Story of Stuff and the next generation

Two years ago I happened upon a media photo of a half dozen pre-teen girls on a park bench all reading the latest celebrity photo magazines and looking like wanna-be celebutantes. I was truly alarmed as I imagined them judging the mismanaged, consumption-intense lives of these rich and famous people. A 20-minute video to be shown at our circle this month — the Story of Stuff (released Dec. 2007 online by Free Range Studios, written by Annie Leonard) — is a welcome sign of providing resources to young people (as well as the rest of us). And I like that it focuses attention on the connections between environmental and social issues, in addition to looking upstream at the true costs of our consumption. Making connections between consumerism and other areas that are affected helps demonstrate the benefits of voluntary simplicity, as well as urgency to turn these trends around.

One review underscored the premise for the Story of Stuff—that our economy rests on the artificial creation of need. In our circle, we have discussed the difference between need and want, and the questions we have asked of ourselves:

• How many of my needs are really wants?


• Think of a recent purchase that I didn’t really need. Why did I buy it? What was I feeling at the time?


• Living more simply saves us money, improves our health, frees up more time, enhances our personal relationships, and benefits the ecosystems of the planet. Why isn’t everyone doing it?

In Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL), voluntary simplicity focuses on financial integrity and step 2 is about tracking your life energy, so that your own values are part of the costs. Although the Story of Stuff sounds to be a bit more like Jim Merkel’s Radical Simplicity, which builds on YMOYL and works toward understanding the environmental footprint of our consumer choices.

Another radio interview I heard recently with political theorist Benjamin R. Barber (the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland) also links this consumer push to the corruption of capitalism (ideally based on meeting needs) with a society that creates “needs” and seeks to turn children into aggressive consumers and adults into an “ethos of induced childishness.” He links this corruption and also increased privatization to the undoing of democracy. His book (from last year, released next month in paperback) is titled Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole.

It reminds me of the work of sociologist Juliet Schor, a Boston College professor of sociology and author of the book, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. The Nation.com ran an article, 20 Dec 2004, saying: “On culture, it's not ‘god, guns and gays’ the Democrats should address but the quality-of-life issues that cross the red-blue divide--excessive working hours, loss of community, commercialized childhood and rampant materialism.” Noted by Amazon.com reviews by Publishers Weekly: “According to consumerism and economics expert Schor (The Overspent American), the average 10-year-old has memorized about 400 brands and the average kindergartner can identify some 300 logos.”

My father taught me store loyalty (which I still appreciate) more than brand loyalty. He always made the effort to look for the smaller, local merchants so that they could survive and be there for him. I’m very concerned for the next generation, raised in an accelerated consumer environment with even fewer connections to the world around them, whether social or just natural.