Episode 1. When Too Much is Never Enough
We love to buy nice things. That’s what credit cards are for right? But when is enough enough. And what if too much is never enough? Join Berni Dymet as he takes a look spend, spend, spend, from a …
Now most of us would agree that it’s nice to own nice things. A house that we enjoy living in, a car maybe two, that we enjoy driving, clothes, jewelry, TV, video, stuff. And it’s great to have a holiday every now and then too. It’s all good stuff, but when is enough, enough? I mean once we have the basics covered, does the rest really make us happy? And why is it that people seem to be working longer and harder than ever before? Is it just to buy more stuff, to fill our closets with clutter? What’s going on, when most of our Western economies are booming and yet the average household is into debt over its ears. And what is going on in our lives? It seems that even too much is never enough.
I’ve been reading a fascinating book called Affluenza, it’s written by Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennis, if you can get a hold of it I strongly suggest it’s worth a read. They define affluenza as that bloated; sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Jones’s. An epidemic of stress, over work, waste and indebtedness caused by a dogged pursuit of the materialistic dream, and an unsustainable addiction to economic growth. Some of the facts that they sight, to me, were fascinating. For instance in most Western economies the real income today is three times what it was in say 1950. And in the West the substantial majority of people really experience no real hardship, yes there is a small percentage of underprivileged people and I’m not denying that at all, but predominately in Western society we’re dealing with affluence, financially.
Yet people seem to have difficulty in making ends meet, they still see themselves as battlers, why is that? Well this is what Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennis write. They say this, “In the coming decade most of our income growth will be spent on consumer products, the craving for which has been created by advertisers”. “Our public concerns might be about health and the environment, but our private spending patterns show that the majority of Australians feel they suffer from a chronic lack of stuff. The problem is that after we’ve renewed our stuff yet again, there’s not enough money left to fund investments in hospitals and schools. We want better public services but seem unwilling to forgo more income in the form of taxes to pay for those services.” “Australia doesn’t have a public health funding crisis; it has a flat screen TV crisis.”
Maybe that’s a bit cynical, but you see the point. I mean back in the 19th Century the futurists were postulating, they were saying well, look you know untimely with incomes growing as much as they are, there will come a point when we all have enough. And at that point, the futurists thought, we’ll enter a post materialistic society. Even in the 1960’s and 70’s sociologists were saying, well, what are we going to do when everyone has enough The problem won’t be getting people employment, the problem will be what to do with people because we’ll only be able to work maybe three, maybe four days a week. So what are we going to do with all of that leisure time? Of course it hasn’t turned out that way. What seems to have happened is that we always want more and more and more.
I was born in the 1950’s, in the late 1950’s, grew up in the 1960’s. And we lived in a relatively small house, but it was a nice house. It had three bedrooms, it didn’t have two bathrooms, it only had one bathroom. It had a garage but could only fit two cars and later on Mum and Dad put a pool in. But since those times incomes have almost trebled. That’s three times as much, taking account of inflation; they’ve trebled in real terms. But no matter how much money we seem to have we want more. Again, Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennis write this, they say “We react with alarm and sympathy when we come across an anorexic who’s convinced that she’s fat, whose view of reality is obviously distorted. Yet as a society, surrounded by affluence, we indulge in this illusion that we’re deprived, despite the obvious failure of the continued accumulation of wealth and things to make us happy. We appear unable to change our behavior.”
It seems to me that we’ve confused something. We’ve failed to distinguish between what we really need and what we want; our needs and our wants. And when you look in the political domain, the rhetoric is all about economic growth. And economic growth is based on high consumption and the underlying principle of that is, that it will make it a better society if we have two, three, four percent, five percent growth in the economy each year. That will make the society better.
So how much is enough? I mean if our incomes double again in the next ten – fifteen years, will that be enough? If they treble in the next fifty years, will that be enough? When is enough, enough? And sometimes you hear politicians or economists, or news reporters saying, gee our economy grew by X percent this quarter, that’s an annual growth of three and four percent, that’s fantastic. And then if the growth slips to one or two percent, people start panicking. The stock market turns down. People start talking about pushing interest rates up. Well really what’s wrong with one or two percent growth? Or zero percent growth? Or minus one percent growth? Really in the scheme of things we seem fixated on growth, we seem fixated on the economic level, and we translate that to a personal level, and what we see is an escalation of lifestyle expectation.
We going to look at advertising a little bit later this week, but if you consider advertising; advertising promotes an ideal, whether its clothes or cars or plasma screens or perfume or luxury holidays. There is this vast marketing machine which creates glossy images of what success looks like. And then you and I look at ourselves and we say “Well I don’t measure up to that, I don’t measure up to that TV image, or the lifestyle program, or the renovation programs. I just don’t match up” And the implication is that the way that you close that gap, the way that we complete ourselves, the way that we get our image looking more like the glossy measures is we spend money on things to meet that gap.
Robert Frank in his book Luxury Fever makes the point that in the USA expenditure on luxury goods is growing five times faster than spending over all. I wonder whether we aren’t trying to buy an identity. Whether we’re indulging in some sort of self deception that says, if I have a nicer car, if I have a bigger house, people will look at me differently. I will finally complete myself; I will finally match the image of success. But of course the whole advertising industry is designed so that when we get that thing, let’s say it’s a new car, let’s say it’s a big house. When we get that, well of course they want to sell us the next thing, the next expenditure, the next thing that will get us to that image that we think we want to follow which is so illusive.
Where is your identity? Where is my identity? What do we get our identities from? I think it’s a really good question honestly to ask ourselves. Do I get my identity from the images that are painted on the television, in the glossy magazines, in the newspapers? Do I say to myself, “I need to be like that?” Is that where I get my sense of fulfillment or is there something else? The scary thing for me about chasing advertising based images is that we say success is something external. Success is when I have the housing renovation, success is when I have that decorator item, success is when I have that car. So people look at me and say “Wow, he’s got a new car.” Please don’t get me wrong I’m about to buy a new car, I’m about to pick up tomorrow, a new car. It’s not the getting of the car, that there’s anything wrong with, it’s when we tie up our identify and our image of success in that car, in affluence, that I think we miss the point in life.
Who do you get your identity from? Me, I get mine from a guy called God. I get mine from a God who loves me so much he sent His Son Jesus to die for me. And I’ll talk about that a little bit more this week on A Different Perspective. But the thing that happened for me when I changed the source of my identity is that I no longer crave things, they no longer dominated me.
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