Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic: A Book Review and Life Review

Do you suffer from Affluenza? Do you feel overloaded with stuff? Do you feel as if you have to work harder just to keep with payments on what you've already bought while seeing something new every day that you want? Are you lost in hopeless debt? Are you anxious about whether you'll be able to afford retirement? Do you just feel as if there is way too much emphasis on having you want rather than wanting what you have? If you answered yes, then you, my friend, caught a case of Affluenza.

Affluenza was originally the name of a PBS show but spunoff into a book and other related media. It has become one of the bibles of the burgeoning anti-consumerism movement. Ever notice how when people say Americans are so much better off than they used to be that the evidence they use to support this fact is that so many Americans now have cable TV, video game consoles, DVD players, iPods and computers? The fact that most of those people are also in debt, or that that in order to pay for a $1000 computer they've paid over $500 in credit card interest by the time it's paid off doesn't appear to concern them.

Affluenza was eye-opening when I read it. We all know the standard 40 hour work week is the only way to do business, right? And we all know that most of us work far more than 40 hours. But there's no other way to be productive, is there? Did you know that in the 1930 Kellogg's offered its workers 35 hours of pay for a 30 hour work week? This couldn't possibly have worked, right? Guess what, productivity rose so much that in two years that workers were getting paid for thirty hours of work what they had previously been paid for forty hours of work.

The system in America has been naturalized. We accept it as the natural way of doing things and don't question it. After all, why should we, without DVDs and iPods and internet? Let me ask you this: Do you feel as though you are working longer hours than your parents did at the same age? And yet you're being told that you have to work harder to keep up production levels. Well here's a little secret that I came across in Affluenza and then looked up to make sure it was on the level.