rampant consumerism

To many, xmas has become an annual social pressure. The thought of each looming xmas heralds anxiety and stress and an imposed orthodox dogma. To a great number it brings on depression.

CEO of beyondblue: the national depression initiative Leonie Young says:

"Christmas can be a very stressful time with the pressures of selecting gifts, preparing food and entertaining family members. Many people look forward to this time of year only to face an anticlimax if their hopes aren't fulfilled" [Beyond Blue].

Xmas means complying with religious ritual and cultural expectations. It is a Christian superstition that has an irrational hold on millions. It imposes unnecessary costs and many are compelled each year to rack up credit card debt simply to comply with and somehow fund the over-evangelised 'time for giving'.

The Church evangelises its conformist message across the land - 'thou must partake in the xmas ritual, or else feel guilty about ignoring Jesus's message. Such guilt-laden conformity to a traditional orthodoxy denies head space, so who needs it?

Retailers evangelise its 'shoppist' message across the land - 'thou must partake in the xmas ritual, or else feel guilty at the 'annual unwrapping'.

Retailers and their advertisers cash in on the guilt trip and profit from it. But the whole 'chrissy' splurge is unnecessary, decadent, wasteful. It is harmful financially and its consumerism is harmful to the planet.

Xmas excess is so 20^th C!

A liberating alternative

Xmas comes at a time of year when really the fundamental need of most people is to simply relax, kick back, share quality time with valued people of choice, and perhaps review, reflect, forget, chill and get one's head space into a happy state and perhaps helping others. No dramas!

Instead, 'Rest and Recreation' (R&R) although derived from American military culture, is so much more aligned to the real human need this time of year. The end of year period should be set aside for rest and recreation - what ever that means for each person, family, friends and culture.

Bugger the dogma, the guilt-laden complying to religious dogma, the gifting, the unaffordable excesses, the overeating, the shopping congestion, that invasive 25^th deadline. Bugger the retail super profits! More and more are waiting for the January sales anyway. How liberating!

Surely society has matured enough to question why we do it. R&R deserves to replace xmas. Replace gifting with catch up and with 'me' time. The rest of the year is inflexible and typically demanding. This year end break need not be. It should a time of flexibility and personal choice and mental health.

R&R (or perhaps the 'chill season') is a more mature thinking. It is free thinking.

The universal test is that year end ought to be a time to look forward to. If xmas has become a time not to look forward to, then question it, stay away from the shops and take well needed R& R instead. One only lives once and life is too short!

Happy Holidays!

Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia

[Image Source: Material Excesses of Christmas are a Moral Problem: Objecting to the Extreme Spending, Borrowing, Materialism
Image © Austin Cline, Original Poster: Library of Congress, USA]

If full environmental costs were embedded into consumer products pricing, then the price of high environmental cost consumer products would rise, making them less affordable and so their consumption would fall. Rampant consumerism is unaffordable to the planet anyway. But what we pay for consumer items is artificially subsidised by leaving out the environmental impact costs. Throughout the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, developed countries have partied with free lunches, and now we are learning that there is not such thing long term. The planet and its nature is now paying for that free lunch. We need only read the next article below by Bandicoot 12^th November, 'Are we witnessing the death of our planet?'

Conspicuous consumption and decadence deserves taxing, because its costs are destructive on the planet and need to be curbed.

I propose a 'planet cost' measure on all products and services globally. This being the full lifecycle cost of a product/service in terms of its environmental cost on the planet - from manufacturing/procurement, inventory, marketing, distribution, to its consumption and waste ('dust to dust' so to speak).

Planet cost needs to be mitigated by imposing behavioural changes on human consumption. Carrots only encouraged those who want to change, so a behavioural stick (aka a 'planet tax') is needed for those conspicuous consumers who don't and who don't give a rats.

In order to determine the tax rate, simply apply a planet impact global test base on severity and scale relative to the other products/services.

So a plastic bottle of phosphate-based laundry detergent used in standard sewerage (so 20^th C) would be priced at $30, whereas a reusable glass bottle of phosphate-free detergent used in a grey water reuse system would cost only $15. With such disparate pricing, behavioural change wouldn't take long!

"Some of the money spent on Christmas wrapping paper, decorations, and unwanted gifts might do some good feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and tending the sick." [Austin Cline, Austin Cline's Agnosticism / Atheism Guide].

Do the planet a favour, buy fewer xmas gifts. Catch up with family and friends instead!

Happy holidays!
:-)

Further Reading:

War on Xmas

Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia

Greed cannot be defined in conventional terms exclusively as a quest for more money or material possessions. It is simply a desire to have more and more. More than one needs. More than one can use. We know that billionaires don’t need and can’t use four yachts and a fleet of twenty antique cars but most North Americans have affluenza too. And our greed is manifested not just in our insatiable material appetites, but in our need for more activity. More hobbies, more “courses”, more “lessons”, more structured leisure events, and volunteering. All this in tandem with a double income work schedule.

Something must give. So what is deemed expendable? Small talk with friends. (Sorry, gotta go). Real talk with family. Time with pets. (North American dogs average a 20 minute nightly walk). Reading time. (remember novels?). Writing letters.(Emails mutilate the language ) Our sleep. (Canadians slept 9 ½ hours a night a century ago). Our health. (Indigenous people averaged 2 hours of work daily---the industrial revolution turned us into mindless robots.) In our contemporary society it is a sin to be seen not to be busy. I recall the words of Thoreau:

“If a man should walk in the woods for love of them of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer, but if spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

Above all we must be “goal-oriented”. We must have “plans” and “objectives”. The impression must be left that my life is not something to be experienced but rather like a career in the Cub Scouts where I get various performance badges to mark my “progress”. Just like the people who plaster their cars with the decals of National Parks to prove they had a good time. Well, I am an not a Japanese tourist and I feel more like just experiencing the moment rather than ruining it by recording it. I don’t think life is like a carport that you have to fill up with junk ---activities---so much to the point that there is no room for your car, that is, for what is essential.

In the 1950s people found time for people. Because they were satisfied with less. Satisfied and happy for the most part. When people had problems, my recollection was, hey, come over for a cup of tea, dear, and let’s talk about it. Grandparents and their concerns were an integral part of the family. Mom was always home waiting for me to arrive from school with a cup of cocoa and a peanut butter sandwich, wanting to know how my day went. She could do that, because it took only one income to deliver what we wanted. A 950 square foot house, with three small bedrooms, one small bathroom, one icebox and one car for seven people. And no foreign vacations. A typical middle class lifestyle. Rich in time and quality of life.

But times have changed. 950sq feet is now a telephone booth for today’s Canadians. Bathrooms are that size it seems. Some kids today have their own ensuites. I had to share my bathwater with two brothers, third in line, and one bath a week sufficed for hygiene. Many people in my boyhood were of the belief, like my parents, that Canada’s wealth was not fairly shared, and that it was outrageous that there were poor among us who did not even have shelter or medical care. This situation is even worse today. But with one difference.

While folks like my parents, the socialists of the 1950s, believed that government services should assist the needy, they did not think, as apparently many people now do, that government should substitute for the care and assistance that friends, neighbours and relatives used to provide in the 1950s. The role of government in their view was to supplement what was already being done. Nothing is so debilitating as the notion that one has no individual responsibility, or community responsibility, to help people because we can just sit back and leave government to carry the ball. Or that we must await “funding” from government to proceed. In the post-carbon era we will have to return to the old Canadian pioneer ethic, get off our butts and help people ourselves. Barn-raising was not done by government employees. But by neighbours and friends who found time to help neighbours and friends. For nothing. No “funding” was available.

Presently, when an individual in obvious need of help or assistance is encountered the reflexive response is to offer the recommendation that he seek the help of some government agency or counseling service. That cup of tea that was offered in the 1950s is never proffered. There is a comfortable and convenient belief about that “these people” will be taken care of “if only” they will seek help. The fact is that if we spent 50% of our GDP on psychologists and counselors it would not take the place that stay-at-home moms, live-in-grandmas, and kindly neighbours did 5 decades ago. And given the choice between the fashionable trauma counselor of this century and my grandmother’s apron, I’ll take my grandmother any day of the week. The people who survived the London blitz didn’t need psychologists---maybe if they had had them , they would have surrendered to Hitler. As it was, they just spent the time to help each other.

But the 50s will never return, you say. Just wait until the oil economy is done. You’re going to get a crash course in Amish living and I am going back to the future.. You’ll have lots of time to slow down then and get re-connected with the people around you. But hey, you can do that now. You have time for me. Your day is 24 hours long just like mine. The point is, you will not MAKE time for me because you have put too much on your plate and I am not a priority.

Now, I most probably should not be a priority. You have your family after all. But realize that is not external forces that are making you run so quickly on a treadmill. It is the force of your own greed to have it all. The bigger more expensive house, the higher paying more stressful job, the two cars, your yoga classes, the two kids, their music lessons, their soccer practices, your Mexican vacations that have to be financed by working over-time. etc. I didn’t twist your arm to make those choices.

You “gotta go” because you are as “Type A” and wired into the system as is any Vancouverite, who at least doesn’t have the hypocritical trappings of Island culture.

Have another expresso.

But one day, please read Leo Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

Tim Murray

June 13/06