The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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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.