s population yet accounts for one-third of global consumption!
⁵
We’re all screaming statistics at each other, and yet the freight train of overconsumption is only accelerating. That’s because addiction does not respond to rational argument.

“Addiction does not have to be a physical drug. Drugs provide biochemical indoctrination. If you shoot heroin, you will become biochemically indoctrinated and habituated to it. That’s on everybody’s radar. What’s off the radar is electrochemical indoctrination. When you see ads, they jolt your adrenaline. They change you physiologically. They are intended to do that. They create physiological habits. When you watch 3,500 ads every day—with a large percentage telling you that you are inadequate until you get the commodity—that’s bound to have an effect on people.”

—Eugene Halton, Ph.D., professor of sociology
at the University of Notre Dame

Drowning in Consumer Debris

American overconsumption is a mass addiction. The average household contains more televisions than human beings. The United States has more cars than drivers. Every year we spend more than $22 billion on health clubs and health equipment. But on any given day, three-quarters of us are doing no exercise at all.
⁶
Zip
! It feels good to plunk down our credit card for a health club membership. We do so fantasizing about how buffed we’re going to get and how attractive we’ll look to others. Unfortunately, fantasizing doesn’t burn a whole lot of calories. How many of us have gym memberships that we never use? Actually working out is a lot sweatier than fantasizing about it or paying for the privilege. And to work out, we’d actually have to look in the mirror and see the disturbing “before” picture of how we look now!

Instead of Running, Dancing, Swimming,
or Singing, We’re . . . Hoarding!

If you find yourself having difficulty deciding what’s valuable and what’s not or if you feel irrational attachment to material items, you may be on the path to a deeper manifestation of the compulsion to collect called hoarding. Two million of us are compulsive hoarders.
⁷
The phenomenon has even inspired two disturbing reality TV shows:
Hoarders
and
Hoarding: Buried Alive.
⁸
The shows follow people who fill their homes with mountains of debris because they are completely traumatized by the thought of throwing anything out. This can even include dirty diapers, rotten food, and dead animals. Ironically, a common reason offered by hoarders to keep an object is its sentimental family value. But their hoarding is precisely what keeps their families alienated. Relatives refuse to visit because a hoarder’s home is generally filled with such squalor it’s nauseating and unsafe. Many hoarders admit to being powerless over the urge to buy. They may have closets stuffed with clothes they’ve never worn, but still can’t resist picking up a new sweater at a department-store sale. Eventually, they begin to drown in junk.

In Las Vegas, a compulsive hoarder was dead for four months before her husband finally discovered her body under piles of debris in their home. Her clutter was so intense that even search dogs (who had worked Ground Zero and Hurricane Katrina) had failed to sniff her out.
⁹

Materialism Is an Expensive Habit!

The average rate of personal savings falls short of what most people need to feel secure. Millions of households actually spend more than their after-tax income.
¹⁰
No wonder we’re stressed out. Total U.S. consumer debt is in the staggering trillions of dollars. Many Americans are in a serious debt trap, with credit cards, home equity lines, and home mortgages eating up an increasing slice of their income. They’ve overspent to such an extent that they’re reduced to treading water financially, working just to keep up with their monthly interest payments. The banks encouraged a lot of this debt by
enabling
people to pretend they were wealthy through an ever- more-imaginative rollout of credit vehicles. Take second mortgages. Taking out a second mortgage on your home used to be a sign of financial desperation. But the banks renamed second mortgages “home equity loans” and encouraged Americans to raid and pillage their own castles. As one bank ad proclaimed, “There’s got to be at least $25,000 hidden in your house. We can help you find it.” Home equity loans became a social contagion!
¹¹
Of course, when the realestate bubble hit, those with two mortgages found themselves in double trouble, much more likely to be upside down on their house. Here’s the added danger of social contagions. They make self-destructive behavior like massive personal debt socially acceptable. That, in turn, gives people a false sense of security. But there is no safety in numbers. If I’m thundering toward a sharp cliff, I may feel safer if I’m part of a huge herd doing the same thing. But in reality, it simply means we’re all going to die. After the real-estate bubble burst, the cult of consumerism started feeling more like the 1970s killer cult of Jim Jones.