I have already written about the work-watch-spend treadmill in my post on Annie Leonard’s ‘The Story of Stuff‘, but here’s a little excerpt from the annotated script of the documentary very thoughtfully provided by Annie —
So, in the U.S. we have more stuff than ever before, but polls show that our national happiness is actually declining. Our national happiness peaked sometime in the 1950s, the same time as this consumption mania exploded. Hmmm. Interesting coincidence.
I think I know why. We have more stuff but we have less time for the things that really make us happy: family, friends, leisure time. We’re working harder than ever. Some analysts say that we have less leisure time now than in Feudal Society.
And do you know what the two main activities are that we do with the scant leisure time we have? Watch TV and shop. In the U.S., we spend 3—4 times as many hours shopping as our counterparts in Europe do.
Annie starts off by throwing away her iPod in a trash can (really!) and asking if we have ever wondered where all the stuff we buy comes from and where it goes when we throw it out. Then, using a funny stand up script backed up by simple animation, she explains why the text book version that our stuff simply moves from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal doesn’t work: it is a linear system and we live on a finite planet and you can not run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.
