When I Was Wrong: "The Affluence Pandemic"

Intellectual growth requires intellectual humility

I used to write “books”—long essays and notes and things, roughly imitating whatever I was reading and focused on whatever I was thinking about. I didn’t imagine they would be publishable in the form I had them, but they were a way for me to work through and form ideas. Little bits and pieces of that work have remained or reappeared in my published work.

I had this whole carousel of themes: food and cooking and resisting the agribusiness industry was a big one. For my freshman year, we had to read and discuss The Omnivore’s Dilemma; I belonged to and later ran the “Students for Sustainable Food” club on campus; and our campus dining, provided by the foodservice giant Aramark, was infamously bad; all of those things ran together in my head.

My other big area of interest was environmentalism, resources, consumption, the whole “small is beautiful” thing. I had developed an interest in old electronics and video games, I’d learned about the concept of planned obsolescence, and I saw corporations as greedy, wasteful villains, along with the Americans who went along with it. (Some of those villains included my classmates who had smartphones, especially the latest iPhone. I wrote an anti-Apple article once for the newspaper which had the misfortune of being published the day after Steve Jobs died, which was not intentional. I used to pop the battery out of flip phone and drop it on the table, like the guy sticking the knife into the table in the jury room in 12 Angry Men.) As I’ve said before when I write pieces like this interrogating my old ideas, I definitely had too much free time.

I remember sitting in the student center in a comfy chair, with my favorite dinner from town (three spicy sushi rolls with miso soup and salad, $14 with a student discount), and writing or editing these things in between wasting time or waving at friends.

It seems a bit privileged and complacent now, to have mistaken the fact that my family could afford a nice four-year small-liberal-arts-college experience for me for my own success. I think I thought this was adulthood: sitting around eating refined food you bought with money that felt infinite, doodling ideas down that felt world-historically important.

Of course, that whole process was not a waste of time, though little of that material is still of use to me. That process was in many ways a very first run at what I do now—it probably led to me being a section editor on the student newspaper, then an intern and employee in the magazine world, then a regular writer. The themes I worked on back then, broadly, still pop up in my work, and inform a lot of my general approach. Write, edit, run around, waste time, hope something good comes out of it. I’m very lucky.

On that theme of consumerism and over-consumption, however, I’m increasingly reassessing my ideas, which I spent so much time with that they felt like bedrock realities. It’s funny how easy it is to forget that you formed these ideas as discrete perceptions of the world. It took me a long time to really grok that I was not simply a passive conduit receiving revelations about the state of the world.

For many years, basically from college to a year or two ago, I carried around this certainty that America was too rich, spent too much money on too much junk, had lost sight of thankfulness and gratitude and the fragility of natural resources and the natural environment. Maybe, like my mother occasionally said, we needed another Great Depression to shake people out of their spoiled complacency.

For a time, I thought people who liked buying new stuff were mentally ill or, at least, very stupid (They think an old laptop or toy is dirty? Wait till they find out where potatoes come from, hur hur). I remember taking a kind of pride—I called it “reverse prestige”—in owning so many things I had salvaged from the dump or grabbed off a curb. (I still have my salvaged HP printer, and it still prints better than my new one.)

I also had a professor in college who was a real environmentalist. I liked him a lot and still do, and a great deal of my thinking is probably from things I learned in his class. He wasn’t like a carbon-tax technocrat-type environmentalist. He talked about these things in a human, wistful sort of way.

He showed us research that after a certain relatively basic point, more money doesn’t make people happier. He explained the “hedonic treadmill,” a concept which explained that increases in the standard of living don’t make us happier because we get used to the improvement as a new baseline and adapt to it. This struck me as a deeply conservative insight and a true understanding of human nature.

He showed us a documentary about Ladakh, an Indian-administered disputed territory, where the people were desperately poor but happy. They could step in freezing water barefoot. Their child mortality rate was high, but their belief in reincarnation softener their grief. He talked about ecological economics, and how the economy is a system based on the natural environment, not a disembodied magical abstraction.

There’s probably a lot more. But it all dovetailed perfectly with my pre-existing interest in old stuff, and my default conservative sense that maybe the past was better. I guess this was the true college experience: discovering some interesting ideas that are more tendentious than you think they are, and feeling this sense of Oh WOW, this is everything!

During this time, one of the “book” ideas I had was to tie this all together into the broader idea that economic growth was our most pressing social problem. My title was “The Affluence Pandemic.” You know, we are all at risk of dying—or worse, losing our humanity—to the relentless march of consumerism and environmental destruction in our mistaken conflation of standard of living with quality of life. The cover was going to be a GDP chart drawn to look like a case-load chart for the virus of economic growth.¹