47 pages • 1 hour read
Affluenza
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Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Symptoms”
Introduction Summary
The Introduction to Affluenza tells the story of the origin of the book and alerts the reader to the structure of the argument that will follow. The project began in 1996 as a PBS television documentary involving author de Graaf. Following its success, the first edition of the book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, by de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor was published in 2001, with a second edition in 2005. The third edition, Affluenza: How Overconsumption is Killing Us—And How to Fight Back appeared in 2014.
As the authors note, a lot has happened in the period since the first edition of the book, from the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 to the 2008 financial crisis and rising awareness of economic inequality. But what has not changed is the need to diagnose and combat the illness they call affluenza, “the obsessive, almost religious quest for economic expansion” that has spread from the United States to the entire globe (2). It is the hope of the authors that readers of all political persuasions in all nations can agree on the destructive nature of affluenza and begin to overturn its increasingly dire effects.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Feverish Expectations”
The chapter begins with a thought experiment attributed to environmentalist David Brower. To understand the scale of geological time, Brower compresses the entire history of the earth into a seven-day period in which one day represents roughly 650 million years. With the formation of the planet beginning on early Sunday, it takes until Tuesday afternoon for the first microscopic forms of organic life to emerge. The era of the dinosaurs doesn’t occur until the middle of the final day of the week, Saturday, with Homo sapiens coming onto the scene just a few minutes before midnight. It is only during the final two seconds prior to midnight, around 10,000 years ago in real time, that humans begin the practice of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution starts 1/30th of a second before midnight, with the beginning of what the authors call “the Age of Affluenza” following World War II occurring in the final 1/100th of a second.
Brower’s metaphor is designed to show how extreme and damaging the effects of modern consumer culture have been. In that tiny fraction of a second, human beings have consumed more resources than all past eras combined, extinguished countless other species, and seriously altered the climate. This level of consumption, the authors argue, is simply unsustainable.
They go on to provide several vivid examples of the increase in consumer spending since the conclusion of World War Two, a distinctly American phenomenon that has now gone global: sprawling malls and on-demand internet shopping; larger cars, meals, houses and appliances; exotic vacations; and the endless cycle of new and expensive gadgets. But according to surveys, this increase in material affluence and the expectation of more and better things has not corresponded to rises in our personal happiness and fulfillment. We felt richer in the past even though we have so much more at present. This can lead to a vicious circle in which shopping addicts spend to excess in order to feel special or powerful, only to find that such unnecessary accumulation leaves them hollow. Overconsumption thus becomes both the cause and the symptom of the illness of affluenza that leaves us burdened with a degrading environment, piles of useless possessions, rising household debt, and the mistaken feeling that more of the same will somehow cure us.
Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis
Taken together, the Introduction and first chapter of Affluenza serve as an important overview for the perspective of the book as a whole. The Introduction lays out the history of Affluenza as a project: what began as a documentary has turned into a book with three authors and three editions published over the course of nearly fifteen years. This helps to explain the highly episodic structure of Affluenza; like a documentary, it quickly shifts from topic to topic, quoting from a variety of sources and studies in order to slowly build a portrait of our current addiction to overconsumption and the toll that it’s taking on us and the planet.
Chapter 1 offers the reader a kind of capsule argument for why affluenza has been so harmful. Simply put, in the recent history of the species we are producing and consuming more than all past eras combined. The concentration of this intense activity within an infinitesimal fraction of the history of the earth shows just how radical the changes to our planet have been since the Industrial Revolution. Seen in this light, the claim of de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor is quite straightforward: we cannot go on like this. The planet cannot continue to sustain the level of global economic growth reached in the 20th century. This bedrock ecological argument forms the backbone of Affluenza; like any other serious disease, it is suicidal for the human species not to seek treatment and fundamentally change our collective relationship to consumption.
Moreover, there is a second key claim made in Chapter 1 that the authors will frequently return to later in the book. As the advertising industry tells each of us numerous times per day, buying things is supposed to bring us happiness and fulfillment, and we are buying more than ever before. For the authors, however, it’s clear that this just has not worked. We work more and spend more than in the past, but we are actually less happy and less fulfilled. Even if affluenza were environmentally feasible, it simply does not bring us what it promises. To find authentic meaning and purpose in our lives will therefore require a new approach.
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