Affluenza

My parents brought me a copy of Oliver James's Affluenza from London recently and I started reading it yesterday. It offers quite an interesting view and theory that explains the reason why we're unhappy even though our wealth has been increasing over the past half a decade. James's idea is that a virus called affluenza is currently the plague of developed countries--people are unhappy as they chase material possessions, money, power, and recognition. And what more, apparently most of the developed countries have the same problems. And even the ones that necessarily don't have the problem in the general population, the elite is still plagued with it. And affluenza in turn creates emotional distress in people.

According to James's description, I guess I have to admit that I recognize some symptoms of affluenza in me, although more recently I've been talking with some people about what the actual point of all this is and have been changing my perspective slightly. The problem with money is that when you are lost or don't know where you might want to go, it's easy to start optimizing money and just make sure that the building blocks are there when you do finally figure out what you want to do. But that's with the assumption that you figure out what you actually want, and it might very well be that I'll never figure out what I truly want and what makes me get up in the morning and in the mean while I'll just continue onwards and try to accumulate wealth and become affluent.

James interviewed quite many affluent people in his book and one thing that was strange was that just about none of them had any real and stable relationships. Some were married and others were switching girlfriends every three months. But none had a real relationship, but all had either learned to deal with the lack of intimacy or then the lack of intimacy was never really a problem in the first place (and that's a spooky thought). I guess these are the types of people who will say that intimacy is overrated. Finding intimacy isn't easy, but it is worth it. Cynicism makes it even more difficult.

Another interesting thing this far was that people in Singapore exhibited signs of affluenza, but didn't really have the symptoms of emotional distress. This led me to wonder if that might have something to do with the cultural differences. The western societies have always embraced rationality and reasoning (cogito, ergo sum, etc.) whereas apparently Asian cultures have been much more concrete and living in the moment. This is in fact in line with the suggestion to think less and observe more that was put forth in last week's yoga lesson. This might also explain why white collar workers are experiencing illness emotionally. Work that focuses on abstract things and in which you won't see any concrete result in years, if even then, can seriously start to undermine your feeling of being useful. You just have to believe that you're doing something meaningful. James suggested that developing countries are a lot more happy according to some metrics, and it's not hard to believe that from an emotional standpoint he's correct. You're a lot more in touch with the present when you do mundane physical tasks, but you can derive happiness and pleasure from the fine tuning that you can do there.

Taylorism was originally devised as a method for making manual labor a lot more efficient and commoditizing the worker. And nowadays McDonald's is commonly believed to be a company that exhibits this idea on a very large scale. Previously it was assumed that tayloristic work is not fulfilling for the worker and as such the worker has to be compensated for doing the tedious tasks. Apparently, however, there are some views that recently people have started embracing and enjoying Taylorism again. I would have to guess that it's the same reason why white collar jobs are making people unhappy. I even recently talked with a coworker about this and how, in the long run, I was thinking that maybe I'll just leave the current society and put up a small grocery store somewhere in the Caribbean, or something to that extent. Just as a hobby, assuming that I can arrange a financial position in which I can get enough money to allow me to barely stay alive with capital incomes.

So yes, it seems that I've also caught affluenza, but on the positive side, at least I recognize it and am actively thinking about what it is that I in fact want from life. Even though it might not always seem like that for people on the outside.