Stuff

Overweight, overleveraged, overdrawn, overburdened with too much stuff. We like stuff, and we love shopping for it. Anne Quindlen writes:

These are dark days in the United States: the cataclysmic stock-market declines, the industries edging up on bankruptcy, the home foreclosures and the waves of layoffs. But the prospect of an end to plenty has uncovered what may ultimately be a more pernicious problem, an addiction to consumption so out of control that it qualifies as a sickness. The suffocation of a store employee by a stampede of shoppers was horrifying, but it wasn't entirely surprising.

But let's look, not at the numbers, but the atmospherics. Appliances, toys, clothes, gadgets. Junk. There's the sad truth. Wall Street executives may have made investments that lost their value, but, in a much smaller way, so did the rest of us. A person in the United States replaces a cell phone every 16 months, not because the cell phone is old, but because it is oldish.

Hard times offer the opportunity to ask hard questions, and one of them is the one my friend asked, staring at sweaters and shoes: why did we buy all this stuff? Did anyone really need a flat-screen in the bedroom, or a designer handbag, or three cars?

Irresponsible use of credit got us here, so what's the government's solution?

The drumbeat that accompanied Black Friday this year was that the numbers had to redeem us, that if enough money was spent by shoppers it would indicate that things were not so bad after all. But what the economy required was at odds with a necessary epiphany. Because things are dire, many people have become hesitant to spend money on trifles. And in the process they began to realize that it's all trifles.

Rampant consumerism drives our economy, so to fix this mess we need to borrow, shop and spend more. This is where the pursuit of stuff has gotten us.

Anne Quindlen, an innocuous, squishy-middle liberal who writes very well, gets it:

Here I go, stating the obvious: stuff does not bring salvation.

No it doesn't. Holocaust survivor Dr.Viktor Frankl observed that happiness can occur even in the extreme privation of a concentration camp. He also believed that happiness cannot be pursued for its own sake. To achieve happiness, one must forget about it and pursue a cause greater than oneself and be true to ones conscience.

And Salvation? One must look a little higher than the Best Buy sign.

The upside of failure is that it draws our attention back to the fundamentals.