I probably should have posted this entry prior to the beginning of the holiday shopping season (known affectionately as "Black Friday"), but yes - I got caught up in the cycle as well.Baby steps, Chris. Baby steps.
Take 20 minutes of your time and watch this short, animated film. Try not to get put off by the preachy-ness of it, as it contains some great information about our stuff, and the life-cycle costs it imposes on our society and our overall quality of life. After you're finished hearing the story, be sure to pass it on to your friends and family. Everyone needs to know that we are voting with our dollars for things we normally wouldn't support in an otherwise sane world.
It is the general consensus by us SDW chaps that if we only took a few steps back and took in more of the "Big Picture", we wouldn't make the same choices we are making today.
Happy New Year, and look forward to some more regular entries here in the near future...
4 comments:
The pressures to "Buy, buy, buy..." are astronomical, espceially this time of year. I may scale back the purchase of cheap crap, but then there's the uncles, aunts, parents and grandparents who are standing in line at Crap-Mart buying the stuff and getting the kids hooked on this mode of living.
I'm working at alleviating my level of guilt for not providing a ton o' shit at Christmas, but the ad-men are working overtime in that department as well.
Ad-men = devils, at least according to a buddy of mine -- at his brother is in advertising! :)
Although the rhetoric in this short film was a little over the top at times, I whole-heartedly agree with almost everything in there. Note that they did not advocate a zero-consumption lifestyle, but rather a closed-loop consumption cycle. Very interesting. I'd like to know if any retailers, of any size, have implemented this closed-loop process.
See I'm not a big fan of that video. My problem is that although I agree with the closed loop process and the basic arguement it signifies whats wrong with the left. I can't even begin to count all the faulty premises such as the fact that implications that corporations whose shareholders include pension funds should not be bigger than Governments, or that somehow Chinese people would be better off without those lowpaying jobs living in huts without plumbing or electricity.
There are so many faulty premises in her arguments that can be attacked. This leads to people dismissing the whole argument.
I used to have tons of stuff, I still have quite a bit of stuff. What I found was that the more stuff I had, the more unhappier I was. The less stuff I have, the happier. Its that simple.
When I looked at people who had more stuff than me, rarely did I find them happy, although there were a few remote instances.
People with the most stuff seemed embroiled in family lawsuits, loss of privacy, divorced etc... Stuff has a hidden cost not only to those who make it but to those who buy it that is not reflected in its price tag.
Want a big house? guess what, the hidden price tag is that you lose your privacy when you have to hire someone to clean and maintain it.
Want a bunch of bigger toys? Guess what, you are liable if someone you share them with gets hurt on them.
Want a flashy lifestyle? Guess what, you now have a bullseye on your back.
They've done studies on happiness, they found that amount of stuff did not correlate with happiness.
That is the great complexity of the stuff problem. There are so many aspects that compose our addiction to stuff that it is impossible to discuss them in a 20 minute video. You are quite right though -- stuff does NOT equal happiness. I would suggest that the more stuff we have them less time we have to do what we really want to do because we are too busy paying for, fixing, protecting, managing, organizing, etc. etc. our stuff.
A good read on this subject is Janet Luhr's The Simple Living Guide. I'd highly recommend it.
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