See them floundering after their cherished possessions, like fish flopping in a river starved of water.

Sutta Nipata 777 (From What Would Buddha Do? (1999)).

A friend of mine recently returned from an extended trip to Egypt. He found it striking that the 18 million residents of Cairo lived in tightly packed conditions and that they owned so very few possessions. Based on his own observations, the average resident of Cairo owned about 10% of the property owned by the average American family. My friend’s estimate was about on the mark. Most Americans would certainly describe most residents of Cairo to be “poor.”

Amidst this material “poverty,” though, my friend noticed numerous signs of family togetherness and harmony that he doesn’t often see in the U.S. Parents and children were spending time with each other, smiling at each other, playing together and apparently enjoying each others’ company. How could this be, that people appeared to be so happy when they owned so little? As my friend described what he saw, I couldn’t imagine Americans getting along that well if someone took away 90% of our possessions. In fact, we’d become embittered and we’d be at each other’s throats.

My friend’s comments caused me to think of the enormous amount of material possessions that Americans have and crave. We have shameful amounts of material possessions. We have many times more stuff than we need. Yet we work very hard to have ever more.

We are afflicted with the all-consuming epidemic “affluenza,” according to authors of the 2002 book of that title. What is affluenza? “A painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” The authors quote T.S. Eliot: “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men.”

Here’s an excerpt from a review of Affluenza from Amazon.com:

Americans each spend more than $21,000 per year on consumer goods, our average rate of saving has fallen from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to zero in 2000, our credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, more people are filing for bankruptcy each year than graduate from college, and we spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything. “To live, we buy,” explain the authors–everything from food and good sex to religion and recreation–all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity.

Do our leaders warn us of our materialistic excesses? They used to. Consider Jimmy Carter’s televised “Crisis of Confidence” Speech delivered on July 15, 1979.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

We don’t hear speeches like that anymore. Not from politicians or even from most religious leaders. Most politicians and preachers who might dare to suggest that Americans were shallow-minded materialists would get the boot.

In fact, everything was so amazingly peachy within a couple months after 9/11, that George W. Bush commended us for our shopping:

In the face of this great tragedy, Americans are refusing to give terrorists the power. Our people have responded with courage and compassion, calm and reason, resolve and fierce determination. We have refused to live in a state of panic or a state of denial. There is a difference between being alert and being intimidated, and this great nation will never be intimidated. People are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing . . .

That’s how bad it’s gotten. We’ve responded to 9/11 by shopping courageously. Bush’s statement wasn’t an aberration. Check out the responses of other leaders following 9/11:

“People in this country ask what should they do at a time like this,” Mr. Blair said. “The answer is that they should go about their daily lives: to work, to live, to travel and to shop — to do things in the same way as they did before Sept. 11.” Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, has said that his battered city needs “the best shoppers in the world” to return to restaurants, Broadway shows and shops. “Go out and contribute to the economy,” Alex Penelas, the Miami-Dade County Mayor, said at a news conference yesterday. “As my wife said, it has never been more patriotic to go shopping.”

There is obviously a downside to owning as much stuff as we own. Our stuff fills our garages and basements to bursting. Most of us don’t even know what we own, because we simply accumulate more stuff than we can possibly keep track of. Our stuff clogs up our residence hallways like cholesterol clogs our bodies, keeping us from making use of the enormous spaces in which we live.

How enormous? We work long hours away from our families–families that are allegedly the most important part of our lives–to afford huge houses. Houses so big that we don’t any longer need to choose carefully when we buy things with which we will fill the houses; we just buy lots of stuff, much of it not durable, and we toss it into our castles. According to Affluenza, the master bedroom in the 1950’s was about 130 square feet. Nowadays, moderately priced homes include master bedrooms measuring 300 square feet. Right after WWII, the average new house was 750 square feet. Now, it’s almost 2,500 square feet.

Not only are these huge houses sterile depositories for our stuff. They offer many of us the opportunity of not interacting with those families we allegedly love. See, for example, this story from NPR:

The big house represents the atomizing of the American family,” he says. “Each person not only has his or her own television — each person has his or her own bathroom. Some of these houses are literally designed with three playrooms for two children. This way, the family members rarely have to interact. Michael Frisby says having lots of room is a good thing. . . .

“I always wanted a house big enough that my kids could be in their room screaming, and my wife could be in a room screaming, and I could be somewhere else and not hear any of them,” he says. “And I think I have accomplished this with this house, because this house is so big that everyone has their own space.” How many times have I heard the complaints that people need bigger houses because they are going to have a first or second child when, 50 years ago, that same house provided ample room for a family with five or six children?

Not only do we all crave lots of stuff. We claim we have the right to be treated like royalty. We insist on a basic right to eat often in restaurants—to have other people prepare our food for us. Plain food isn’t good enough for many of us, certainly not in public settings. Executives bringing brown bag lunches to important meetings would be laughed at.

Refusing to eat the food poorer folks eat is more a statement of status than nutrition. We insist that we have the inalienable right to eat fruits and vegetables out of season. The average item of food travels more than 1,000 miles from the point of production to your plate.

Our stuff constantly distracts us. Our things suck our life energy from us with their needs to be maintained, repaired, protected, insured and guarded. In Walden, Thoreau noted that our many empty distractions can take over our souls:

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; and keep your accounts on your thumbnail…The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land.

Professionals have sprung up to help us to declare war on our stuff. For example, check out Flylady.com and Lifeorganizers.com

I have yet to meet anyone who denies that most Americans own absurd amounts of ostentatious and frivolous material goods. So what should we do about it? The obvious thing would be to give away the things that might have value to someone else and throw away the useless things. Certainly, we need to stop buying so much useless stuff. Flylady.com advises that if you’re not going to treasure it or use it, don’t buy it. As obvious as it is that we don’t need most of all we on, most Americans would scream if you told them they had to give up even a fourth of what they own, much less 99%. After all, this stuff is why most Americans work so hard.

I don’t know where this topic leads. It might not have a meaningful wind-up, much less a solution. Maybe our environment is so incredibly toxic that we are all destined to wallow in it for the rest of our distracted and shallow-minded lives. Maybe it’s like we are all alcoholics trying to live sober lives in taverns.

Certainly, our constant rampant craving of non-essential things is expensive and time consuming. That it is done in all affluent societies suggests that having such things satisfies a deep evolutionary craving. I would suggest, then, that there might not be any such thing as nonfunctional luxuries.

As Zahavi has noted, to be reliable, signals must be expensive. Our expensive (but ostentatious) stuff sends powerful and reliable signals that one possesses the resources to provide well for a mate; owning expensive useless stuff is thus reliable advertising for potential mates. This much is common sense, too: Driving away from one’s expensive house in an expensive car, eating expensive food and wearing expensive clothing attract mates. Having and craving lots of stuff is highly contagious—it erupts into an arms race. Rampant ownership of ostentation stuff becomes widespread because good mates are relatively rare. It’s another example of the “red Queen principle,” the need to run faster simply to stay even.

Whatever it is that makes us this way, it distracts us from spending time with people we allegedly care about and it distracts us from activities that we claim are far more important than working hard to buy more stuff.

[Note: this is a companion piece to the recent post on the damage caused by ubiquitous advertising.]