How much stuff is enough?

July 19, 2002 - When I was a teenager during the 1950s, I loved looking at articles in magazines like Popular Mechanics that showed what the world would be like in a few years when technology had taken over our lives. You may remember the personal helicopter that would whiz us past traffic jams on the road and the robots that would do the housework and eliminate drudgery. The big question in those days was what we would do with all of our leisure time because work was predicted to decline to 20 hours a week.

Now cut ahead 50 years. When I look about my house, the future predicted by those articles has indeed arrived. We've got a dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, TV set and VCR, microwave oven, food freezer, automatic garage door opener, telephone answering machine, email and CD player. I have yet to become a possessor of a cell phone or DVD player, but they have become ubiquitous and seem to be necessities. At work, there is the computer, copier, fax, email and voicemail. But the reality is that all that technology is not freeing me to enjoy more leisure; instead, it enables me to be far more productive in a given unit of time.

There was a time when we yearned to have more time to read, do things with our friends, indulge in hobbies, spend more time with our children and grandchildren, go camping and travel. Instead, our work week hasn't shrunk, we are working longer hours than we did two decades ago. The tradeoff has been that we are being paid more money so that we can buy more STUFF.

I believe it was a deliberate plan. World War II brought an end to the Great Depression and boosted the American economy to become the dominant force in the world. As the war was drawing to an end, the urgent question was how to keep the U.S. economy booming during peace time. The answer delivered by the President's Council of Economic Advisors was consumption. Shortly after the end of the war, Victor Lebow, a retailing analyst put it this way: "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 consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate." When that vision is supplemented with the notion of disposability so that products are used once and discarded, then markets can never be saturated.

After the trauma of September 11, U.S. President George Bush affirmed the success of this program when he urged all Americans to do their civic duty by going out and shopping in order to keep the economy growing. And amazingly, it worked. Both Canada and the U.S., whose economies had been diving before Sept. 11, are experiencing a strong economic upturn. Consumerism now forms the bulk of our economy.

When I was a child, a swamp, woods or even empty lot engaged me for hours with the magic of constant surprise revealed by nature. For most urban children, that world is no longer readily available, so we've substituted the wonder and diversity of the natural world with the human-created products of our economy.

Today, despite rampant consumerism, social problems of alienation, depression, drug abuse, suicide, spousal violence, road rage and loneliness have become major concerns. But in our preoccupation with keeping the economy growing, we fail to ask fundamental questions like what is an economy for, how much is enough and what are the important things in our lives. I think it's time to ask those questions, to reopen the ideas about more leisure time and quality of life and get off this mindless and destructive path of hyperconsumption.

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