Affluenza

The individual who finds no opportunity for self-chosen, meaningful expression of inner resources and personality suffers, said van den Haag, “an insatiable longing for things to happen. The external world is to supply these events to fill the emptiness. The popular demand for ‘inside’ stories, for vicarious sharing of the private lives of ‘personalities’ rests on the craving for private life—even someone else’s—of those who are dimly aware of having none whatever, or at least no life that holds their interest.”

What the bored person really craves is a meaningful, authentic life. The ads suggest that such a life comes in products or packaged commercial experiences. But religion and the science of psychology say it’s more likely to be found in such things as service to others, relationships with friends and family, connection with nature, and work of intrinsic moral value.

Our amazingly productive technologies could allow all of us to spend less time doing repetitive, standardized work, or work whose products bring us little pride, by allowing us to trade higher wages for reduced working hours

Without such vigilance, he suggested, life would become hollow. “Life is not worth living,” he wrote, “if we exercise our profession only for the sake of material success and do not find in our calling an inner necessity and a meaning that transcends the mere earning of money, a meaning which gives our life dignity and strength.”

First, he pointed out, mass production, which makes the universal consumer lifestyle possible, drives large numbers of people out of more varied occupations as artisans and small farmers and instead agglomerates them in factories, where the division of labor reduces the scope of their activities to a few repetitive motions. Their work offers neither variety nor control.

“The benefits of mass production,” van den Haag wrote, “are reaped only by matching de-individualizing work with equally de-individualizing consumption.” Therefore, he argued, “failure to repress individual personality in or after working hours is costly; in the end, the production of standardized things by persons also demands the production of standardized persons” [emphasis ours].12

Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. They compared individuals whose primary aspirations were financial with others who were oriented toward lives of community service and strong relationships with other people.7

Their conclusions were unequivocal: Those individuals for whom accumulating wealth was a primary aspiration “were associated with less self-actualization, less vitality, more depression and more anxiety.” Their studies, they wrote, “demonstrated the deleterious consequences of having money as an important guiding principle in life

During the ’60s, calls such as Hayden’s for a meaningful life of service to the world—responding in part to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask, rather, what you can do for your country”—inspired tens of thousands of students.

One seldom hears work described as a calling anymore. Work may be “interesting” and “creative” or dull and boring. It may bring status or indifference—and not in any sense in relation to its real value. Our lives are disrupted far more severely when garbage collectors stop working than when ballplayers do. Work may bring great monetary rewards or bare subsistence. But we almost never ask what it means and what it serves. For most, though certainly not all, of us, if it makes money, that’s reason enough. Why do it? Simple. It pays

So we were surprised that these middle-class Americans often experience more stress from feeling that they are wasting their lives doing meaningless work than from feeling that they are not making enough money.”5