In wandering through EarthEasy’s website, I found this article with a title that caught my attention: Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy. It’s actually an excerpt from Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, and it first appeared in Mother Jones.
It was two words in the title that made me stop: “no longer.” My thought is that having more never made us happy; we just thought it would. It isn’t that the way to be happy has changed, just that we might be starting to figure out that some of our old assumptions were false.
The excerpt wasn’t as simplistic as the title makes it appear. McKibben addresses the problem that, while More is no longer Better, the assumption that it is still basic to our (Western) economic model of growth, progress, and productivity. Our pursuit of more has created this whole culture that is now realizing that More Stuff means More Dirty, i.e., oil, gasoline use, landfills, plastics, pesticides, etc.
He goes into a lot more detail than I’m going to tackle here, and looks at More/Happy in several different cultures. Go read it; you’ll be interested.
What came to mind for me was a class I took back in high school on American history. My teacher, who was both passionate and articulate, described a historical cycle that occurs over and over again, across centuries and societies. A civilization begins simply struggling to survive. If it does survive past the initial poverty and/or political upheaval (or what-have-you), it moves into a time of growth. People build, and farm, and start businesses. Families have children who survive past infancy. The children grow up and have children. From growth – consistent growth – comes a time of prosperity. People don’t just have what they need, they have much more. There is excess. The memories of survival fade. The newer generations know only prosperity, and it is at that point that the civilization moves to apathy. Everyone expects a certain level of comfort and security as a natural right; participation in government decreases; understanding of bigger issues decreases. People nod and smile but don’t really care, as long as they can still have what they’re used to having.
Sound familiar?
The bad news: apathy leads, inevitably, to economic, political, and social structures falling apart.
The good news: we don’t have to wait until they fall apart before we stop being apathetic.
Image Credit: debaird.
