Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic Read online

  I’VE GOT MINE, JACK

  In the years just after World War II the super-rich sought to conceal their profligacy, but after Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural ball many began to flaunt it again. As economist Robert Frank points out, there’s been a rush on $15,000 purses, $10,000 watches, even $65 million private jets. Twenty million Americans now own big-screen TVs costing at least $2,000 each. Some buy their children $5,000 life-size reproductions of Darth Vader and $18,000 replicas of Range Rovers, $25,000 birthday parties, and million-dollar bar mitzvahs.14 Yachts the size of mansions burst their berths in many a marina.

  Thus from the hot zones of popular culture and stratified workplaces, our new Joneses—consciously or otherwise—spread the affluenza virus, swelling our expectations as never before. And stuffing us up.

  CHAPTER 4

  Chronic

  congestion

  A house is just a pile of stuff

  with a cover on it.

  —GEORGE CARLIN

  It’s nine o’clock at night, and Karen and Ted Jones, a double-income couple in their forties, are peering through a flickering flashlight beam at boxes of stuff, stored a few months earlier at U-Stuff-It, the self-storage facility near their house. He’s rooting for a missing report his boss needs the next day, while she’s foraging for a painting a friend gave her, because the friend is coming to visit.

  “I feel kind of like a burglar,” she comments in a low voice, rummaging through a box of Christmas decorations and vaguely familiar objects. “Why?” he asks. “This is OUR stuff. We’re just lucky to be able to afford this space, aren’t we?” She’s not totally convinced. Lucky their stuff can overflow somewhere, with the garage and aluminum shed already popping their nails and rivets. But lucky to be paying $65 a month for 100 square feet of space? Lucky to have so much stuff? She’s not sure.

  ALL STUFFED UP

  Karen and Ted are by no means alone. There are now more than 30,000 self-storage facilities in the country, offering over 1.3 billion square feet of relief for a legion of customers starting home businesses, combining households, getting organized after a move, or just unable to stop buying. The industry has expanded fortyfold since the 1960s, from virtually nothing to $12 billion annually, making it larger than the U.S. music industry.1

  We’re all stuffed up, literally! In our homes, workplaces, and streets, chronic congestion has settled into our daily lives—chaotic clutter that demands constant maintenance, sorting, displaying, and replacing.

  So which box is that wretched report in?

  WHEN HOUSES BECOME LANDFILLS

  For Beth Johnson, the acquisition of stuff goes beyond mere frivolity. Like at least two million other Americans who compulsively save everything, she felt overwhelmed by all the excess stuff that clogged her house and her life —from books to clothing to old maps to stacks of phonograph records. “Compulsive savers often have difficulties in their personal relationships because of their excess stuff, although most ‘savers’ are creative, successful people in their exterior lives,” she says. “They feel deep shame in their inability to just ‘let go’ of material possessions.”2 Now on the road to recovery, Beth operates the Clutter Workshop in West Hartford, Connecticut.

  She’s visited homes jam-packed like warehouses, with only narrow paths from one room to the next. To overcome blockages like these, she helps modify behavior through creative challenges like group garage sales—selling only, no buying allowed! Workshop members are empowered to invite peers into their houses, sometimes for the first time in years.

  Do we have stuff, or does it have us? In a world filled with clutter, we too easily become overwhelmed, lose our way, and get swept along in a current that carries us to the mall for more stuff, or to the car dealership for a new car—nothing down.

  CAR CLUTTER

  Denver resident Dan Berman, like many other Americans, could take his two midsize SUVs to the jagged peak of a mountain, as in the TV ads, but not into his own garage. Neither vehicle would fit in the fifty-year-old brick garage, so he ripped it down and built one suitable for a new millennium. Some of his neighbors in Denver’s solid Washington Park haven’t gotten around to that yet. Driving past the old neighborhood’s homes, you see $40,000 Ford Excursions and Lincoln Navigators grazing at curbside, desperate for exercise. But in a clogged-up metropolitan area like Denver, they aren’t likely to get much.

  Americans have reached a new milestone. We now live in a country that has more cars (204 million) than registered drivers. But with that dubious distinction come highway speeds of twenty miles an hour or less at rush hour—speeds that waste $60 billion a year in lost time and wasted fuel. Stuck in traffic recently, Dave imagined all the cars on the highway suddenly disappearing, leaving just people standing there on the road. It wouldn’t appear to be so jammed up, then—just a bunch of people walking to work, or taking part in. . . a parade!

  What happened? America used to be where both the pizza delivery person and the ambulance driver could get someplace before it was too late. In our brave new world of clutter, both are trapped in traffic. (Rule of thumb: The shortest distance between two points is always under construction.) In a South American short story, traffic is so hopeless that drivers abandon their cars and start foraging for food in neighboring villages. Eventually they start growing crops by the roadside. A baby is conceived and born before traffic begins to move again. While congestion hasn’t yet reached quite that level in the United States (or South America), it may not be a bad idea to put a few packages of seeds in the glove compartment, just in case.

  METRO FOLLIES

  The mother of all traffic jams is in Los Angeles, where Interstate 5 crosses I-10, I-60, and I-101. More than half a million vehicles logjam through this stretch daily— not a pretty sight. An average Los Angeles resident spends eighty-two hours a year stuck in traffic; the national average for urban drivers as a whole is thirty-four hours. L.A. drivers annually waste 120 gallons of gas per capita owing to congestion3 and are also forced to breathe marginal air and listen to fast-talk traffic reports. Boston’s “Big Dig,” designed to bury the city’s central artery like a subway system for cars, will siphon taxpayer dollars for another fifty years. Its $18 billion—and counting—price tag is more than twenty-five times the 1975 estimate. And now, it’s leaking. . . .

  When it comes to traffic jams, we’re all in it together, but some traffic engineers think only they hold the key to getting us back out. Rather than opt to reorganize our communities so less travel is necessary, the engineers are still road crazy after all these years. Having already paved over two-thirds of Los Angeles, their sights are set on St. Louis, Tucson, and Colorado Springs. However, recent studies by the Texas Transportation Institute and others prove that the major cause of congestion is neither a lack of roads nor population growth but an increase of up to 65 percent in miles driven, largely caused by sprawl. The Texas institute researchers concluded that every 10 percent increase in the highway network results in a 5.3 percent increase in the amount of congestion. Like medication with serious side effects, building new roads may make things worse.

  With the highways clogged up, drivers are increasingly “jumping ship” into neighborhoods, cutting down alleyways and across vacant lots like Steve Martin’s character in the movie L.A. Story. However, mechanical engineers think they have a more pragmatic, high-tech solution:“smart cars” and “smart highways.” One of them suggests automated highways on which vehicles equipped with specialized sensors and wireless communications systems could travel under computer control, at densely packed intervals. “Once traveling in automated mode, the driver could relax until the turnoff. At this point, the system would need to check whether the driver could retake control, and take appropriate action if the driver were asleep, sick, or even dead.”4

  It’s comforting to know that we may reach our destinations even if we’re DOA. But doesn’t it seem a little like a cartoon? In a way, it’s mass transit, except “smart highways” would be Amer
ican-style, individualized mass transit, resulting in high levels of individualized consumption as well as high levels of expensive road construction and maintenance.

  STUFF WARS AT THE AIRPORT

  If American homes crammed with stuff are the metaphorical equivalent of congestion in the lungs, and highways are the plugged arteries, air travel must be the sneeze that propels affluenza carriers (that’s us) through the air. Between 1988 and 1998, air travel increased by 35 percent in the U.S., to1, 714 passenger miles per capita States, more than four times the 1950 level. At the airport—once our delayed flight is finally ready to go—we plead with the airline attendant to be able to carry on one more bag but are reminded, sternly, of policies designed to protect the passenger. Stuff Wars are in full swing. The airlines have determined that we’ll fly no matter how packed the flights and how miniature the complimentary bags of peanuts. Their strategy is “More people, less stuff”—cram passengers in with as little carry-on luggage as possible. (They didn’t count on Americans gaining an average 10 pounds in the 1990s, though, which adds an extra $275 million a year in fuel costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control.) Meanwhile, passengers have another agenda—to keep their stuff with them on the plane so they don’t have to wait for it at the baggage claim, and so they can access laptops, cosmetics, and emergency rations.

  “Please do not leave your baggage unattended. . .” drones the voice on the P.A. as you wait in line to get through security. What’s going on here? Everybody’s obsessed with stuff! Your carry-on luggage is allowed to be only twenty by forty inches, and they need to X-ray it, label it, inspect it, confiscate your nail clippers, and cross-examine you about it. Why can’t they be more understanding? That’s your stuff, symbolizing who you are. Don’t they care who you are? Not really. Remember, you’re a passenger, not a person.

  The height of Stuff Wars madness can be experienced when the aircraft lands and the captain rings the bell signifying it’s time to unfasten your seat belt, jump out of your seat, and scramble for your stuff!

  THE SKY IS FALLING

  In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Coke bottle falls from the sky and disrupts the social structure of a peaceful tribe of Bushmen in Africa’s Kalahari desert, unaccustomed to the artifacts of Western culture. In Southgate, California, the detached “nose wheel” of an airplane recently fell from the sky and hit the ground in front of a market, barely missing a woman entering a church.

  Even space is jam-packed with stuff. More than seven million pounds of spaceship pieces are hurtling around the planet at 22,000 miles an hour. At that speed, a piece of space debris the size of a small marble has the kinetic energy of a 400-pound boulder dropped from a hundred feet. To get out beyond the hazards of Earth’s space clutter, future astronauts may spend much of their time dodging bullets of space junk.

  Meanwhile, back on Earth, space-junk collectors like Jim Bernath of British Columbia anxiously await the descent of more debris, to add to their collections. Bernath already owns chunks of comets and bits of the Canadarm, a device built to retrieve satellites. He’s especially hopeful that a piece of the junked MIR space station will fall somewhere in Canada—possibly right into his own backyard.5

  ANALYZING THE AMERICAN DREAM: WHERE CLUTTER COMES FROM

  America’s 111 million households—the authors’ among them—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 clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”6

  Erich Fromm reminds us about the risk of settling for “normal”:“That millions share the same forms of mental pathology does not make those people sane.”7 As compared to what a sane society would be —grounded in natural rhythms and social cooperation and trust—the dream we are dreaming is so abnormal that it keeps behavioral anthropologists working overtime, trying to figure out what we think we are doing. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recently set aside $20 million to examine the American lifestyle, primarily by carefully observing the daily behavior of Homo sapiens americanus.

  For example, anthropologist Jan English-Leuck tries to make sense of child behavior as it relates to lifestyle. “When I shadow a three-year-old around, on the surface, that wouldn’t seem to be an encapsulation of our culture,” she said. “But when that three-year-old turns to his little sister and says, ‘Don’t bother me, I’m working,’ that’s worth overhearing.”8 Has the child already made the connection between the hours spent working and all the stuff his parents accumulate at the house?

  At the University of Arizona another crew of anthropologists has been studying America’s garbage since 1973. Garbologists core-drill Tucson landfills and sort through obsolete naval aircraft carriers, trying to make sense of our everyday artifacts. “We might think of the pattern of modern trash as a tangible record of human consumption,” said William Rathje, the program’s founder. “Future generations will marvel at the stuff that flows through our lives. The container of a frozen dinner that’s cooked and eaten in minutes persists for hundreds of years.”9

  As in a monster movie, more stuff begins to take shape as we sit daydreaming about the perfect living room, the perfect body, or the neighborhood’s sexiest lawn mower. Daydreams like these all require a steady stream of products that need to be hunted and gathered. On the vacation after next, maybe we’ll hit the ski slopes in Colorado or hike in northern Italy, but before then we’ll need to acquire a detailed checklist of expensive ski equipment. In the book High Tech/High Touch, John Nais-bitt and his coauthors describe some of the items necessary for “adventure travel.” “High-tech gear is available for every conceivable need, for every conceivable journey: digitally perfect-fit hiking boots, helmets with twenty-seven air vents, hydration packs, portable water purifiers, bike shorts with rubberized back-spray-repelling seats. . . .”10

  SHAMEFUL STUFF

  Most of us can relate to the dizzying array of technologically correct equipment and apparel. Do you have the right stuff? Does anyone? Some bicycling friends recently asked Dave to ride with them. His cutoff khaki shorts stuck out like a border collie at a greyhound track beside their shiny spandex, but he just kept pedaling. Even more “shameful” was the day his computer crashed and sank, taking years of data down with it. A vandal-generated message appeared suddenly on Dave’s computer screen, insulting him by name, and within a few hours a repairman pronounced the computer “toast.” Even the emergency floppy disks he fed into the machine were spit out with a growl. The computer was only a few years old, but somehow Dave felt a sense of techno-shame that he wasn’t properly equipped to fend off the virus. His penalty for not being state-of-the-art? Two thousand dollars to replace the deceased, useless computer.

  Dave’s neighbor, eighty-seven-year-old political and social activist Ginny Cowles, appreciates the value of e-mail and the Internet, but she finds she can read the screen well only when she tilts her head up to bring the lower half of her bifocals to the task. “I think I may have to get a new pair of glasses to wear just when I’m on the computer,” she said recently, with some frustration in her voice. “It’s another example of how stuff always seems to require more stuff.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The stress

  of excess

  We hear the same refrain all the time from people:

  I have no life. I get up in the morning, day care,

  elder care, a 40 minute commute to work. I have

  to work late. I get home at night, there’s laundry,

  bills to pay, jam something into the microwave

  oven. I’m exhau
sted, I go to sleep, I wake up and

  the routine begins all over again. This is what life

  has become in America.

  —TREND-SPOTTER GERALD CELENTE

  We are a nation that shouts at a microwave

  oven to hurry up.

  —JOAN RYAN,

  The San Francisco Chronicle

  Affluenza is a major disease, there’s no question about it,”1 says Dr. Richard Swenson of Menomonie, Wisconsin, who practiced medicine for many years before changing his focus to writing and lecturing. A tall, bearded, deeply religious man, Swenson began over a period of time to conclude that much of the pain in his patients’ lives had psychological rather than physical roots. “And after about four or five years, the whole idea of margin came to the surface,” he says. He found that too many of his patients were stretched to their limits and beyond with no margin, no room in their lives for rest, relaxation, and reflection. They showed symptoms of acute stress.

  “It could be physical symptoms,” Swenson recalls. “Headaches, low back pain, hyperacidity, palpitations in the heart, unexplained aches and pains. Or it could be emotional problems like depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, yelling at your boss or at your colleagues or your kids. There were all kinds of behavioral symptoms like driving too fast or drinking too much or screaming too much or being abusive. I recognized that they didn’t have any space in their lives, they didn’t have any reserves. The space between their load and their limits had just disappeared. I couldn’t take an X-ray to find this thing, but nevertheless it was there. And it was a powerful source of pain and dysfunction in people’s lives.”