I see it all around me—to a lesser extent in people I know, and to a much greater extent in the media—this pervasive image of wealth and expenditure, of the good life (it isn’t even the American Dream anymore). We see this vision of how other people live, and we come to believe that it depicts what is normal. But at this point in my life, I don’t think I have the slightest idea of what normal is (for me, or for the rest of the world). I mean, I’ve been working and earning and spending money out in the real world for something like 6 years now, and my mom certainly made sure I knew how to handle money long before that, but none of that has given me a good sense of what is normal, what I should expect when I graduate and am completely on my own, making and spending much more money than ever before. And maybe that’s part of the problem; maybe there is no normal, we just want to think there is.
In the end though, I think the problem of affluenza is that it is universally present. So many people in this country don’t have to struggle to actually make ends meet. Many end up struggling because they want that nice new car, and they need the cable TV with 500 channels, but these are really just luxuries, and so is almost everything else we consume. As a society, we have become so efficient at providing necessities that we take them for granted. Since we can take the necessities for granted, everything else is just a luxury. There’s a quote from a Roman philosopher I can’t remember fully, but the gist of it is that the presence of food critics marks a civilization as being opulent. How ironic is it then that good food (the kind we have critics for) is probably the most holistic, useful, and fulfilling luxuries available to us, and yet we increasingly ignore it, opting instead for fast food or a quick fixing frozen dinner?
kade304 March 9, 2009 at 11:46 pm