CHAPTER 25
The glow of health
… one word to you and your children: stay together, learn the flowers, go light.
—GARY SNYDER, Turtle Island
For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.
—LILY TOMLIN
Everyone knows that feeling of waking up after a long illness and suddenly, miraculously, feeling full of life again! Good-bye, daytime TV. Hello, energy! How we love to dive back into our favorite activities when we don’t feel isolated, powerless, or estranged anymore! That’s what happens when we beat affluenza—we realize at last how stressful it was to keep up with the Joneses; to stay at a job we hated just for the money and benefits; to write endless checks to credit card companies and always be worried about the next house payment … What a relief, when we discover there’s a way out!
In the course of writing and then updating this book, we discovered that many other Americans feel the way we do. Their comments and ideas became part of our own thought processes. One early reader of the manuscript saw similarities between victims of affluenza and prisoners of war. “Except we’re prisoners of an economy that destroys our environment, our communities, and our peace of mind,” he said. “Imagine what it must feel like when the war is over, and we’re liberated. Or when affluenza is purged from our lives. We’ll feel such a sense of freedom and such a sense of lightness.”
After reading about historically low savings rates in the United States, another reader whimsically imagined fifty million people retiring all at once with virtually no savings and slamming on the brakes. “There’s gonna be one huge garage sale,” he said, shaking his head. “I can see the Craigslist entries now: Ford Expedition, near-new, $400. Big-screen TV (59-inch), free. Hot tub, free.”
A third reader commented that each of our homes seems to have an elephant in the living room that we try desperately to ignore: the unshakable feeling that something is fundamentally wrong. “We can’t figure out how to chase it out, so we learn to just live with it,” he said. But maybe we don’t have to. Maybe we can change our way of life, together, as we have so many times before. (Look, if we can’t make massive changes in our collective value system, where did all these suburbs, airports, and computers come from?) A recent poll conducted by professional homebuilders found that energy efficiency has in recent years become one of the top considerations for homebuyers. Healthy habits like exercising and yoga are becoming more popular. Basic changes are occurring in our diet, in the way we generate energy, and even the way we consume products; from Netflix to Zipcar, access via leasing is substituting for ownership. Our civic focus is shifting to the local scale, where we can have a voice in decision making. Clearly, our culture is in transition.
THIS WAY OUT
A common thread in the recovery process is admitting we have a problem. A string of events including 9/11, megastorms like Katrina and Sandy, and the Great Recession has convinced many of us that affluenza will knock us out unless we take action, now. These changes need to happen deep in our value system, in a basic redefinition of the word success. Mahatma Gandhi’s words should be a beacon: “Speed is irrelevant if you’re traveling in the wrong direction,” he warned, calling for economic balance as the world’s industrial pace began to exceed what nature could provide and culture could moderate. We may be playing the game expertly, he was saying, but it’s the wrong game. “No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back,” echoes an old Turkish proverb.
The systems thinker Joanna Macy urges our civilization to take a deep breath, admit we do have a major problem, and collectively go cold turkey. Throughout history, we’ve done this whenever we had to. In the past, as she discusses in the book Coming Back to Life, we’ve looked at the world as a collection of parts and pieces, but now we’re ready for a more holistic Great Turning, a new way of understanding. Donella Meadows calls it a paradigm shift: “There’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow about paradigm change,” she writes. “In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing. It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, bring down empires, and have impacts that last for millennia.”1
The earth’s systems use feedback just as a thermostat does, to maintain resilience and balance. But Macy and Meadows believe human feedback signals are being jammed by an economy with a one-track mind. “It’s natural for us to be distressed over the state of the world,” says Macy. “We are integral components of it, like cells in a larger body. When that body is traumatized, we feel it.… However, our culture conditions us to view pain as dysfunction. A successful person, as we conclude from commercials and electoral campaigns, brims with optimism.… ‘Keep smiling,’ ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’”2 But until we acknowledge that our environment and many aspects of our culture are sick, how can we take focused action to heal it? Denial is an obstacle to effective action, says Macy. Saving the world will require being outside our comfort zones, and adopting sustainable, equitable solutions even if they feel unfamiliar.
The ecopsychologist Terrance O’Connor believes “saving the world” is really about enlightened self-interest. “If this is not my planet,” he asks, “whose is it? I am the cause, and I am the cure. When I act out of this realization, I act not out of guilt but out of self-love. I break through my denial and see that humankind is facing an absolutely unprecedented crisis. I act not out of obligation or idealism, but because I live in a straw house and I smell smoke.”3
One of the most time-worn slogans of the old way of thinking is “The show must go on.” But those who have successfully kicked affluenza ask, “Why?” If the buyer must always beware, and if our economy often resembles a pyramid scheme in which risks are pushed onto the poor and the environment, why don’t we just change the script? Why don’t we look, together, at what it will take to be truly successful?
DESIGNING A NEW LIFESTYLE
Writes the change agent Paul Hawken, “Join a diverse group of people in a room—different genders, races, ages, occupations, and levels of education—and ask them to describe a world they want to live in fifty years from now. “Do we want to drive two hours to work? No. Do we want to be healthy? Yes. Do we want to live in places that are safe? Do we want our children to grow up in a world where they are hopeful? Do we want to be able to worship without fear of persecution? Do we want to live in a world where nature is rebounding and not receding? No one disagrees; our vision is the same. What we need to do is identify, together, the design criteria for how we get there.”4 Dave has been thinking about these criteria for years, and has compiled a list of them:
has the growth of capital as its goal.What if we systematically apply these criteria to our designs, policies, and daily decisions? Let’s look at a lifestyle—and a civilization—that could deliver twice the satisfaction for half the cost and half the resources we now use. A lifestyle of health and wellness rather than the same old wealth and “hellness.” A lifestyle in which nonmonetary forms of real wealth begin to overpower the epidemic of affluenza.
It’s important to note that we’re not talking about “add-ons” that lengthen our to-do lists and add stress to our lives, but substitutions that give us more time and less stress. Real wealth is the contentedness that comes with feeling good, physically; a regenerative sense of well-being that makes anything seem like an event. When we gain an understanding of how the world works, we can substitute information, convictions, and brilliant design for wasted resources, including our time and money. When we choose real wealth in our everyday lives, we can have healthful, great-tasting food; exciting hobbies and adventures; work that challenges and stimulates us; and spiritual connection with a universe that’s infinitely larger than our stock portfolio.
Instead of more stuff in our already-stuffed lives, we can have fewer things but better, higher-quality things; fewer visits to the doctor and more visits to museums and friends’ houses. More joyful intimacy, more restful sleep, and more brilliantly sunny mornings in campsites on the beach—bacon and eggs sizzling in the skillet and coffee brewing in the pot. Greater use of our hands and minds in creative activities like playing a flute, building a table, knitting a sweater, or harvesting the season’s first juicy heirloom tomato. These are the things that matter, and we can choose them, if we spend less time, money, and energy being such obediently desperate consumers.
Because real wealth makes us feel content, the marketers have learned how to ridicule it and portray it as “boring.” You don’t see a lot of ads for small, well-designed houses, backpacking adventures, potluck dinners, or other experiences and products that reduce the GDP yet elevate our gladness to be alive.5
Readers of Affluenza have often agreed with this book’s message but many let their cynicism or their politics stand in the way. “These changes can never happen in my life, because I don’t have the time, and besides, I need the money to live the way I want.” But what if a different way of thinking and being generates its own income, by avoiding expenses and substituting real wealth? What if these folks spend more for healthful food but less for clothes, consumer trinkets, and housing? More for exercise and preventive health care and less for prescription drugs? We’re really just talking about changes in priorities to match our values.
CREATING AN AFFORDABLE ECONOMY
To create a healthy, germ-free economy we’ll need to slow the metabolism of human civilization itself, by improving the usefulness and also questioning the necessity of certain habits and products. Beverage containers are one small example. Writes Lester Brown, “A refillable glass bottle used over and over requires about 10 percent as much energy per use as an aluminum can that’s recycled. Banning nonrefillable containers is a win-win-win option—cutting material and energy use, garbage flow, and air and water pollution.”6 With inspired designs and policies, we can create architecture that lasts a thousand years, products that mimic nature the way Velcro mimics burrs, and energy that lasts as long as the earth itself.
THE SHAPE OF AN AFFORDABLE ECONOMY
• As our collective demand for products falls, so will prices, as we’ve seen recently with gasoline after the recession hit.
• When we design communities to fit human needs rather than developer or automobile needs, our whole lifestyle requires less money. Public transit will be far less expensive per capita than America’s current inefficient fleet of cars.
• Protecting and restoring nature delivers free services like water purification, pollination, and recreation that we now pay for. For example, restoring wetlands in New Orleans, along the Mississippi River, and elsewhere will potentially save hundreds of billions of dollars by preventing floods.
• Getting rid of packaging, glossy green lawns, and food waste also takes a huge chunk out of the collective cost of our lifestyle. So does advertising; we currently spend $900 per capita to be shelled with unsolicited information, which of course is embedded in the cost of products and services. Less consumption means less advertising as well as less debt. And less debt means less interest on the debt.
• Reasonable reductions in meat consumption, air travel, and energy-intensive materials like cement, aluminum, paper, and synthetic chemicals increase personal and national income because producing them uses a lot of expensive energy.
• Green chemistry, which shortens the steps and softens the environmental cost of making chemicals, in turn lowers the cost of everything manufactured.
• Credit unions can lend capital at lower interest rates and already save borrowers $8 billion a year in interest on loans.
• Preventive health approaches and more empathetic, service-oriented doctors and nurses lower the cost of maintaining our health, and better industrial design prevents unhealthy pollution.
• Eliminating subsidies that result in the destruction of ecosystems will save the world about $700 billion annually, about a third of that in the United States. Rather than drawing down aquifers, letting soil erode, clear-cutting forests, and overfishing the world’s fish species, we will learn how to make best use of each resource and how to harvest only a sustainable yield.
• In the new economy, recycling will become a ritualized, standard practice, embedded in design and policy, so less costly extraction is required.
• In a world with fewer materialistic goals and priorities, there is less need for crime control, lawsuits, and security systems. An emphasis on social support as well as greater equality nurtures a society that is more trusting and less fearful and has less “status anxiety,” a direct cause of crime.
• When we avoid designing for the “worst-case scenario,” we save huge amounts of money. For example, why spend a third more for an office building’s oversized air conditioning system to handle the hottest day of the year? Why not instead let employees work at home on that day?
Source: David Wann, The New Normal (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 38–39.
SURVIVAL OF THE KINDEST
Do we have the right stuff to shift our civilization in the right direction—away from runaway individualism and back toward generosity and collective well-being? Of course we do: it’s in our genes to be generous and kind. The University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner challenges the familiar dog-eat-dog interpretation of natural selection, arguing that humans are successful as a species because of our nurturing, altruistic, and compassionate traits. His own interpretation of evolution? “Survival of the kindest.”7 We thrive because we take care of each other. We find ways to share the wealth and help each other meet needs. For example, the entrepreneur David Green started a company, Aurolab, which has helped eighteen million people, mostly in India, regain their eyesight by replacing lenses damaged by cataracts with synthetic ones. Lenses that used to cost hundreds of dollars now cost $2. He could be making millions or billions of dollars, but he’s content with $150,000 or so a year, and the real wealth of having a purpose: empathetic capitalism. “How do we make sight and hearing or even life itself affordable to poor people?” he asks. “My competitive juices get flowing when I start to think about a big, $4 billion medical-device company and how I’m going to beat them,” Green says.8
Susan Riederer of Boulder, Colorado, is generous with her time, recently traveling to Washington, DC, with 368 other members of a group called Citizen Climate Lobbyist to meet with members of Congress. Says Riederer, “I was intimidated initially by the challenge of talking to my representatives. But I was driven to push through my fear because of the magnitude of the situation we are currently facing.”9 Researchers are discovering that having information on a given issue won’t create change unless other factors are present, like motivation, conviction, and a sense of responsibility. Emotions are often a driving force: the sense that something is shameful, dangerous, or unfair. We’ll do something for our kids that we wouldn’t do for ourselves, and we’ll more readily create change when we see others doing it.
Shortly after giving a billion dollars to the United Nations, the media mogul Ted Turner came up with a stimulant to get more charitable donations out of fellow billionaires: each year, post how much each of them gave away. “I figured this would not only motivate people to get to the top of the list, it would also shame some whose names didn’t show up.” The following year, philanthropic donations began to rise. In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates launched the Giving Pledge, challenging the super-rich to give away more than half of their wealth by the time they die. Three years later, 114 individuals and families had signed.10
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
As individuals, we don’t need to be billionaires to eat well, sleep soundly, or feel like our life has a purpose. The fact is, we do need to consume less per person, because we’re running out of affordable resources as well as tolerable places to dump our wastes. But the core issue of this book goes beyond consuming less to wanting less and needing less. Think about all the money we spend to fight various diseases, many of which (like allergies, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease) can be caused or aggravated by affluent lifestyles. Then remember that affluenza is one disease that we can cure by spending less money, not more.
The bottom line is this: When your time comes and your whole life flashes before you, will it hold your interest? How much of the story will be about moments of clarity and grace, kindness, and caring? Will the main character—you—appear as large and noble as life itself, or as tiny and absurd as a cartoon figure, darting frantically among mountains of stuff? It’s up to you, and indeed, it’s up to all of us!