simple life

Here's a quiz from a recent PBS series about spending and materialism called Affluenza.

1. Which of the following is comparable to the size of a typical three-car garage?a. a basketball court b. a McDonald's restaurant c. an "RV" (recreational vehicle) d. the average home in 1950.

Answer: d. Many of today's three-car garages occupy 900 square feet, just about the average size of an entire home in the 1950s. Many people use the extra garage space to store things they own and seldom use. Often we hear that Americans have lost ground economically and have less purchasing power. But Americans are buying more luxurious items, partly by working more and going deeply into debt. The homes they live in and the cars they drive today are often bigger and more technologically advanced than those purchased by their parents.

2. The percentage of Americans calling themselves "very happy" reached its highest point in what year? a. 1957 b. 1967 c. 1977 d. 1987

Answer: a. The number of "very happy" people peaked in 1957, and has remained fairly stable or declined ever since. Even though we consume twice as much as we did in the 1950s, people were just as happy when they had less.

3. How much of an average American's lifetime will be spent (on average) watching television commercials? a. 6 months b. 3 months c. 1 year d. 1.5 years

Answer: C. In contrast, Americans on average spend only 40 minutes a week playing with their children, and members of working couples talk with one another on average only 12 minutes a day.

4. True or false? Americans carry $1 billion in personal debt, not including real estate and mortgages.

Answer: False. Americans carry $1 trillion in personal debt, approximately $4,000 for every man, woman and child, not including real estate and mortgages. On average, Americans save only 4 percent of their income, in contrast to the Japanese, who save an average of 16 percent.

5. Which activity did more Americans do in 1996? a. graduate from college b. declare bankruptcy

Answer: b. In 1996, more than 1 million Americans declared bankruptcy, three times as many as in 1986. Americans have more than 1 billion credit cards, and less than one-third of credit card holders pay off their balances each month.

6. In the industrialized world, where is the U.S. ranked in terms of its income equality between the rich and the poor? (First being the most income-equal.) a. 1st b. 5th c. 12th d. 22nd

7. The world's 358 billionaires together possess as much money as the poorest _____ of the world's population? a. 15 percent b. 30 percent c. 50 percent d. 10 percent

Answer: c. Nearly 50 percent. The world's 358 billionaires' combined assets roughly equal the assets of the world's poorest 2.5 billion people.

a. everyone who ever lived before them b. the combined Third World populations
c. the Romans at the height of the Roman Empire d. all of the above

Answer: All of the above. Since 1950, Americans alone have used more resources than everyone who ever lived before them. Each American individual uses up 20 tons of basic raw materials annually. Americans throw away 7 million cars a year, 2 million plastic bottles an hour and enough aluminum cans annually to make six thousand DC-10 airplanes.

9. Americans' total yearly waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks long enough to:

a. wrap around the Earth six times b. reach half-way to the moon
c. connect the North and South Poles d. build a bridge between North America and China

Answer: a. and b. Even though Americans comprise only five percent of the world's population, in 1996 we used nearly a third of its resources and produced almost half of its hazardous waste. The average North American consumes five times as much as an average Mexican, 10 times as much as an average Chinese and 30 times as much as the average person in India.

10. Which president feared that untamed American capitalism might create a corrupt civilization?

Answer: c. President Theodore Roosevelt feared that allowing American capitalism to develop unleashed would eventually create a corrupt civilization. He was a strong proponent of simple living.

How'd you do?
Life at the end of the 20th century is confusing - It is increasingly the best of times ... the worst of times to quote Dickens. About 100 years ago, one of the first sociologists, Emile Durkheim, charged that modern society was afflicted with a social disease he defined as anomie, or normlessness. It is a notion that is similar to the spoiling of a child. Very simply, the more we get, the more we want; but it is more complicated. The idea is this. We begin life learning about what to expect. We come to count on these expectations and are disappointed when they aren't met. If our desires are satiated beyond our expectations, our appetites for these new rewards increase and so do our expectations, until we expect rewards beyond actual reason.

See if this sounds familiar. With increased prosperity desires increase. At the very moment when traditional rules have lost their authority, the richer prize offered these appetites stimulates them and makes them more exigent and impatient of control. The state of de-regulation or anomie is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. (Durkheim in Suicide (1987).

Merton (1951) further explained. To the degree that regularity disappears in a (person's circle of significant others), the individual is in a normless situation, no matter how firm and consistent normative regulation may be elsewhere in the society ... Few facts are so important in analyzing a society as those concerning the stability of normative patterns in the basic units of person-to-person interaction. thus, divorce, extremely high mobility, and other forms of small group dissolution provide clues to the total state of the social system. In day-to-day social life, what really matters most immediately to the individual is what he can count up-on from his network of personal relationships.

If we were to chart the general course of American Family Life from about 1920 to the present, we would find that access to material goods has increased steadily despite family financial ability to pay for them. Things have become ends in themselves since we have replaced personal involvement and emotional attachment with things. And social thinkers would have us believe that this is bad because there are limits to our ability to provide things.

Both parents working ultimately results in neither parent parenting. The more we work, the more we purchase, the more we have to maintain, the less time we have for personally handling the cognitive, emotional, and social development of those other things in our lives - children. Children born to such families are probably more likely to get parenting from television (socialization, at any rate). Since the main function of media is to sell us stuff (raise our interest in obtaining things), it only takes a couple of generations of these urchins before we just want stuff. What's the end result of all this?
Read the paper or watch the news.

Certainly people are caught up in what we used to call the rat race - trying to get ahead (of something), keeping up with the Joneses, looking out for number one. And we hardly ever ask ourselves why we are doing all this.

Voluntary Simplicity is an old solution with a few new wrinkles to modern problems of overwork and dissatisfaction. One of the new wrinkles is the presence of support groups and information services on the internet.

In addition to the PBS Show Affluenza, other media based "specials" are appearing in print media and their online counterpart websites: