Posted by
Michael Kleen on Friday, August 08, 2008 10:07:34 PM
Every day, advertisers tell us that we need more; more cars, more clothes, more food, more money, more jewelry, more music--more of everything, as if the United States is an all-you-can-eat buffet with a huge neon sign that says, “pig out!”
I’ve never been a wealthy man. When I was a teenager, my friends and I scrounged around for change in order to buy a meal at El Famous Burrito.
Sometimes, we could only afford a drink, so we would sit and talk while taking advantage of our refill privileges.
Those are the times I remember most vividly, when everything seemed scarce. Money was more precious. Food seemed more flavorful. Even my free time was more valuable--when my friends and I would make the most out of the few hours we had to goof off after school
Excess seems to sour everything. The more you have of it, the less you appreciate what you have. That seems like common sense, but that message is often lost today when we are taught that happiness increases alongside the amount of money or stuff you accumulate.
Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. As a consequence, we are driven to accumulate ever-increasing amounts of wealth and luxury, because what we have never seems to be enough.
A few years ago, Barry Schwartz wrote a groundbreaking book on the subject called The Paradox of Choice. In it, he argued that our culture of abundance actually robs us of satisfaction because being confronted by too many choices raises our levels of anxiety and makes us discontent.
More importantly, he presented statistical analysis showing that, past a certain point, there is no quantitative correlation between increased happiness and increased wealth. “Once a society’s level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence, further increasees in national wealth have almost no effect on happiness,” he explained (106).
Rising rates of depression and metal illness attest to the fact that while we have grown wealthier as a society, our emotional health has suffered. As Schwartz points out in his book, it’s precisely the things that limit our choices (to a certain extent)--friends, family, religious service, group acceptance--that make us the happiest.
That is why I believe mass production has decreased our quality of life. Take the simple example of bread. Everyone eats bread. The grocery store offers rows and rows of different factory produced breads. Can you remember the last time you ate a piece of Wonder Bread and thought to yourself, “wow, that is really good!”
No, of course you can’t. Now, have you ever made your own bread? Have you ever kneaded the dough, added your own butter and spices, and pulled it fresh from the oven? I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.
The reason for this difference is simple. Anyone can just go to the store and buy mass produced bread. Every loaf is the same. Every loaf is flavorless and bland. Your own home-made bread, however, is one of a kind. It is something that you worked hard to produce, and there is nothing else quite like it. When you make something yourself, or when you only own a few of that thing, you tend to treasure it because it is unique or scarce.
You see, what is at stake here is not only the quality of the products we buy, but our quality of life as well. In a mass produced culture that equates happiness with excess, we find that we suffer from a poverty of value.
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