Citizenship - Living in an Age of Stuff
There was nothing I could do but wait. I was to meet an old friend at Starbucks for a tea, but in front of me was a group of four placing their orders. There was Misto with non-fat, a caramel Machiatto (seriously, I’m not making this up), a Frappucino with caramel on top, and, thankfully, an apple cider. It took about a minute to ring it all in and another 4-5 minutes to prepare.For some reason that experience stuck with me, and when I got home I did some research on Starbucks. I should have braced myself for the shock. Did you know that Starbucks claims to offer some 87,000 different beverages? I even had trouble pronouncing some of the beverage names I came across.Welcome to the age of “stuff”. Our choices now appear limitless. When I visited a local hardware store this week for a new spray nozzle, I mentioned to the manager that I didn’t realize there were so many available. “Our products used to be manufactured on the basis of demand,” he offered, “but now the chain is realizing that the more you display, the more people will purchase.” He concluded perfunctorily, “A lot of this stuff is crap.”Eric Beinhocker, a complexity researcher at the McKinsey Global Institute, has estimated that a major market like New York City or London, England offers over ten billion distinct types of product. He concluded that the sheer amount of choices concerning merchandise literally can overwhelm a citizen each and every day.The great economist John Maynard Keynes once noted that from “two thousand years before Christ down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was really no great change in the standard of living of the average man in the civilized centres of the earth.” He then estimated that, at the most, the standard of living had increased 100% over those 4,000 years. That was before 1712 and the invention of the steam engine. Suddenly one single pump could replace a team of 500 horses. Now that 100% figure can be accomplished in just a few decades.The effects of all of this on today’s citizen might well prove overwhelming. The advantages have been obvious: more travel and exposure to different cultures, beautiful homes, two, even three, university degrees, investment properties, the ability to get our kids the new technologies, even Botox. But there have been trade-offs: higher personal debt, stress, islands of isolation, addictions. Then there are the prices we pay on the larger issues: the growing gap between rich and poor, inaffordability of higher education or healthcare, pension stagnation, environmental damage, loss in productivity and innovation, regional enmity and factionalism, and our loss of influence in the world, to name a few.As a species we spent thousands of years adapting to an environment that was more incremental, and then suddenly we are faced with challenges that are exponential. There is growth, to be sure, but there are now fault-lines of rapid decline, and it remains unclear as to whether our instincts can adapt quickly enough to the sensory overload we are facing. We are not as invincible or as refined as we believe.
For an exceptionally long period of time we journeyed from stagnant economies that cemented in place the gap between rich and poor to steady growth that energized the middle class. For as long as the last few generations could recall we have been able to enjoy steady economic growth and personal progress at the same time – more and better co-existed in rough harmony. But as rampant consumerism overtook most everything else in modern society, citizens bought into it to such a degree that they were able to make themselves the centre of their environment. We began casting off those aspects that once enabled our survivability – guilds, unions, neighbours, local markets, service clubs, places of worship. As long as the economy remained sustainable it appeared as though we might get away with it. But our individualism, this infatuation with ourselves, resulted in less accountability to the larger issues.Through the process of time we even felt we didn’t require one another anymore. Government – the great institution designed to keep us joined together – became an intrusion, invading our private space and bothering us with things like taxes, which were meant to be the price we willingly paid for collective growth. We came to believe we were masters of our own domain, forgetting that our industry, security, education, health and environment were subsidized by all of us, combining our resources to create a roughly equitable society. Where we once required each other and our institutions, we now had credit cards and fabulously low interest rates.But now we stand facing the gathering clouds, trusting that somehow technology or, yes, even government will find some way through them. Well they won’t unless we harness our own energies and sacrifice to the required solutions. We have preferred ourselves for long enough now that progress lies beyond our grasp. In a world of “stuff,” we have misplaced the “right stuff” that only our collective will can muster – something even the gold-plated credit card can’t purchase.