CHAPTER 1

Feverish expectations

Let’s put it bluntly: we can’t grow on like this. In these pages, we’ll argue that affluenza has overheated our economy and our planet while leaving us feverish with desire for ever more consumer products. Never before has so much meant so little to so many. In the blink of an eye, geologically speaking, our feverish expectations are changing our planet beyond recognition, with little thought for those who will come after us.

The late, great environmentalist David Brower, who turned the Sierra Club from a tiny California hiking society into America’s most powerful conservation organization, used to give what he called his sermon as part of his many speeches. He compressed the age of Earth, estimated by scientists at some 4.6 billion years, into seven days, the biblical week of creation, if you will. When you do this, a day represents about 650 million years, an hour 27 million years, a minute about 450,000 years, and a second 7,500 years.

On Sunday morning, Earth congeals from cosmic gases. In the next few hours, land masses and oceans begin to form, and by Tuesday afternoon, the first tiny “protocells” of life emerge, probably from scalding primordial vents in the bottom of the oceans. In the next few days, life forms become larger, more complex, and more wondrous. Shortly before dawn on the last day—Saturday—trilobites and other strangely shaped creatures swim by the millions in the Cambrian seas. Half a billion years later, in real time, we will be amazed by their fossils, scattered about the globe.

Around the middle of the very last day of the week, those gargantuans, the great reptiles, some mild, some menacing, thunder across the land and fill the sky. The dinosaurs enjoy a long run, commanding the earth’s stage for more than four hours, until a monstrous meteorite, landing in the Gulf of Mexico, makes the climate too cold and ends their reign. By the late afternoon and evening on Saturday, mammals, furry, warm-blooded, and able to withstand a colder world, flourish and evolve, until, a few minutes before midnight on that final night of the week, Homo sapiens, walking erect on two legs, learns to speak, use fire, and create increasingly complex forms of organization.

Only about ten thousand years ago in real time, less than two seconds before midnight in our metaphor, humans develop agriculture and start building cities. At a third of a second before midnight, the Buddha is born; at a quarter of second, Christ. Only a thirtieth of a second before midnight, we launch the Industrial Revolution, and after World War II, perhaps a hundredth of a second before midnight in our week of creation—again, on the final night—the age of consumerism begins, the age of stuff, the Age of Affluenza.

In that hundredth of a second, Brower and others have pointed out, we have managed to consume more resources than did all human beings all together in all of previous history. We have diminished our soil, fisheries, fossil fuels (which took hundreds of millions of years to form), and who knows what other resources, by half. We have caused the extinction of countless other species, and we have changed the climate. Think about it; try to grasp in your mind what it means to have done all of this in this blink of the geological eye.

There are people, Brower went on to say, who believe that what we have been doing for that last one-hundredth of a second can go on indefinitely. If they even think about the issue, they believe, without evidence, that science and new technologies will allow our continued hyperexploitation of the planet’s resources. They are considered normal, reasonable, intelligent people—indeed, they run our corporations and our governments. But in reality, they are stark, raving mad. They are like Frankenstein’s monster. They are rampaging all over the globe now, but as a race they were born in the USA.¹

It will be hard to change their mind, hard to change our practices, but not nearly as hard as it would be to change the laws of physics. We can’t grow on like this.

CONSUMER MANIA

Since World War II, Americans have been engaged in an unprecedented consumer spending binge. We now spend 71 percent of our $15 trillion economy on consumer goods. For example, we spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches than on higher education.² We spend as much on auto maintenance as on religious and welfare activities. In 1986, America still had more high schools than shopping centers. Less than twenty years later, in 2005, we had more than twice as many shopping centers (46,438) as high schools (22,180). In the Age of Affluenza (as we believe the century following World War II will eventually be called), shopping centers have supplanted churches as a symbol of cultural values. In fact, 70 percent of us visit malls each week, more than attend houses of worship.³

Until recently, our most profitable shopping centers were megamalls. Typically, they cover areas of fertile farmland that formerly produced bumper crops instead of traffic jams. Indeed, sixty-nine acres of prime American farmland are lost to “development” every hour. When a new megamall opens, the pomp and ceremony rival anything Notre Dame or Chartres might have witnessed in medieval times.

The Super Mall in Auburn, Washington, opened to a stampede of a hundred thousand shoppers in October 1995. The crowd gathered under an imitation of the state’s 14,410-foot Mount Rainier. Rising above the Super Mall’s front entrance, the imitation mountain provided one show which the real thing could not: a display of fireworks, set off as soon as the ribbon-cutting ceremony was over.

In a spirit of boosterism that would have impressed Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, speaker after speaker extolled the wonders of the new shopping center, the biggest in the state. “The number of shoppers expected to visit here over the next year exceeds 1.2 million,” burbled Auburn’s mayor, adding that “committed shoppers can shop till they drop in 1.2 million square feet of shopping space.” Along with a new racetrack and casino in the area, the mall was expected to become a “destination attraction” for vacationers from the entire western United States and Canada. It would, they said, create four thousand jobs and “improve the quality of life throughout the region.” Thirty percent of the expected business would come from tourists who would each spend about five hours and more than $200 at the mall.⁴

FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

The thousands of eager shoppers on hand for the opening wore bored and impatient expressions during the speeches but pushed eagerly through the open doors when the rhetoric stopped. One woman said she was “really excited about the mall because this is something we haven’t had in this part of Washington. We were waiting for something like this.”

“We said, ‘If we build it, they will come,’ and they did,” gushed a happy shopkeeper. Another explained that its hardwood floors “add a little sense of excitement to the mall. They’re much easier than walking on tile or granite and make the Super Mall really special.” She hoped children would enjoy it, “because shopping has become such a family experience that’s really important.”

“Shopping malls have really become the centers of many communities,” says Michael Jacobson, founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism in Washington, DC. “Children as well as adults see a shopping center as just the natural destination to fill a bored life.”⁵

WHAT ELSE MATTERS?

The host of the TV program Affluenza, Scott Simon, visited Potomac Mills, a large Virginia shopping mall, during production of the program. Shoppers were eager to answer his questions about where they came from and what they thought of the mall. None of the people Simon talked to were sweating profusely. But all seemed infected by feverish expectations, often the first symptom of affluenza.

Two women from Dallas, Texas, said they’d been at the mall for three days straight, while their husbands golfed nearby. “We’re always looking for a bargain. You’ve got to know the brands, and we have experience, we’re proud to say,” they proclaimed. “I didn’t need anything. I just went to shop,” said a man with a cart full of merchandise. “Whatever I like, I buy.” “I bought a lot more than I planned to,” another woman admitted. “You just see so much.”

Yes, you do, and that’s the idea. Seeing so much leads to impulse buying, the key to mall profitability and to the success of big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Impulse: a devilish little snake that cajoles first, then bites later, when the credit card bill comes due. Only a quarter of mall shoppers come with a specific product in mind. The rest come just to shop. “What else matters?” asked one of the ladies from Dallas at Potomac Mills, only half in jest.

“I came here with one overriding interest, to spend money,” said a proud teenage girl, who was getting rid of the hundred dollars her mother had given her for this particular spree. “I like to shop,” she explained. She’s not alone. One poll found that 93 percent of teenage American girls rate shopping as their favorite activity.⁶

An older couple passed by with a shopping cart piled to the brim. “This is only half of what we’ve purchased,” the man said cheerfully. “We brought a long list of things to buy,” his wife added, “and then we bought a lot of stuff that wasn’t on the list.”

But Potomac Mills is a mere mini-mall compared to the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. With 4.2 million square feet of shopping space (100 acres), the country’s biggest mall (“Where It’s Always 72 Degrees!”) spreads over an area the size of seven Yankee Stadiums and will soon double in size. It employs twelve thousand people and attracts forty million visitors a year. The Mall of America is more than metaphorically a cathedral; some people get married there. It is also a world-class affluenza hot zone.

A WORLD PHENOMENON

Today, the malls of America have rivals in other countries. The Phoenix City Market Mall in Mumbai, India, is only slightly smaller than the Mall of America, and the New South China Mall is nearly twice as big, while the Dubai Mall has become the world’s most visited leisure and shopping destination, with sixty-five million annual visitors.⁷

But the malling of the world may be starting to lose steam. The big Indian and Chinese malls are full of vacant space, as many of India’s and China’s poor, unable to afford the products, come only to look, not to buy. In an even more promising development, recent demonstrations in Turkey began when the government announced plans to demolish Istanbul’s popular Taksim Gezi Park and build a shopping mall in its place, striking a powerful blow against affluenza.⁸

In the United States, too, many malls are losing tenants. Retail experts predict that a tenth of the approximately one thousand megamalls in the US will close their doors within the decade. Part of this downturn was the result of the recent recession. But much of it can be blamed on greater consumer spending options.

HOME SHOPPING

While many malls, and vast discount megastores like Wal-Mart and Costco, still boast growing sales (and still drive smaller, locally owned stores out of business), Americans are now doing a whole lot of shopping right from their couches. Nearly twenty billion mail-order catalogs (more than fifty million trees’ worth of paper) flood our homes each year,⁹ about seventy for every one of us, selling everything from soup to nuts (to refrigerators to underwear). “Buy Now, Pay Later!” they shout. While some resent their arrival, most Americans eagerly await them and order from them with abandon. In some cases, we even pay for the catalogs (such as Sears’s) so that we can pay for what’s in them. Then there are the home shopping channels. Critics mock them as presenting a continual succession of baubles on bimbos, but for a sizable minority of Americans, they’re the highlight of the cable TV systems, and highly profitable. And to think someone once called TV “a vast wasteland.” That was before the shopping channels, of course.

Mail-order catalogs and shopping channels carry a lot more than products. They are highly contagious carriers of affluenza.

In the past several years, a new affluenza carrier has entered the mix in a big way. In time, it threatens to someday outdraw malls, catalogs, and shopping channels combined. The intense frenzy with which the ubiquitous Internet has been embraced as a shopping center can be compared only to that which followed the discovery of gold in California and Alaska, or to the Texas oil boom. Americans now spend an average of thirteen hours a week online, and much of that time is spent shopping, since a majority of Internet sites are selling something.

Ten years ago, consumers spent $50 billion online, nearly double what they had spent four years earlier. By 2012, online sales had topped $200 billion, and they continue to double every four years. Though they are still only a fraction of total retail sales ($4.4 trillion), the trend is clear.¹⁰

A BIT OF BACKGROUND

Take a walk down memory lane. Way down. If you’re as old as the authors, your memories carry you back to the 1950s at least. World War II and the Great Depression were over, and America was on the move. Suburban houses were going up everywhere. New cars were rolling from the assembly lines and onto new pavement. Ground breaking began for the National Defense Interstate Highway System, soon to stretch from sea to shining sea. A TV dinner (introduced in 1953) came from every oven.

“It’s a great life, eh Bob?” a man in a ’50s commercial intones as a young couple and their towheaded son sit on a couch watching the tube. “And tomorrow will be even better, for you and for all the people.” Of course, the great life wasn’t great for the millions who were poor or discriminated against. And even for middle-class America, it wasn’t worry-free. On the same day in 1957 (October 4) that Leave It to Beaver premiered on American television, those pesky Russians shot Sputnik into space. Nikita Khrushchev promised to bury us “in the peaceful field of economic competition.” We know how that came out.

But 1957 was important for another, less heralded reason. It was the year the percentage of Americans describing themselves as “very happy” reached a plateau never exceeded and seldom matched since then. The following year, a year when Americans bought two hundred million Hula-Hoops, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith published an influential book calling the United States “the affluent society.”

We felt richer then than we do now. Most Americans today don’t think of themselves as affluent, says the psychologist Paul Wachtel, “even though in terms of gross national product we have more than twice as much as we did then. Everybody’s house has twice as much stuff in it. But the feeling of affluence, the experience of well-being, is no higher and perhaps even lower.” Liberal economists argue that since about 1973 the real wages earned by middle-class Americans haven’t risen much and, for many workers, have declined. Young couples talk of not being able to afford what their parents had. But one thing is incontestable: We have a lot more stuff and much higher material expectations than previous generations did.

STARTER CASTLES

Take housing. The average size of new homes is now more than double what it was in the 1950s, while families are smaller. Right after World War II, 750 square feet was just right (in Levittown, for example). By the ’50s, 950 square feet was the norm; by the ’60s, 1,100 square feet was typical; and by the ’70s, 1,350. Now it’s 2,500.¹¹

In recent years, before the housing bubble burst, homes became a symbol of conspicuous consumption, as beneficiaries of the ’90s stock market boom began to buy real estate, bulldoze existing (and perfectly functional) homes, and replace them with megahouses of 10,000 square feet and more. Starter castles, some have named them. Others call them monster homes. In places like the spectacular mountain towns of the West, many such megahomes are actually second homes, mere vacation destinations for the newly rich.

CAR WARS

As with homes, so with cars. Until 2000, the eighteen-foot-long Chevy Suburban set the standard for gigantism. Then, not to be outdone, Ford introduced the Excursion, a seven-thousand-pound titan that was a foot longer than the Suburban. Ford Motors chairman William Ford even apologized for making so many SUVs, calling his Excursion “the Ford Valdez” for its propensity to consume fuel. He condemned SUVs as wasteful and polluting but said Ford would continue to manufacture them anyway because they were extremely profitable.

“For a lot of people an SUV is a status symbol,” says car salesman Mike Sillivan. “So they’re willing to pay the thirty- to forty-odd thousand dollars to drive one of these vehicles.”

Never one to give up without a fight, General Motors came charging back at Ford, acquiring ownership of the Hummer, a more luxurious version of the military transport vehicle used during the Gulf War. GM is “placing a big bet that the decade-long trend toward ever larger and more aggressive-looking sport utility vehicles would continue,” according to the New York Times.¹² “It’s like a tank with fashion,” says one teenager quoted by the Times. The kid says he loves the Hummer because “I like something where I can look down into another car and give that knowing smile that says ‘I’m bigger than you.’ It makes me feel powerful.”

A Hummer dealer website (www.lynchhummer.com) features a link to “Stupid Hummer Tricks.” The link offers photos of, among other things, a Hummer in a standoff against a buffalo, another proudly knocking aside trees as it plows up an incline in a forest, and a third nearly submerged in a pretty mountain stream. Now what will Ford counter with, an even bigger SUV called The Extinction?

LET’S DO LUNCH

We’ve talked about houses and cars. Now consider food. The ’50s did give us TV dinners. Turkey, peas, and mashed potatoes in a throwaway tray for sixty-nine cents—thank you, Swanson’s. As kids, we considered them delectable. Our standard diets were pretty bland. “Exotic” meant soggy egg rolls, chow mein, and chop suey. “Mexican” was tacos and tamales (how did we cope without chimichangas and chalupas?). “Thai” wasn’t even part of our vocabulary. Now, city streets and suburban malls sport a United Nations of restaurants. We remember waiting for certain fruits and vegetables to be in season. Now everything is always available. When it’s winter here, it’s summer in New Zealand, after all. Yet we often feel deprived. Strawberries lose their flavor when you can have them all the time. More food choices and more diversity certainly aren’t a bad thing, but they come at a cost. The exotic quickly becomes commonplace and boring, requiring ever newer and more expensive menus.

Eating out used to be a special occasion. Now we spend more money on restaurant food than on the food we cook ourselves. Swelling expectations. Swelling stomachs too, but that’s another symptom.

INVENTION IS THE MOTHER OF NECESSITY

Consider, also, the kinds of goods that were deemed luxuries as recently as 1970 but are now found in well over half of US homes and thought of by a majority of Americans as necessities: dishwashers, clothes dryers, central heating and air conditioning, color and cable TV. Back in 1970, there were no microwave ovens, DVDs, cell phones, smartphones, fax machines, iPads, iPods, leaf blowers, Xboxes, or personal computers. Now, more than half of us take all of these goods for granted and would feel deprived without most of them. In the past ten years, the cost of using cell phones has more than doubled the amount that Americans spend on phone service. It takes a lot of energy to run all this stuff.

There always seems to be a “better” model that we’ve just got to have. Writing in 2000 about Compaq’s then-new iPaq 3600 Pocket PC, Seattle Times technology reporter Paul Andrews warned that the iPaq, with its “sleek Porsche-like case and striking color screen,” cost $500 more than an ordinary PalmPilot. “But without the color display, music, and photos of the iPaq, life seems pretty dull,” he lamented.¹³ Now, the iPaq is mostly forgotten, replaced by new “gotta have it” devices.

With the newest smartphones, we may never have to be patient again, except when they aren’t loading properly, writes Seattle Times columnist Monica Guzman, in an article that is hopefully somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Smart phones are making things like long lines and late appointments more bearable. When I have to wait, though, even I’m surprised by how irritating it feels. Like during takeoff and landing. “Put away and stow all electronic devices.” … Beautiful views are just out the window, but I can’t do exactly what I want to be doing.… No wait is too small for a smart phone to vanquish. When I work from home, the phone is never far. It’s there, ready to go, when I need to not wait for food to warm up in the microwave or for the Keurig to pour a cup of tea.¹⁴

We expect the information to come faster and faster with each new device, and we grow anxious when it doesn’t, another feverish expectation. In such a world, nature’s pace becomes unbearable, “irritating,” and worst of all, “boring.”

We drive twice as much per capita as we did a half century ago and fly more than twenty-five times as much.¹⁵ Middle-income Americans seldom ventured more than a few hundred miles from home then, even during two-week summer vacations. Now, many of us (not just the rich) expect to spend occasional long weekends in Puerto Vallarta or (in the case of New Yorkers) Paris. Everywhere, humble motels have been replaced by elegant “inns,” humble resorts by Club Meds. Now, “I need a vacation” means I need to change continents for a few days.

THE CHANGING JONESES

It may be fear rather than greed that primarily drives our swelling expectations. Fear of not succeeding in the eyes of others. In one magazine ad from the ’50s, readers are encouraged to “keep up with the Joneses” by driving what the Joneses were driving: a Chevy. A Chevy sedan at that, not even a Corvette. Just about the cheapest car around even then.

But the mythical Joneses don’t drive Chevrolets anymore. And they’re no longer your next-door neighbors either, folks who make roughly what you do. The economist Juliet Schor studied people’s attitudes about consumption in a large corporation and found that most Americans now compare themselves with coworkers or television characters when they think about what they “need.”

But corporations have become increasingly stratified economically in recent years. One frequently comes into contact with colleagues who are much better paid than oneself. Their cars, clothes, and travel plans reflect their higher incomes, yet set the standard for everyone else in the firm.

Likewise, says Schor, “TV shows a very inflated standard of living relative to what the true standard of living of the American public is. People on television tend to be upper-middle class or even rich, and people who watch a lot of TV have highly inflated views of what the average American has. For example, people who are heavy TV watchers vastly exaggerate the number of Americans with swimming pools, tennis courts, maids, and planes, and their own expectations of what they should have also become inflated, so they tend to spend more and save less.”¹⁶

Schor says that as the gap between rich and poor grew during the 1980s, people with relatively high incomes began to feel deprived in comparison to those who were suddenly making even more. “They started to feel ‘poor on $100,000 a year’ as the well-known phrase puts it, because they were comparing themselves to the Donald Trumps and the other newly wealthy.” It happened all the way down the income line, Schor says. “Everybody felt worse compared to the role models, those at the top.”

Until the recent economic crisis began, Americans’ feverish expectations had been reducing our personal savings rate steadily since the 1980s, from roughly 11 percent in 1982 to 1.5 percent in 2005. By contrast, the Princeton historian Sheldon Goran (Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves), points out that savings rates in Germany, Italy, France, and some other western European nations have continued to exceed 10 percent, with the notable exception of the United Kingdom, where the savings rate has actually been negative.¹⁷ Curiously, conservatives have often claimed that a strong social safety net would discourage savings because people would feel they didn’t need to prepare for old age or emergencies. But in fact, a strong safety net, including free health care and education, seems to encourage savings, providing needed services at lower cost than the private marketplace.

THE EXAMPLE NOT TO FOLLOW: US

The Italian economist Stefano Bartolini calls the United States “the example not to follow.”¹⁸ He suggests that the American model of high spending and skimpy safety nets encourages greater consumption—and therefore longer work hours (see chapter 3). The pressures of work and consumption create stress and leave people little time for each other, increasing loneliness and unhappiness while at the same time creating a less inviting or sustainable natural and built common environment. We then try to restore social connections and environmental quality through private purchases. (Lonely? Buy a new car, and you will attract others. Living in an ugly world of strip malls? Visit a tropical paradise for a few days.) And so we spend more. It’s the vicious cycle that affluenza encourages.

THE ADDICTIVE VIRUS

You suspect you may be a coffee addict when you’re so hyped up that you start answering the front door before the doorbell rings! But when you can’t resist buying a coffee mug with a picture of a coffee mug on it, it’s official. You’re hooked. For you and at least thirty-five million other javaholics (four to five cups a day), coffee is life; the rest is only waiting.

But coffee’s not the worst of our addictions, not by a long shot. Fourteen million Americans use illegal drugs, twelve million Americans are heavy drinkers, and sixty million are hooked on tobacco. Five million Americans can’t stop gambling away their income and savings. And at least ten million can’t stop buying more and more stuff—an addiction that in the long run may be the most destructive of all.¹⁹

Lianne, a department store publicist in New York City, is a problem shopper. Every year, she uses her employee discount to rack up more than $20,000 in clothing and accessories. She finally suspected she might be addicted when she broke up with her boyfriend and moved her stuff out of his apartment. “Some women tend to shop a lot because they live out of two apartments, theirs and their boyfriend’s,” she explains. “You never look at your wardrobe as one wardrobe. But when I saw how many things I had that were identical, I began to see that maybe I did have a problem.”²⁰

Addiction to stuff is not easily understood. It’s a bubbling cauldron of such emotional states as anxiety, loneliness, and low self-esteem. “I’d like to think I shop because I don’t want to look like everybody else,” Lianne confides anonymously, “but the real reason is because I don’t want to look like myself. It’s easier to buy something new and feel good about yourself than it is to change yourself.”

Addicts need to go back for more in order to feel good again. The addictive substance or activity takes away the emotional discomfort of everyday life and also releases the built-up tensions of craving. The goal is to get back to a place of perceived power and carefree abandonment. The drinker suddenly becomes loose and uninhibited, certain he’s the funniest man in the world. The gambler feels the elation of risk and possibility—putting it all on the line so Lady Luck can find him. The addicted shopper seeks the high she felt a few days earlier, when she bought a dress she still hasn’t taken out of the box.

According to professor Ronald Faber, who has studied American advertising, compulsive buyers often report feeling heightened sensations when they shop. Colors and textures are more intense, and extreme levels of focus and concentration are often achieved—literally, altered states of consciousness. Some extreme shoppers compare their highs to drug experiences, while others have compared the moment of purchase to an orgasm.²¹

“I’m addicted to the smell of suede, the smooth texture of silk, and the rustle of tissue paper,” admits one shopping addict. She also loves the captive attention she commands when she shops. And because her credit card is always ready for use, she can shop whenever she wants. Now, that’s power.

NEVER ENOUGH

The thrill of shopping is only one aspect of the addiction to stuff. Many Americans are also hooked on building personal fortresses out of their purchases. Whether it’s a new set of golf clubs or a walk-in closet full of sweaters and shoes, having the right stuff and sending the right signal somehow reassures addictive buyers. The problem is that the world’s signals keep changing, so addicts never reach a point of having enough. The computer never has enough memory or virus protection and is never as fast as everyone else’s. The SUV doesn’t have a satellite-linked Global Positioning System, so how do we know where we are? The phone system is obsolete without Internet access, image messaging, and call waiting; the refrigerator doesn’t dispense ice cubes, filter water, or have push-button, movable shelves (some even have flat-screen TVs on the door); and the big-screen TV is a good six feet narrower than the living room wall. Glaring deficiencies like these become unacceptable when affluenza sets in.

Economists call it the law of diminishing marginal utility, jargon that simply means we have to run faster just to stay in place. As the social psychologist David Myers phrases it, “The second piece of pie, or the second $100,000, never tastes as good as the first.”²²

Yet, despite diminishing returns that are plain to see, affluenza victims get stuck in the more mode, not knowing when or how to stop. If eating pie fails to satisfy, we think we need more pie to become satisfied. At this point, the affluenza virus has become an addiction. “Consuming becomes pathological because its importance grows larger and larger in direct proportion to our decreasing satisfaction,” says the economist Herman Daly.

In terms of the social factors that trigger the addictive virus, our thanks go first to the pushers on the supply side. For example, when the highways to which we are addicted become clogged, dealers push more highways, which very soon become clogged as well. When we get used to a certain level of sexually explicit advertising, the pushers push it a step further, and then further, until preteens pose suggestively on network TV ads in their underwear.

It’s the same in restaurants, fast-food outlets, and movie theaters, where portions get bigger, and then get huge. Plates of food become platters, Biggie Burgers become Dino Burgers, and boxes of popcorn become buckets. What’s next, barrels requiring hand trucks? Our stomachs expand to accommodate the larger portions, which we soon regard as normal (sixty-four-ounce soft drinks and 1,400-calorie Monster burgers, normal?!).

Sometimes more and bigger are not enough. When we can’t maintain our consumer highs with familiar products and activities, we search for new highs. Sports become extreme sports or fantasy sports in which thrill seekers bungee jump off skyscrapers or gamble in Internet fantasy sports leagues. Even real professional athletes, with fantasy salaries, can never get enough. When a bright young baseball prospect signs for $25 million a year, a veteran who makes only $12 million suddenly feels dissatisfied. This is the plight of the affluenza addict: even too much is not enough.

SHOPPING TO FILL THE VOID

Similarities among addictions are alarming. When the pathological becomes normal, an addict will do whatever is necessary to maintain the habit. Gamblers and overspenders alike bounce checks, borrow from friends, and go deep in debt to support their habit, often lying to loved ones about their actions. It’s not hard to see the connection between addictive behavior and the huge craters in our culture and environment. Just as gamblers sell family heirlooms to continue gambling, so do addicted consumers sacrifice priceless natural areas, contentment, and tradition to maintain a steady stream of goods.

Psychologists tell us that pathological buying is typically related to a quest for greater recognition and acceptance, an expression of anger, or an escape through fantasy—all connected to shaky self-images. Writes Faber,

One compulsive buyer bought predominantly expensive stereo and television equipment but demonstrated little interest when discussing the types of music or programs he liked. Eventually, it came out that his motivation for buying came mainly from the fact that neighbors recognized him as an expert in electronic equipment and came to him for advice when making their purchases.²³

Faber reports that anger is often encoded in pathological buying. Debt becomes a mechanism for getting back at one’s spouse or parent. Or in other cases, extreme shopping is a fleeting getaway from reality:

Buying provides a way of escaping into a fantasy where the individual can be seen as important and respected. Some people indicated that the possession and use of a charge card made them feel powerful; others found that the attention provided by sales personnel and being known by name at exclusive stores provided feelings of importance and status.²⁴

In the years just after World War II the super-rich sought to conceal their profligacy, but since Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural ball many have begun to flaunt it again. As the economist Robert Frank points out, there’s been a rush on $15,000 purses, $10,000 watches, even $65 million private jets. Twenty million Americans now own big-screen TVs costing at least $2,000 each. Some buy their children $5,000 life-size reproductions of Darth Vader and $18,000 replicas of Range Rovers, $25,000 birthday parties and million-dollar bar mitzvahs. Yachts the size of mansions burst their berths in many a marina.²⁵

Thus, from the hot zones of popular culture and stratified workplaces, our new Joneses—consciously or otherwise—spread the affluenza fever, swelling our expectations as never before. And stuffing us up.