What Does Your Stuff Really Say About You?

By Michael Pearlman, 3-14-10

While watching the Colbert Report last week, I caught an interview with Annie Leonard, a progressive activist who was promoting the release of her new book “The Story of Stuff.” The book is an extension of a 20-minute animated Web video of the same title that was released in 2007 and has now garnered over 10 million views on YouTube. The video is a refreshing and illuminating observation on the human and ecological costs of consumerism and Americans’ addiction to material goods.

Leonard’s folksy, matter-of-fact speaking style makes her analysis of the true effects of our country’s encouragement of unrestrained consumerism more tolerable. In the Story of Stuff video, Leonard walks the viewer through the consumer goods cycle, from extraction to production, distribution and consumption and eventually disposal. She discusses how our “love of stuff” also impacts people and places far from Americans’ field of vision, in factories and dumps and clear-cut forests in third-world countries most of us will never visit. When examined closely, the entire process isn’t a pretty picture. We have become a nation of consumers and our self image is correlated with how much we consume, Leonard says.

Americans (including myself) don’t spend much time contemplating the “externalized costs” of the cheap products that land on our shelves. We either don’t want to think about the health impacts to factory workers, the farmland being ruined, or the heavy metals being dumped in the water supply, or we simply choose not to because doing so would be overwhelming. So while we’re eager to buy cheap plastic or electronic goods at the big-box store, the idea of being a conscious consumer is foreign to most of us.

What the Story of Stuff video only touches upon is how our addiction to “stuff” affects our mental well-being. Specifically, does having a lot of toys or gadgets or clothes really make us any happier? Or are consumer goods an inadequate substitute we use to a fill a void that exists because of an absence of social connections? In an unsourced statistic, Leonard claims that since the post-World War II boom of consumerism, Leonard claims that “polls show that our national happiness is declining” since the 1950s, when consumerism really took off. At the same time social interaction, once a central element of day-to-day existence, has been substituted by electronic communication. Isn’t quality human interaction ultimately what makes us more happy?

On Sunday we had brunch with friends who are preparing to move to Switzerland. They talked about all the belongings that they’re going to be ridding themselves of as they prepare to live in a much smaller space than the townhouse they currently occupy. They also noted with amazement that they were getting rid of possessions that sat in boxes that hadn’t even been opened since the couple from Alaska to Wyoming two years ago. I’m sure that their situation isn’t unique. For many of us, it’s easier to not sort through our stuff than make the tough decisions about what is and isn’t important to maintain.

I’ve found myself attached to possessions that didn’t have a real useful purpose. As an athlete, I’ve gotten sucked into the gear rat race, a victim of ‘perceived obsolescence’ that’s referenced in the Story of Stuff. In each of my recent moves, I’ve been forced to get rid of possessions that I’d owned for a while but really wasn’t using any more- things like cassette tapes, furniture, old T-shirts, clothing and books--all of which had more sentimental value than real value. When my father died, I had to go through his possessions and decide what stuff was important enough to hold onto and what to give away or throw out. My father had held onto all this stuff for a reason, so it was hard to make the decisions he didn’t want to make, regardless of the relative usefulness of the things.

Leonard’s video also suggests that there are “points of intervention” which can have an impact on consumer culture. She suggests citizen activism, designed to pressure our government to support policies that protect consumers over powerful corporations. Some of these consumer prevention policies are already in place in Europe. If one of the roles of government is to protect the populace, than government can and should offer incentives or disincentives for certain kinds of behavior and processes. Of course, getting government involved in changing behavior is all but guaranteed to meet resistance these days, since anti-government sentiment appears extraordinarily high.

I completely agree with one of Leonard’s closing points, that it’s up to people to develop a new form of consumer culture, one that calculates the real costs of production, distribution and disposal of goods. While I’m not ready to abandon all my material possessions, at the very least The Story of Stuff reinforces my determination to follow a philosophy I first spotted about 10 years ago on a bumper sticker. Not the one that says “He who dies with the most toys wins,” but the one that reads simply, “Need Less.”

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