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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.
So we are in this ridiculous situation where we go to work, maybe two jobs even, and we come home and we’re exhausted so we plop down on our new couch and watch TV and the commercials tell us “YOU SUCK” so gotta go to the mall to buy something to feel better, then we gotta go to work more to pay for the stuff we just bought so we come home and we’re more tired so you sit down and watch more T.V. and it tells you to go to the mall again and we’re on this crazy work-watch-spend treadmill and we could just stop.
It’s so difficult to avoid the work-watch-spend treadmill, because the whole world is running on it. So, even if you say “STOP!” and step off, you find yourself standing alone, as the world passes by you, running on the treadmill, but oblivious of it.
Comments (2)
I have to add one caveat.
When I was in high school/college, I watched very little TV. I didn’t own a TV. Etc.
But during those years, my life was very full and exciting.
When I started working (dead-end)jobs, I started watching a lot of TV.
I didn’t pay any attention to the commercials, because I couldn’t afford any of the stuff there anyway.
But I loved me the TV.
Why? Three reasons.
1. It was free.
2. It was a way for me to feel connected to something even though I couldn’t afford to socialize/meet friends.
3 (most important). On TV, things changed.
This is something no one ever mentions. In my day-to-day life, I do the same thing, over and over again. There’s little possibility for growth. Each day is exactly like the other.
On TV, there’s an exciting story — the story that is absent from my life.
I became very fond of my television characters, and found myself over-invested in what would happen to them.
Nutty, dontcha think?
But it was because TV was something that changed and developed and grew.
@Blue: But, that’s precisely the point — we almost always use TV to fill in the emptiness in our life, except that it only fills time, not the emptiness itself.
All of us would prefer to live a full life, only if we knew how. TV is not going to tell us how. If we want to search for that answer, we’ll need to look elsewhere. No?
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