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  1. #1
    I don't know barbaro's Avatar
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    American Materialism & Mass Consumption

    While at Uni I started changing my perceptions, values, and viewpoints about mass consumption. Buying stuff. For many, not all nor even most people, "things" are not fixated upon. But many folks in the US think that "more is better" and "bigger is better." I don't believe in this, and think it's also provides a false sense of happines and well being. It's not beneficial, to acquire, acquire, and acquire.

    Especially after living overseas, I now view having more things, as a burden. I came to South East Asia with one bag, and I'll leave with one bag.

    Experiences, people, and good times, are far more important to me than "things."

    How do you feel about marterialism, consumerism, and "things?"

    How important are non-essential items to you?


    Americans Living in a Material World

    Published: June 12, 2008
    To the Editor:
    Matthew Hollister


    Related

    Op-Ed Columnist: The Great Seduction (June 10, 2008)




    It isn’t often that I agree with David Brooks, but “The Great Seduction” (column, June 10) was at least the beginning of a conversation in which America desperately needs to engage.


    His litany of responsibility for our culture’s chronic indebtedness, however, barely hints at the extent to which the commodification of everything inhabits our lives in this free-market paradise.


    Our entire economy is founded on mindless and infinite consumption — the more mindless the better. It’s the American credo: I consume, therefore I am. Why else do TV and radio (and, increasingly, the Internet) exist except to sell us more of anything and everything?


    What does Mr. Brooks think will happen to this economy if Americans suddenly decide to embrace Ben Franklin’s virtues of hard work, temperance and particularly frugality, and stop roaming the malls? One thing for sure, with the way the free-market purists have turned everything from political representation to health care to spiritual redemption into mere vendibles, they won’t be pleased with him for pushing this particular line of inquiry.


    Mr. Brooks could be expelled from Club Neocapitalism if he doesn’t watch out, and it will cost him a pretty penny to buy his way back in.


    Stephen Lehman
    St. Paul, June 10, 2008
    ............

  2. #2
    I am in Jail

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    "The best is not always simple, but simple is always best."

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    I've come full circle on consumerism. For much of my adult life I was a conspicous consumer, a spendthrift even. When I think of the stuff I have given away, lost or just plain lost track of with my various moves it makes me cringe.

    I've got way, way too much shit, even now. I want to move to a smaller place at some stage, so again this will be a logistical nightmare. Not like you can sell it for much in this country.

    Given my time again, I would buy less- much, much less- but better.

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    I got way too much crap too:
    Scuba diving crap I haven't used in 3 years.
    Motorcycle stuff, scooter stuff, camping stuff, Land Rover stuff, GPS stuff, photography stuff, computer stuff( 2 laptops and 4 ipods), furniture stuff, TV stuff, fans, aircons, cooking stuff, books, BBQ, 2 cell phones ect.......yepper I'm a stuffed American alright!

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    ^ Hey, I'm not Merkin ya know! I guess we just like to copy ya.

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    ^you got stuffed cuz yankee gringo scum told ya to "get stuffed"

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    After tennish years in Thailand, first where I had no gearbut my pack and paints, I loved it. No dust collectors, easy to keep tidy. Then you move and start to get stuff. Eek!
    I'm back in Van for what, two years, and I still got my container full of crap in storage. Just can't be bothered, although I would like my martini glasses and my ironing board.

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    Interesting thread. I've been thinking about the consumerism, materialism, capitalism thing myself recently, and a student asked me last week to tell her the difference between a materialist and a capitalist.

    Worryingly, both think that infinite expansion within a finite system is somehow a neat idea.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon
    After tennish years in Thailand, first where I had no gearbut my pack and paints, I loved it. No dust collectors, easy to keep tidy. Then you move and start to get stuff. Eek! I'm back in Van for what, two years, and I still got my container full of crap in storage. Just can't be bothered, although I would like my martini glasses and my ironing board.
    Thats bullshit too Jetty, Martini glass's my ass, I have got just as drunk drinking Martinis out of a fruit jar, and even martinis that had no vermout in em at all and were just straight Gin,, just give that container away and live a long happy life.

    But during the move from Phetch to CM and getting ready, I made a comment that when I came here I had 1 suitcase and not much in it except papers and records that I will need til i die, then from CM to Phetch it was a small truck of household shit, now 6 years later it was another truck with household shit, next time I move, it is back to the one suitcase with 3 changes of rags and my papers and records. maybe the hard drives from my puter.
    I was happier when I only owned 1200 pounds of shit,, that was a fully packed Harley.

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    But how many really want to live in a mud hut and wear colourful shirts and head bandanas to live the true simple life.

    Not me.

    Idea is to reduce to what is required for your own personal tastes and educate your children.

    I saw recently on a show that a western child by the time it is 3yo will have produced enough waste and pollution equivelant to the entire life of an adult in other poorer countries.

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    I don't know barbaro's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nawty View Post
    But how many really want to live in a mud hut and wear colourful shirts and head bandanas to live the true simple life.

    Not me.

    Idea is to reduce to what is required for your own personal tastes and educate your children.

    I saw recently on a show that a western child by the time it is 3yo will have produced enough waste and pollution equivelant to the entire life of an adult in other poorer countries.
    I think this is the point of the OP. At least for me.

    I want to own and have things that I need, for the most part.

    And it's OK to have a few things that are wants.

    We all can reduce waste, unnecesarry accumulation of things we rarely, if ever, use.

  12. #12
    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    A little wisdom on "stuff" from one of my favs, George Carlin.


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    Thailand Expat Texpat's Avatar
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    Fully one third of the people on this planet have never used a telephone. Maybe we should all throw our telephones away as they're merely a manifestation of our quest for information and knowledge. Only to ultimately be used to further oppress the true, pure and genuine inhabitants of the planet that roam the jungles naked eating berries and leaves.

    These comparisons are nonsense.

    Some people are happily amused by swimming in a polluted stream in Niger.
    Some people are willing to work hard for 10 years to buy a BMW in Connecticut.
    Some people prefer to work for very little but are expected to do very little in Songkla.

    One isn't better than the other. Another Americans are bad! thread by our resident self-hater. Trying to pigeon-hole a country as diverse as the US is rarely successful or accurate. Plenty of tree huggers and compost-pile purveyors who ride their bikes and live in communes.

    Do you realize how much plastic, silicon and non-natural, pollution-generating material is in your computer?

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    Owning lots of stuff seems to interfere with my pursuit of materialism. My time in Thailand is fairly minimal in terms of personal property. I need my TV, CD/DVD player, digital camera and some basic furniture, but little else. And yet I've always immersed myself in the material world with the best food and partying I've experienced anywhere. Living in Thailand is a different kind of materialism, a place where one can enjoy the greatest material and sensual comforts while owning a lot fewer things than we're used to back in the West.

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    Quote Originally Posted by blackgang View Post
    Thats bullshit too Jetty, Martini glass's my ass, I have got just as drunk drinking Martinis out of a fruit jar
    Nope, not the same at all, BG. You can live in jungle surroundings, wear Bt20 flipflops and have a jungle hut, but it's class that counts. As I always said, a girl should never be without her Chanel lipstick and should always be well groomed, and have grace and good manners (occasionally excepting Issues comments). And the fekin martini glasses.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by Milkman
    Experiences, people, and good times, are far more important to me than "things."
    Gotta agree with that, although I am trying to cut back being a consumer since coming to live in Thailand. Materialism is a worldwide "problem" now, its not fair to call it an "American" problem.
    One thing I do find troubling though is when watching US news channels like Bloomberg or CNN, when government or fed officials speak they often refer to the US people as "consumers" I find that a bit condescending. Like the people are just viewed as robots who should work, sleep and buy shit they dont really need.
    I've never heard any UK official refer to the public in this way.

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    Some points that I've witnessed below. Latent, but they exist. People look around at their peers, often people they don't know, eyeing what they "have," and then judging themselves in relation. Buying stuff....or, borrowing to "buy" stuff gives the impressions that one is "keep up with the Jones's. My generation where I am from at least, rejects this notion as a whole." In other parts of the US, I'm not so sure.

    The Culture of Debt

    By DAVID BROOKS


    July 22, 2008

    On the front page of Sunday’s Times, Gretchen Morgenson described Diane McLeod’s spiral into indebtedness, and now a debate has erupted over who is to blame.
    This third position begins with the notion that people are driven by the desire to earn the respect of their fellows. Individuals don’t build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them.

    Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.
    A part:

    According to this view, what happened to McLeod, and the nation’s financial system, is part of a larger social story. America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded.

    Some of the toxins were economic. Rising house prices gave people the impression that they could take on more risk. Some were cultural. We entered a period of mass luxury, in which people down the income scale expect to own designer goods. Some were moral. Schools and other institutions used to talk the language of sin and temptation to alert people to the seductions that could ruin their lives. They no longer do.

    Norms changed and people began making jokes to make illicit things seem normal. Instead of condemning hyper-consumerism, they made quips about “retail therapy,” or repeated the line that Morgenson noted in her article: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
    Link: Op-Ed Columnist - The Culture of Debt - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

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    Exorbitant housing, Upper-middle class envious of the upper, upper, upper middle class.

    October 2, 2008, 10:02 pm
    Waiting for Schadenfreude

    A couple of years ago, at the height of the boom, a friend in New York publishing described to me the indignities of being a five-figure employee commuting daily from suburban New Jersey on trains packed with traders, stock brokers and hedge-fund types.

    “These were the guys who, in college, I used to step over on Sunday mornings when they were lying in a pool of their own vomit,” he said. “And now they’re earning millions and millions – in bonuses alone.”

    The image, as you might imagine, stuck in my mind. For it summed up so well a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in the late 1990s.

    The feeling of injustice wasn’t just about money, though it was partly about being more than solidly middle class and still struggling to pay the bills, as New York writer Vince Passaro captured so well in his “Reflections on the Art of Going Broke” (“Who’ll Stop the Drain?”) in Harper’s in 1998.

    It was, rather, about a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth.
    They had taken over everything. Their salaries (and bonuses in particular) had pushed real estate costs and living expenses sky-high. Their values had permeated every aspect of life. And their choices seemed to have become the only acceptable — even viable — ones possible.

    In the 1970s, even in New York, it had been financially possible for a middle class family to survive if parents — even one parent — built a professional life around something other than purely making money. In the 1980s — even in the “greed is good” (which was of course meant to be a damning phrase) 1980s — it seemed respectable, honorable and, dare I say, valuable to do things other than make a lot of money. But by the late 1990s, in New York, if you weren’t in the financial industry, it was hard to survive.

    And so it went, in a more general way, throughout the country, in the whole winner-take-all-era ushered in by the boom years of the late 1990s. The model for success narrowed. The goal posts marking success grew more out of reach.
    Entire:Waiting for Schadenfreude - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com

  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon
    but it's class that counts
    I'd even accept that from Blackgang . . .but from you that just sounds too funny.



    Consumerism? Yes, of course . . . to an extent.

    Do we have too much stuff? Yes. Do we engage in mass-consumerism? No.

    I like my B&O, had it for close to ten years. It is a classic, it has great sound and I like it.

    We kept many of our parent's things, collected over 50 years in Africa, Asia, S. America and the Middle East.
    Is this 'stuff'? Yes, of course. Is it clutter? No. Is it part of history? Yes.

    Too many t-shirts? Probably.

    Too many suits? No . . .

    Geez, one could go on forever and a day. We are all consumers and whoever says different is bullshitting.

    There are, however, degrees and I must also admit that my years in the US made me dislike the crass consumerism that is rampant, be it the huge-Vento Starbucks to the Upsizing crazyness . . . yes, it is also consumerism.

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    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    Nothing wrong with buying the things please but living the opulent life on credit and walking away when the going gets tough is not.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Norton View Post
    Nothing wrong with buying the things please but living the opulent life on credit and walking away when the going gets tough is not.
    A good point, of course

  22. #22
    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat
    A good point, of course
    Apologies for stating the obvious but this seems to be at the core of the "financial crisis" in the US and Europe. Too many folks consuming without much thought on paying for it.

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    Well, yes, but if a bank offered you a leg up on the property ladder instead of paying rent, wouldn't you take it?

    The problem this time wasn't so much consumer debt as people with mortgages they had little realistic chance of paying off.
    Last edited by johnbkk; 06-10-2008 at 11:18 AM. Reason: nevermind, too argumentative

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    I don't know barbaro's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by johnbkk View Post
    Well, yes, but if a bank offered you a leg up on the property ladder instead of paying rent, wouldn't you take it?
    No.

    Not if I could not afford it. No way.

    Because of this sentence below:

    The problem this time wasn't so much consumer debt as people with mortgages they had little realistic chance of paying off.
    These people should not get any help at all. They're losers.

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    Agree. Responsible young people are rare as hen's teeth and every slob who gets out of high school expects someone to take care of him.

    Couple that with a government who thinks it's their obligation to provide a mortgage to every unemployed wife-beater and you have the current situation.

    Fuck 'em. Let 'em suffer if they're too stupid or lazy to move up the ladder themselves.

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