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Loading...The Story of Stuff and Why We’re Addicts
- Erica Sofrina
- December 6, 2012
- 10:22 am
- 224 comments
By Erica Sofrina, author of the book Small Changes, Dynamic Results! Feng Shui for the Western World.
I recently wrote about Tips for Downsizing your Living Space and it got me thinking about the History of Stuff. What made us the huge consumers that we have come to be in the United States?
The Story of Stuff is a powerful video about how we got here and what it is doing to our planet.
It talks about how my grandmother’s generation was committed to resourcefulness, stewardship and thrift. So what happened between then and now to bring us to this place of ultra consumerism which threatens the extinction of our planet?
It all started right after WWII. In order to jump-start the economy, President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers had to come up with a plan to get people to buy – and quickly! The guru and retail analyst of the day, Victor Legough, wrote in 1955:
“Our Enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…we need things burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
Egads! Consuming was linked with spiritual satisfaction and ego satisfaction (Sounds like an oxymoron to me.) Shopping became a ritual and it promised fulfillment.
So the era of “shopping as a spiritual practice” began! It was a message crafted by the government in cooperation and collaboration with the advertising media. The people bought it, and continue to do so to this day. The problem is that there are oodles more of us now than there were then, and it can’t continue if we are to have a planet at all.
These carefully crafted ads implied that shopping was the answer to happiness and that you were not okay if you didn’t have the latest and greatest gadget, appliance, car, fashions, etc. The goal was to make people feel badly about the stuff they did have, and badly about themselves if they didn’t have the new stuff. So they had to rush out and buy the new stuff, only for it to quickly go out of fashion so they had to buy more … You get the picture.
A new era in marketing was ushered in. Things were specifically made not to last. The product was made to fall apart right at the point where the consumer still had enough confidence in it to purchase another. It was called planned obsolescence.
The second new scheme was called perceived obsolescence. It was about re-designing the packaging of a product and adding a few more bells and whistles so that it was clear by looking at it whether or not a person had the latest and greatest object of desire (hello..Steve Jobs!) Quality went out the window and things were made to become obsolete within a carefully planned period of time, so that consumers would buy more.
Families were encouraged to move to the suburbs and buy a home, which then required them to have a car. Ushering in the new culture of multiple car homes and the ensuing pollution that follows. You then had to fill your spacious new home with all of the latest and greatest stuff. Every woman needed to have her own refrigerator, washer, dryer and vacuum cleaner, promising more leisure time for doing the things she loved.
Read more: Conscious Consumer, Conservation, Environment, Feng Shui & Organizing, Home, Household Hints, Inspiration, Reduce, Recycle & Reuse, Spirit, Videos, Videos, 1950's consumerism, addiction to shopping, addictions, consumerism, feng shui, green living, green planet, organizing, pollution, stuff
Erica Sofrina
Erica Sofrina is a motivational speaker, author and life coach specializing in connecting people to their spiritual essence. She is also an Internationally recognized Feng Shui speaker, green living columnist, teacher and the author of the book Small Changes, Dynamic Results! Feng Shui for the Western World and the Founder of the West Coast Academy of Feng Shui. She is also the founder of Earth Spirit Adventure Travel which takes people on retreats to powerful energy vortexes such as Bali and Hawaii to facilitate their deep earth/spirit connection. Find out more at www.ericasofrina.com
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Small Changes, Dynamic Results! Feng Shui for the Western World
By Erica Sofrina A Simple Guide to Feng Shui for our Western Lifestylesbuy now
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224 comments
+ add your ownPLEASE ALSO READ "Downsizing as a Mindful Practice"
I AM MORE MINDFUL, THANKS TO U!!!
Thanks.
Minimalist here and loving it. So much less maintenance and cleaning... and far, far cheaper.
I just watched a documentary last night named "Happy". I highly recommend it. It discusses this very thing....that stuff actually does NOT make you happier. What really makes people happier is strong social and family ties, doing things for others, looking beyond your own self-interest. 50% of the state of happiness is genetic...a predisposition. 10% is what actually happens to you. The remaining 40% is totally under your control. People on the planet with very, very little are some of the happiest people...far happier than our culture of needing to buy more and more. I did a major clearing of my belongings when I moved last year and I feel so cleansed. I'm ready to get rid of some more now....and get more involved in my new community!
Ay ay ay Erica....
ty
break the cycle
as a society we are addicted to keeping up with the jonses and crave material possessions and money at the expense of the loss of love family and spirituality
Ok thanks for sharing it's lovely and true. Now let's really look at what changes we might have to be making. Check out the huge Three Gorges Dam in China on Google Earth. Now check out what is surrounding the dam on the mountains. It's thousands of rice patty fields. They have to have them on the mountains, because the flat land is taken up by farms to feed people. China is huge & it's full of farms. We have more people on the planet every second. What about the rubbish dump we create by over packaging things & not being responsible for our rubbish which has resulted in a huge floating rubbish mass larger than Texas full of plastic bottles & plastic bags in the ocean. Are you recycling your envelopes and reusing paper for notes where you can? Check out Google Earth again and see for yourself how much forestry has been cut down in Indonesia alone, let alone Borneo and other places. Brazil has just signed a deal to cut down a lot of their forestry which will be going to China to use. Have you noticed fish starting to run out all over the world? In Australia we have to get calamari from China because Australian waters don’t have the demand for the people here. These are the REAL CHANGES WE HAVE TO MAKE, WE HAVE NO CHOICE! So what is everyone really going to be doing after this month, what being nice and more caring towards each other, we should be doing that and practising that anyway? Do we need to eat bacon & eggs for breakfast and hamburger or me
Thank you, Erica:)
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