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Stuff that: First world problem

Why we have too much of everything

James Wallman’s book Stuffocation struck a chord around the Western world when it was released this year, and the term has since become a buzz word for our ‘first world problem’ of having too much stuff, and how this affects us.

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These are interesting times we are living in, as a shift in consciousness seems to be occurring, and as a result our values and what we view as important are changing.

Growing up as a child of the 80s it was certainly all about stuff – who had what stuff, how much stuff you had, where you got your stuff from, and most importantly, how much your stuff cost. We were wowed by fancy cars, phones, appliances, electronics, clothes, houses – anything shiny and new.

We were victims of marketing and mass media, and of the cultural rhetoric that continued to perpetuate the myth that the way to happiness was through the accumulation of consumer goods and material wealth.

In the 90s it seemed some of the gloss started wear off this belief system, and by the early 2000s we were downright disillusioned – why wasn’t all this stuff making us happy? Why was the gap between rich and poor widening? Why were we more stressed than ever, and what were we doing to the planet?

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It seems this decade has been about awakening to what’s really going on and slowly but surely starting to make a shift away from a way of living that hasn’t served us. The reality is that under the stuff-orientated, consumer-focused economic growth model that has dictated our lives, people have not been happy.

Generally speaking, we are stressed and our planet is being overused and abused. We’re not in harmony with each other or our planet. The idea that we need to buy more stuff, and produce more stuff, in order to keep the ‘economy’ growing is killing us.

It’s not rocket science that what we need is an economy that operates within the constraints of the planet, not outside of it. The current economic growth model assumes we have unlimited resources, when we actually have finite resources. It assumes the only way the world can be ‘successful’ is if we keep on producing more goods made from the resources provided by Earth, and selling them to make money.

But as we seem to be discovering, we already have enough stuff; in fact, as James Wallman points out, we have too much stuff, and it’s not making us happy, neither is it making the majority of people rich. It’s making a very small number of people rich while the rest of the world struggles financially at some level.

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There is a growing awareness that the shift we need, and that many people are already making, is away from consumerism. Many people are starting to go inwards and find peace within themselves, learning to be present in the now, and to reconnect with each other and the planet.

As this shift in consciousness grows, it will naturally mean the economic growth model doesn’t work anymore because consumerism doesn’t have the same appeal, and so we’ll be forced to change the model. One of the exciting things about this is the fact there is already another model that has been created by economists, called the Circular Economy, which requires resources to be taken from the earth and put back in a state where they can be rejuvenated. Under this model we cannot consume as much as we do now because the earth could not rejuvenate at the speed we’re taking resources.

It’s my hope that through my work and the way I live, I can demonstrate this new model for living in my own reality, and cause a ripple effect in those around me.

What I find really exciting about the times we are living in is that every day in work and in play, I come across people who feel the same way and are making a shift away from the stuff culture, towards a more meaningful, harmonious existence. No longer is this about ‘fringe dwelling’. I get the feeling that in my lifetime we’ll look back on a time when the accumulation of material things was what dictated our lives and wonder why we ever thought this could make us happy.

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By Leanne Frisbie

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