ColumnGot Affluenza?

Affluenza is an affliction that is characterized by the relentless pursuit of material goods and luxury services. This condition is about keeping up with the Joneses, even if the upscale lifestyle comes with debt, stress and no real or lasting happiness. While some may think of this syndrome as just another pop-culture cliche, others consider it to be a real affliction. I happen to be an accomplished hypochondriac, and generally think there is a decent chance that I have every possible ailment that exists, whether it is physical, spiritual or emotional (in fact, at this very minute I’m trying to decide if the pain radiating across in my left shoulder is a muscle pull or a heart attack). But affluenza is one condition from which I do not suffer – my aging inner hippie, coupled with a lack of disposable income, keep me fairly immune from rampant consumerism.

Also, for the last 20 years I have been a middle class person living in an extremely affluent suburb, and this has lent me an aggressive form of reverse snobbery. I like to think of myself as a latter day Beverly Hillbilly, clanking around Mercedes country in a rusty Toyota with a failing muffler. I wear my relative poverty as if it were a sign of groundedness and moral superiority, when it’s really just the result of laziness and half-assed financial planning. But living as I do in a town known for movie stars, former presidents, and investment bankers, I am familiar with affluenza, and its sufferers.

If any of the following symptoms apply to you, you may have contracted a bad case of affluenza:
-You have no idea where the toilet brush, rubber gloves or cleaning supplies in your home are kept.

-When you hear that Kim Kardashian is planning a wedding that will cost ten million dollars, it strikes you as something to aspire to, as opposed to the end of all hope, reason, and laughter.

-You have a nutritionist and an acupuncturist. For your dog

-You use the word “summer” as a verb, as in “We summer in our cottage in Maine.”

-You have, at least once, bought something so extravagant, that you had to divide the purchase between two credit cards, a fistful of cash and some traveler’s checks.

-You paid someone else to teach your child how to ride a bike.

-You are unaware that there are cars manufactured in the United States, not to mention Korea.

-Your engagement ring can be seen from space.

-You think of Depression as something to be treated with Prozac, as opposed to government job initiatives and tax breaks for small businesses.

-You are unaware that drinkable water is available right out of the sink.

-The thought of spending $56,000 a year on college does not immediately give you chest pains (although I guess that could just be a muscle pull…)

-Two words: life coach.

Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

Image: web flunkie

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Fields of carpet, a sea of leather: It’s becoming as endangered as the polar bear as we embrace less is more (less indulgent, more power to you).

Forward green design is radically shifting the kind of statements we are making in our dwellings. How do you know you have arrived? Once it was a clear site line from the entryway to the Olympic-sized pool, or finding yourself diminished by a great room the size of a hotel lobby, that you figured you could squeeze your entire house inside.

Scaling down has produced a new kind of house envy. We covet sleek, modern utility. In this era of the understatement, these luxury spots are being subtracted:

The Wrapping Room

Candy Spelling and the housewives of Beverly Hills and Menlo Park were all taken in by this “bonus room” suggested by Martha Stewart as a place for wrapping all of those holiday gifts. Sorry ladies. Stick em in reusable bags or boxes and call it a day.

The Powder Room

No need to impress with a fancy shmancy bath just for visitors. In a prefab or other low energy dwelling, guests use the main floor bathroom like everyone else. Just keep it pretty with flowers and clean towels when you entertain.

Three Car Garage

Even two car garages might suffice for families using public transit. This McMansion feature is as tacky as it gets and usually includes plenty of cabinets for box store bulk and other evidence of affluenza.

Au Pair Room

Who can afford live-in nannies anymore?

The Guest Room

This is not a necessity as it once was. Anyone willing to stay at your house rather than a hotel is willing to sleep on a sofa bed. Grandmas can crawl in with the kiddies and good old air mattresses do just fine for sleepovers.

The Dressing Room

As we continue to clean out our closets and espouse the notion quality over quantity, there is little need for massive closets or spare rooms for getting dressed.

Fitness Center/Gym

Most efficient spaces might see an elliptical in the bedroom or multi purpose room rather than an entire space devoted to machines. Ride your bike to the gym. What a concept.

Walk-in Pantry

If you are endorsing fresh, local, organic and slow, then you aren’t stocking up on processed foods, and a few good shelves should do the trick.

Home Theater

Okay, we all like having friends over to watch the Oscars or favorite films, but only suits in the biz and the tenacious nouveau riche are building screening suites in their cribs with the works: Ridiculous sound systems; mohair chairs and massive screens, popcorn machines and bars. It’s the epitome of 80s gross. Come on, plug in the crockpot and gather round the LG in the den. It’s so much warmer.

Cabana

Keep the cabana boy but ditch the pool house, unless you are renting it out to buy groceries during the recession (which really isn’t over). Pools suck energy and this resort inspired space is practically extinct.

Images: gsloan, Candacerose; Elan Interiors; largerich; Patriotweb; HFB; Oak Hampton Park; HTN

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I’m always tempted by those clever hooks for purses to keep better track of our keys. They’re usually hidden in my bag under a bushel of important papers, hair ties, various wallets and glasses. Digging for keys is adding years to my life. It’s that stressful because disorder complicates my life.

There are people out there called professional organizers who charge hourly rates to box and label the accumulation in our homes. And everywhere you look, there are attractive storage boxes and baskets for sale to keep things in their proper places in our offices and homes. What I wouldn’t do to keep my family’s things in their proper places. I would glue them down if that worked.

The middle class is begging for these gadgets and services. We are not only being buried alive by constant connection and information, our accumulation, too, is taking over and greatly complicating our lives.

It doesn’t matter that I’m attempting to go paperless by saying no to receipts at the register or reading my news and paying  bills online. It doesn’t matter that I spent last weekend eliminating clothes from my daughters’ closets and retiring enough garments to fill five supersize garbage compactor bags. Today, my husband is hauling them to his mother’s so that her nurse can ship the items to her poor family in the Philippines.

As I strive to reduce excess and clutter to make my home the simplified, functional haven I envision, I continue to do battle with the nagging phenomenon of  losing shit. Shit! I’m sick of it.

“Where’s the English paper I printed out?”

“Who moved my tax documents? They were on kitchen table!”

“Have you seen my new skinny jeans? I’ve looked in the hampers and in everyone’s rooms and I can’t find them.”

Yes, playing the surprisingly unrewarding game of lost and found remains the most aggravating symptom of the consumption syndrome known as affluenza, aptly defined by Wikipedia as “the portmanteau of the words affluence and influenza and a socially transmitted condition of overload resulting form the dogged pursuit of more. ”

First, allow me to point out that the mother is the sole proprietor of the house capable of locating lost articles. And once the lost treasure surfaces, I rarely see the results I would expect, i.e. a big hug and overwhelming expression of joy on their faces. “Goodness, Mother, how can I ever thank you?”

Take my husband, an intelligent eco man who acquires the least, loses the most, and can’t find objects that are literally under his nose. One daughter has inherited this same bizarre gene. The other daughter was once a registered bloodhound like her mama, but is now losing her shit, and has succumbed to the same bad habits as her influential sister such as getting undressed and leaving belongings strewn on the floor of various rooms. (They also both bite their fingers and devour chocolate like wild beasts, habits I link to the bizarre genes inherited from their mother.)

Every so often, like last weekend, I get on a roll and rifle through closets, sort my kitchen desk nook, organize the kids’ bins of art supplies, and perform the most dreaded and vapid chore of all – filing. Man oh man, does anyone loathe filing as much as I do?

I wish I could get that organizer lady back here to help me make new files and sort all the junk. She made professional labels on her label maker. She was great. I wanted to marry her. I want her to move in and take over and take me away. She’s Calgon to me, minus the harsh chemicals. But wouldn’t you know it, I don’t know where I put her number.

I try not to beat myself up about all of this – to follow the advice of modern clergy and therapists and be compassionate with myself. Sure, I’m a bonehead about keeping order, a little better than some of my most eccentric working friends, and not half as good as most stay-at-home moms.

It’s really a matter of overcoming the selfishness which leads to the over-consumption of material possessions, according to the author of the website My Super- Charged Life. As he sees it, the disease of deriving happiness from the next new toy “is a fruitless pursuit that will quickly leave a person depressed, disillusioned and broke.”

I feel depressed when I drop my girls off at their private school and pass the lost and found corner which is so generously stocked, it resembles a second hand store. Piles of forgotten lunch boxes with rotting contents, abandoned warm winter jackets, essential classroom binders and adorable stylish tee shirts: They all abound in the unsightly lost and found – glaring symbols of affluenza.

At the end of each month, a volunteer parent named Tila from Colombia ships the unclaimed items to the poor in her homeland. The children there are appreciative. Children who barely have enough food to eat don’t snub their cheese sandwiches and abandon lunch boxes on the black top. When you own just one winter jacket, you don’t leave it behind when you board the bus for home.

True, kids will always be forgetful. I was once a forgetful child. But unlike my daughters, I had less and kept track of it. My walk-in-closet contained about five pair of shoes and two toy boxes, one with Barbies, one with stuffed animals. It was easy to clean up after play. It was freeing.

Guess it all adds up to wanting to be free, again, free from the clutter and feeling that fleeting high from getting something new, a wired emotion we don’t feel by accident.

In the ’30s, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (known as the father of public relations) figured out how to mold public opinion via third party propaganda campaigns for selling everything from bacon and eggs promoted by the nation’s doctors to cigarettes, soap and books. This marketing strategy dictated to the receptive nation eventually became a familiar meme: Linking the accumulation of goods with feelings of happiness and success.

Ironically, I’m now finding happiness is attainable not by adding but subtracting. If anything should get lost, it is the brainwashing (and sometimes greenwashing) that the more we amass, the better we feel.

I strive to find the simplicity of less. Even more than ignorance, I suspect it is the route to bliss. In other words, it is time to bench Team Edward.

This is the latest installment in Luanne’s column, Life in the Green Lane.

Main Image: Evelyn is Here

Images: Jeffrey Beall, It’s a Purse Thing, Squidoo, Wikipedia

The post Lost and Found in the Age of Affluenza appeared first on EcoSalon.

Shop till You Drop, a dead end job mystery is a humorous detective novel about a woman who uncovers crimes while employed at an ultra-exclusive boutique in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. But there is much truth to the title of this fiction. It is also the real-life saga of more and more women during the recession.

Conspicuous consumption seems to be the remedy for what ails many money-strapped UK women, as found in a new survey by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire.

Some 700 women were asked about their emotional responses to their grim financial situations and almost half reported they were pretty darn scared. Nealy 80% said they were so concerned about their bank accounts, they would be making cutbacks on spending.

Yet 79% also confessed they would go the material girl route to cheer themselves up – splurging on clothes and other items to release those endorphins. Hey, chocolate only goes so far.

The survey results, published by Life Science, also found 40 percent of the women cited depression as an excuse to overspend, while 60 percent claimed “feeling a bit low” was a good enough reason.

Karen Pine, Professor University of Hertfordshire

“This type of spending, or compensatory consumption, serves as a way of regulating intense emotions,” observes Karen Pine, Aussie professor and author of  Sheeconomics (Headline Publishing Group, 2009).

Pine likens the splurge mentality to an addiction such as drug dependency in which people self-medicate, but instead of drugs, the high is retail therapy: a new dress, eye shadow and a few pairs of summer sandals. Ironically, it all adds up to more credit card debt and feeling even worse after from pangs of guilt.

“If shopping is an emotional habit for women, they may feel the need to keep spending despite the economic downturn,” figures Pine. “Or, perhaps worse still, if they can’t spend we might see an increase in mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.”

I guess it’s true. The shopping avenue has always served as a huge distraction for me, something that allows me to flex my creative eye, even if the wallet is not quite as limber. In fact, one of my favorite haunts is Retail Therapy, a designer outlet in San Francisco. I’m guaranteed to get my fix there when my bank book gets me down.

Who says affluenza ceases just because your portfolio goes south?

Apparently, women are not the only victims of the shopping addiction during hard times. A 2006 study by the Stanford University School of Medicine found 5.5 percent of men label themselves compulsive buyers.

So what is the cure for the cure?

In the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic, the compulsive shopper finds relief by attending a self-help group and purging her stuff. Maybe that also works in the real world. There sure would be a lot of takers among the most serious victims of the recession, those struggling just to buy food.

2008 Robert Zuckerman / Walt Disney Pictures

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