The "satisfied" life of a consumer
May 20, 10:14 AM by Administrator
Oprah did an emergency intervention this past year with a packrat. Their home had scarcely any space to move in, and there were things purchased years before that no one had seen since.
Like any addiction, shopping can give a pulse of happiness when you think of how good it might look, or how someone may like it. Like drugs, this high lasts for only a short time before you must leave your home and shop again. Usually if you get rid of the surplus clothes and items around your home, hopefully through Goodwill to help people, this doesn’t appear to be a problem. Until you look at the cash flow.
I’ll take the round number of $20 for a new dress shirt and $30 for a pair of slacks. If I got a new pair of those every other week, this would be 26 times per year. At $50 a set, this would total $1,300 a year just in new dress shirts and slacks!
I hear of people shopping daily. I hear of people finding a deal they couldn’t refuse or that was too good to be true. Sorry, but it is an illusion, it is too good to be true.
I call this situation “chronic consumerism”.
What happens if you add packrat habits to the habits of a chronic consumer? You get a person who is always shopping and buying things they have no need for, yet cannot get rid of because they have become emotionally attached to the things they have bought.
What about the couple who lived in that house I mentioned? I saw the paths with my own eyes, and they were hardly even two feet wide. Yeah, two feet wide paths through a house around two thousand square feet in size.
If things made a person happy, then this couple should have been through-the-roof giddy! They had tons, in literal weight, of clothes, ungiven gifts, and other items in every room in their home: the kitchen, the master bedroom, and the bathroom even.
How did they describe how they felt? At first they were embarrassed and didn’t want to admit a thing. Then, as the person doing the intervention went further—the couple finally admitted to feeling “trapped, suffocated” by their own possessions.
Money and things in large amounts can cause suffocation because they limit your freedom. Think of the two foot goat-paths through their home! There was maybe two feet of space between the ceiling and the goods strewn everywhere.
Who is to blame?
The cretin responsible for all this isn’t a man, per se, but a series of events coupled with a certain psychologist’s destructive theories. The event I am referring to is the Industrial Revolution, and the psychologist is Sigmund Freud. The Industrial Revolution slowly ruined families by taking the father out into a separate workplace, and then the mother, and then the children themselves. Goods were produced in greater amounts and were cheaper, but the pay received by the laborers wasn’t much either. Then along came further inventions and progress into mass production. Then came Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud is well respected by most, but his life ended in a near maniacy about the “inner evils” of the masses. These theories of Freud spawned psychoanalysis, experiments into mind control, and finally the department of “public relations”. All members of the PR department came from psychoanalysis schools.
These things were compounded by Edward Bernays, the father of PR and mass control who was also the nephew of Freud. It was Bernays who influenced the Woman’s Libbers of the early 20^th^ century to smoke cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. It was a psychoanalysist, Bernays presumably, in the early days of PR who influenced women into buying instant cake mixes from Betty Crocker.
There’s an interesting story there, in the first Betty Crocker’s cake mixes. See, the mix was, originally, almost fully instantaneous. Just add a little water, mix, pour, and bake. Well, during that time period women did most everything from scratch, and the mix would not sell. In fact, Betty Crocker was so concerned that they would lose their large investment that they called a psychoanalyst to see what was going on. What did he say? “An egg. If you tell them to add an egg, subconsciously they will associate that action with love for their husbands, and the mix will sell.” (Paraphrased slightly.) And what do you know, the mix sold like hotcakes!
Do you expect a successful business field of semi-passive mind control would ever just die out? They adapt to the point that almost any decision you make is influenced, even if you know about them and willfully “rebel” from their control.
Today we produce so much junk that we can’t consume it all and wind up throwing the leftovers into the trash. Let me ask you a serious question. Isn’t it time that we went back to a more stable economic system that doesn’t rely upon mass production? Because, lets face it—if you don’t consume in a system of mass production and consumption, then the machine falls apart. And some of the most successful businesses of our time were started at home without mass production.
If you don’t believe me or wish to know more, I suggest you watch The Century of Self for yourself. Christian brothers and sisters would be well warned not to look at the third episode visually, as the video footage is risque and possibly includes nudity; just minimize the window and listen. The entire documentary is four hours in length.