MORE HAPPINESS LESS STUFF,
HOW TO TRANSFORM THE MODERN SHOPPING DILEMMA by Judith Fertig
According to the online Ency- clopedia of Earth, the present-day “worker as consumer” worldview was fully entrenched in the United States by the 1920s, when the labor move- ment stopped advocating a shorter workweek to instead focus on securing better wages and working conditions. The goal was to guarantee more buying power for workers, so that they could purchase more than just the necessities of daily living.
s winter holiday shopping inexorably nears its peak, the last weeks of the year are often the most frenetic. We’re bombarded with advertisements for gifts of all kinds, caught between doing good for the people we love and thinking that surely there’s a better way than trudging around like beasts of burden, crossing hazardous parking lots and navigating crowded malls in search of a satis- fying end to the seasonal buying spree.
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We wonder: Will the gifts we spend our time and money to buy re- ally make anyone happy—or the world a better place? What if we could reinvent shopping
every day of the year? It turns out that it’s possible to simplify our shopping, while at the same time making it both mean- ingful and green, including purchasing gifts that will do the most good every time they are used. On our way to realizing this ideal solution, it helps to understand the ori- gins of the modern shopping dilemma. To begin, we must ask ourselves why we
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respond to marketers in ways that per- petuate mindless socioeconomic trends.
From Producer to Consumer
Americans experienced a major para- digm shift in the early part of the 19th century with the advent of the Indus- trial Revolution. Basically, we changed from an agrarian economy, in which most people produced what they con- sumed, to a manufacturing and services economy, in which people are mostly just consumers.
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“We have more stuff, but less time for the things that make us happy.”
~ Annie Leonard
After World War II, this idea got a boost from economist Victor LeBeau, who in 1947 declared, “Our enormous- ly productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfac- tion, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.” It’s perhaps not coincidental that, “Our national happiness peaked in the 1950s,” as related by Annie Leonard in the compelling video The Story of Stuff, just as television began spreading the new philosophy of what Leonard calls
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