1장
The Epidemic of Overconsumption: How Stuff Became Our Master
When the Joneses moved next door, everything changed. The new SUV in their driveway, the constant deliveries of furniture and electronics, their perfectly manicured lawn - suddenly your comfortable home felt shabby by comparison. This familiar scenario plays out across America daily, fueling what authors John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas Naylor diagnose as "affluenza" - a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.
First published in 2001 and updated in subsequent editions, "Affluenza" has become part of our cultural lexicon, with internet references growing from 200 before their PBS documentary to over 2.3 million by 2013. The book has attracted praise from environmental leaders like James Gustave Speth and Lester R. Brown, who commend its practical solutions for our consumer-obsessed society. What began as an extension of a documentary has evolved into an enduring classic that challenges us to question why we're working "too much to buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't even know."
2장
Fever Dreams: America's Overheated Expectations
America has developed a case of feverish expectations that's overheating both our economy and our planet. We now spend 71% of our $15 trillion economy on consumer goods - more on shoes, jewelry, and watches than on higher education. Shopping centers have replaced churches as cultural centers, with 70% of Americans visiting malls weekly. The spectacle of mall openings has become a cultural phenomenon, like Washington's Super Mall with its imitation Mount Rainier and celebratory fireworks, where shoppers proudly admit to buying far more than planned.
Our material expectations have skyrocketed since the 1950s. Average home sizes have doubled to 2,500 square feet, cars have ballooned into massive SUVs that make owners feel "powerful," and technologies that didn't exist in 1970 (smartphones, computers, etc.) are now considered absolute necessities. Online shopping has exploded from $50 billion to over $200 billion in just a decade.
The fever spreads as we constantly compare ourselves not to neighbors but to wealthier colleagues and inflated television lifestyles. Harvard economist Juliet Schor found that heavy TV watchers vastly overestimate what average Americans own, leading to inflated personal expectations. As the wealth gap widened in the 1980s, even high earners began feeling "poor on $100,000" compared to the newly wealthy. This constant upward comparison has reduced American savings rates to dangerously low levels, creating what Italian economist Stefano Bartolini calls "the example not to follow" - a vicious cycle where consumption and work create stress and loneliness, which we then try to solve through more private purchases.
Despite having twice the material goods as in the 1950s, Americans report no higher levels of happiness. We've created a society where even too much is never enough.
3장
Drowning in Possessions: The Suffocation of Stuff
Americans have become a nation drowning in stuff, with our homes and storage units overflowing with possessions we can barely keep track of. Shopping addiction affects at least ten million Americans, creating a destructive cycle where emotional voids are temporarily filled through purchasing. Compulsive buyers report experiencing heightened sensations and altered states of consciousness while shopping, with some comparing the moment of purchase to an orgasm. The addiction stems from anxiety, loneliness, and low self-esteem, as shoppers seek recognition, acceptance, or escape through their purchases.
Our addiction to stuff operates on the principle of diminishing marginal utility - each additional purchase brings less satisfaction than the previous one. Yet affluenza victims respond by consuming more, not less. Our culture pushes "more" at every turn - bigger highways, more explicit advertising, and supersized food portions.
This stuff-centered existence manifests in every aspect of American life. Air travel exemplifies our congested lives, with passenger numbers skyrocketing from 295 million in 1980 to 730 million in 2012. Airlines pursue a strategy of "More people, less stuff," cramming in passengers while restricting carry-ons to reduce fuel costs. They didn't anticipate Americans gaining an average of twenty pounds since 1990, adding half a billion dollars in fuel costs. Meanwhile, passengers fight to keep their possessions with them, creating a battleground over limited overhead space.
Our obsession with oversized vehicles has created unprecedented traffic congestion in American cities. The tech industry proposes autonomous vehicles as the solution - cars that can drive themselves, refuel, and park without human intervention. By 2013, six million vehicles already contained robotic intelligence for crash avoidance and navigation. While corporations see enormous profit potential in this technology, it represents yet another way we're avoiding the fundamental problem of our cluttered, car-dependent lifestyle.
We haven't freely chosen this consumptive lifestyle but have been corralled into it through social engineering and economic pressures. We try to fulfill fundamental human needs for identity, expression, and belonging by displaying our possessions. The system makes resistance nearly impossible - from mandatory gift-giving seasons to required sports equipment for children to appliances designed to be unrepairable. Even when we choose not to drive, we still subsidize car culture through taxes that fund roads and mandated parking, building these costs into everything we purchase.
4장
Time Poverty: The Stress Epidemic
Affluenza manifests as acute stress, with victims stretched beyond their limits with no margin for rest or reflection. The disease creates a harried populace that "shouts at microwave ovens to hurry up." American greetings have evolved from "Fine, and you?" to "Busy, and you?" as time scarcity has become our defining condition. Despite predictions that technology would create abundant leisure, we have less free time than thirty years ago.
Americans now work longer hours than any other industrialized nation. Harvard economist Juliet Schor found workers toiling 160 hours more annually in 1991 than in 1969. By 1999, the US had surpassed Japan for longest working hours. Over two-thirds of Americans say they want a more relaxed life, yet the pace continues accelerating. The irony is that while mothers who work fewer hours report greater happiness, economic pressures force more into full-time work. Unlike the 1960s when one wage earner could support a family of four, today two incomes barely support three people at the median standard of living.
Work has intensified dramatically, with computer monitoring creating pressure to perform faster. A 2013 Harris poll found 83 percent of American workers stressed on the job, with physical symptoms costing the economy over $300 billion annually. Meanwhile, Americans surrender vacation time worth $67 billion to employers, with only 38 percent using all their allotted days. Even on vacation, 72 percent regularly check in with work, fearing they'll be seen as slackers during the next round of layoffs.
Stress is "the new tobacco," according to Dr. Sarah Speck, constricting blood vessels just like nicotine. Men who skip vacations are 30% more likely to have heart attacks, while women's risk increases by 50% and their depression risk multiplies eightfold. Despite this, Americans prioritize financial portfolios over health portfolios, with heart attacks now striking people in their forties and fifties rather than sixties and seventies.
While American productivity has doubled since World War II, we've channeled all that progress into producing more things rather than working less. Europeans made a different choice - trading productivity gains for time instead of money. They now work nearly nine weeks less per year than Americans while achieving 91% of our productivity. As a result, Europeans live longer and are healthier despite spending far less on healthcare. The United States ranks last in health among rich nations and is projected to spend 19% of GDP on healthcare by 2014. As one activist put it, "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat," and possibly a dead one.
5장
Family Breakdown: Children in the Crosshairs
Affluenza undermines American family life like termites destroying a foundation. The pressure to keep up with the Joneses drives families into debt and conflict, contributing to America's doubled divorce rate since the 1950s, with money arguments figuring in 90% of divorces. Modern parents sacrifice personal time to be with their children, yet family dinners and vacations have dropped by a third since 1970. Exhausted parents cocoon at home in front of televisions, further exposing themselves to advertising that fuels consumption desires while community connections wither.
Children have become primary targets in the affluenza epidemic. Their spending has exploded from $4 billion in 1984 to $35 billion in 2005, with marketing to children growing 15,000% between 1980 and 2004. Today's children recognize logos by 18 months and request brand-name products by age two, receiving about 70 toys annually. The average twelve-year-old spends 48 hours weekly exposed to commercial messages but only 40 minutes in meaningful conversation with parents. Most young children trust TV characters over their parents, and 95% of American adults worry their children are too focused on consumption.
Psychologist David Walsh sees childhood affluenza reaching epidemic proportions, with market-created values of selfishness, instant gratification, and perpetual discontentment directly opposing the values most parents want to teach. Since the 1984 deregulation of children's television, marketing has fundamentally changed - where once parents were portrayed as wise figures, today's advertisers openly refer to parents as "gatekeepers" whose influence must be circumvented so children can be "captured, owned, and branded."
As education funding tightens due to tax cuts, schools increasingly turn to corporations for financial help, allowing advertising on school property. Education professor Alex Molnar describes how children are treated as "cash crops," with corporations providing "curriculum materials" that promote their products - from Revlon's "Good and Bad Hair Days" lessons on self-esteem to Exxon's materials explaining why the Valdez oil spill wasn't harmful.
America's children pay a high price for affluenza, with rising rates of depression, suicide thoughts, and actual child suicides tripling since the 1960s. Children are overscheduled to prepare them for a world of consumerism and competition - some schools have even banned recess to "maximize instruction time" for global economic competition. The values children absorb are concerning: 93% of teenage girls cite shopping as their favorite activity while fewer than 5% list "helping others." College freshmen now rank becoming "very well off financially" as their top goal, and narcissism has increased 30% among students since 1982.
6장
Community Collapse: From Connection to Consumption
As consumer competition intensifies, our sense of community has dramatically changed. What began as a quest for suburban good life has degenerated into private consumption that separates neighbors. Community spaces where neighbors can gather - what writer Ray Oldenburg calls "great good places" or "third places" - are disappearing. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam observes that Americans have transformed from "citizens to consumers," with declining participation in community organizations, voting, and public meetings. Meanwhile, digital technology creates an illusion of connection without genuine friendship.
When chain stores replace local businesses, traditional civic leaders disappear from community organizations. Though chains offer lower prices, communities lose their sense of belonging and cultural identity. While local businesses create a multiplier effect by hiring local services and carrying locally-made goods, national chains create a "divider effect." Major retailers like Home Depot, Starbucks, and Walmart now dominate their markets, with Walmart's annual revenue ($469 billion in 2012) rivaling America's Medicare expenditures and exceeding the economic power of most countries.
As affluenza pulls communities apart, Americans retreat inward, with at least 10% of homes now in gated communities. Including secured apartments and other security measures, one in five Americans lives behind bars. Sociologist Edward Blakely questions how the nation can maintain a social contract without social contact, while Robert Reich observes that affluent Americans have essentially seceded from the rest of society into separate communities with private services.
Local buying and investing has emerged as a potent antidote to affluenza. Like acupuncture or herbal remedies, the localization movement provides precise, preventive solutions attuned to changing times. Local businesses can better assess regional needs and provide more personalized service as the economy shifts toward services and experiences. Despite America's processed food landscape dotted with 100,000 fast-food restaurants, companies like Whole Foods and the farmer-owned Organic Valley cooperative are leading a return to healthier eating.
7장
Spiritual Emptiness: The Heart of Affluenza
As Americans fill their lives with things, they increasingly feel empty inside. Despite material abundance, there's a growing spiritual emptiness that religious figures like Mother Teresa have observed, calling America "the poorest place I've ever been." Even Republican strategist Lee Atwater confessed before his death that despite acquiring wealth, power, and prestige in the 1980s, he still felt empty, warning of "a spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society."
Rabbi Michael Lerner discovered while running a stress clinic that middle-class Americans often experience more stress from feeling their work is meaningless than from insufficient income. Initially presenting themselves as happy and stress-free, participants eventually revealed deep unhappiness and a hunger to serve the common good. This emptiness may explain why clinical depression rates are ten times higher than before 1945, with nearly half of American adults suffering from mental illness in any given year.
Psychology studies by Kasser and Ryan confirm that individuals primarily focused on financial aspirations experience "less self-actualization, less vitality, more depression and more anxiety" than those oriented toward community service and relationships. While many contemporary "conservatives" follow Ayn Rand's philosophy of self-interest, religious leaders like Pope Francis condemn unfettered capitalism and greed. Traditional religious wisdom teaches that life's purpose is to serve others and the common good, not accumulate things or power.
Our advanced technological culture could allow us to lead more meaningful lives by trading higher wages for reduced working hours. This would give us more time for freely chosen, voluntary work that enhances relationships and communities, allows creative expression, and reconnects us with nature. Such choices would give us time to consider what truly matters and how we want to use our remaining years.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified "flow" as a universal human goal - when "the ego falls away and time flies" as we're fully engaged in challenging activities that match our skills. His research found people were significantly happier during inexpensive leisure activities like conversation, gardening, or hobbies than during expensive, resource-intensive pursuits. These simple activities require few material resources but demand psychic energy. For the ancients, happiness came from virtuous, balanced living - moderation, gentleness, friendliness - not from shopping malls.
8장
Environmental Collapse: The Planet Pays the Price
Our overconsumption is rapidly depleting natural capital - petroleum, metals, water, farmland, trees, and climatic stability - at unprecedented rates. We're reaching a tipping point where our lifestyle threatens civilizational collapse, with symptoms that have preceded the fall of previous civilizations: depleting resources, accumulating pollution, exploitation of increasingly scarce and expensive resources, breakdown of natural services, growing environmental chaos, and demands for access to hostile regions.
Our economy is resorting to environmentally destructive technologies like fracking, mountaintop removal, and deep-sea drilling because easily accessed resources are disappearing. We've overfished oceans, creating unstable fish farming industries, while climate change drives increasing natural disasters - in 2012 alone, the hottest year on record, US damages reached $139 billion. The average middle-class family's yearly needs require industry to process four million pounds of materials, and each American consumes 40 million gallons of water and 2,500 barrels of oil in a lifetime. With humanity already using 30% more resources than Earth can regenerate annually, and Americans requiring five planets' worth of resources if everyone lived like them, we're facing a fundamental sustainability crisis.
Earth's species are suffering as humans disassemble their habitats. Coral reefs are dying, glaciers melting, and prairies disappearing under suburban development. Biologists like Norman Myers and E.O. Wilson warn we're experiencing the most severe extinction since the dinosaurs' demise 65 million years ago, with species disappearing at 1,000 times the natural rate.
Our chemical-dependent culture has created an environment where beloved advertising icons like the Marlboro Man, Ronald McDonald, and the Jolly Green Giant mask the dangerous reality of our synthetic chemical dependence. Of 84,000 chemicals in commercial use, only 1,500-2,000 have been tested for carcinogenicity, and two-fifths of the 3,000 highest-volume chemicals lack basic toxicity data. Most chemicals entered the market before 1979 federal legislation mandated review of new substances.
Chemical pollutants are creating chaos in the natural world by masquerading as hormones like estrogen and androgen. This endocrine disruption causes sexual abnormalities in wildlife: stunted sex organs in alligators, roosters that can't crow, "gay" female seagulls, and whales with both sex organs. One study found children whose mothers ate PCB-contaminated fish during pregnancy were born sooner, weighed less, and had lower IQs than a control group.
9장
Healing the Epidemic: Paths to Recovery
The first step in recovering from affluenza is to stop, take stock, and give yourself a break - just like bed rest for the flu. Joe Dominguez, a former stockbroker who retired at 31 through extreme frugality, co-authored "Your Money or Your Life" with Vicki Robin, teaching thousands to escape consumerism. Their nine-step program helps people calculate lifetime earnings versus net worth, track spending, and find their "enough" point on the fulfillment curve where additional spending brings diminishing returns.
Beyond the "Your Money or Your Life" approach, many Americans are finding other ways to slow down and live better on less. Some choose smaller homes like tiny "apodments" under 400 square feet, preferring public spaces to private entertainment systems. Others go further - Bill Powers lived in a 12x12 off-grid house, finding joy without electricity, while Colin Beavan became "No Impact Man," eliminating his ecological footprint for a year. A 1995 poll found 86% of voluntary downshifters reported being happier.
Just as alcoholics need support to stay sober, those fighting affluenza need others to help them resist consumer culture. Support groups provide the community connection necessary to combat this addictive virus, especially when society constantly pressures us to consume more. Cecile Andrews transformed her life after reading "Voluntary Simplicity" by Duane Elgin, eventually resigning from her college administrator position to facilitate workshops on simple living. She organized Swedish-style "study circles" where participants share personal stories about overwork and disconnection, give practical advice, and build networks for tool sharing.
Reconnecting with nature may be the most effective remedy for affluenza, reducing both our need and desire for money. Yet modern children spend over fifty hours weekly with electronic media but less than forty minutes outside. This disconnect shows in alarming ways: biology teacher Fred First found that of 120 students on field trips, only one could name any living thing they encountered (poison ivy). One child feared being touched by a plant, while another thought a dead beetle's "batteries must have run out." Our virtualized world is rapidly replacing direct experience of nature.
We can reconnect with nature through simple actions: protect nearby nature, certify your yard as wildlife habitat, encourage backyard camping, play "find ten critters," recycle effectively, walk regularly observing nature, garden, and shop for eco-friendly products. For educators: reframe nature as health not recreation, teach interactively, and let children love the earth before asking them to save it.
Marjorie Kelly envisions a democratic economy where profits share importance with employee well-being, community health, product quality, and environmental regeneration. She cites Beverly Cooperative Bank as an example of stakeholder ownership - one of 800 "mutual" banks without outside investors demanding short-term profits, allowing it to prioritize community well-being over maximizing returns. Credit unions similarly keep $10 billion annually in the hands of 90 million Americans who pay lower interest rates.
10장
Creating a New Economy: Beyond Affluenza
Despite 35 years of cynicism about government effectiveness, government can play an important role in creating a society that discourages affluenza and supports simplicity. Americans could have chosen to work half as much while maintaining the 1950s "affluent" lifestyle as productivity doubled. Instead, we put all efforts into making and consuming more. A better approach would be setting a standard working year of 1,500 hours (compared to current 1,800), while maintaining a forty-hour weekly maximum, giving workers flexibility in how they arrange these hours.
Half of American workers would accept proportional pay cuts for shorter hours, but the reduction needn't be one-to-one. Workers are more productive per hour when working fewer hours, with reduced absenteeism and improved health. Ron Healey's successful "30-40 now" plan in Indianapolis offered forty-hour salaries for thirty-hour weeks, with increased productivity making it viable.
The Netherlands' Hours Adjustment Act allows workers to reduce their hours while keeping the same hourly pay, full healthcare, and prorated benefits. Over 95% of requests are approved, resulting in the highest percentage of part-time workers and shortest working hours globally, alongside high labor participation and low unemployment. Similar policies could benefit American workers, who are 20% happier on weekends than workdays.
A progressive consumption tax could replace income tax, with rates rising from 20% on spending under $40,000 to 70% on spending over $500,000, discouraging "luxury fever" while encouraging saving. Simultaneously, a livable wage through negative income tax or tax credits could ensure all citizens maintain a sufficient standard of living. The minimum wage should increase dramatically from the proposed $9/hour to match Nordic economies' equivalent of $14-15 in purchasing power.
Corporations should take full responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products, an idea gaining acceptance in Europe. Rather than selling products, companies would lease them, then take them back for reuse and recycling when their useful life ends, preserving precious resources.
If Americans simplified their lives, bought less stuff, and worked less, would our economy collapse? While immediate universal adoption of voluntary simplicity would cause disruption, a gradual shift over a generation would be manageable. European countries like Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have grown more slowly than America yet enjoy higher quality of life with more free time, lower crime, greater job security, and better health. These "postconsumer" societies balance growth with sustainability.
The glow of health comes with liberation from affluenza - that wonderful feeling of recovery after illness. Breaking free brings relief from the stress of keeping up with the Joneses, staying in jobs just for money, and endless debt payments. Many Americans share this desire for liberation from being "prisoners of an economy that destroys our environment, communities, and peace of mind."
Recovery begins with admitting we have a problem. Events like 9/11, megastorms, and the Great Recession have convinced many that affluenza requires immediate action. The systems thinker Joanna Macy urges a "Great Turning" - a paradigm shift that Donella Meadows notes "can happen in a millisecond" through "a new way of seeing." Unless we make this shift, our legacy may be a cartoon-like existence, darting frantically among mountains of stuff rather than living lives of clarity, grace, and caring. The choice is ours.
