…Maybe I’d just rather be a Postconsumer
By Michael Beck
Sure, I’ve fantasized winning the lottery. I’ve rubbed my hands and imagined what I’d do with all that loot. Who hasn’t? What a kick it is to speculate, especially since – given the long odds – the fact that I’ve never actually played the lottery has hardly affected my chances.
It’s a glorious experience to envision those megabucks making all my dreams come true, completely unencumbered, of course, by messy details from the real world – the kind even billionaires have to live with:
• Study after study has proved that once people earn enough to support a life of basic dignity, increased wealth produces little or no increase in satisfaction.
• Surveys of actual middle-class lottery winners reveal that, once past their initial exhilaration, they wind up no happier overall.
• The care and feeding of great wealth, even when delegated, sucks up enormous psychic energy.
• Among these psychic sinks are the vast legal, fiduciary, and social obligations that accompany wealth, along with dangers – the subtle ones of distorted relationships and obvious ones such as threats from criminals.
Aside from enjoyable (if silly) fantasies, I fear that the dream of instant wealth has cast a serious and perverse spell on our society. Look at how commercial media obsess about celebrities. The rich and famous in all their shimmering glitter snuggle up to us, close and personal, in our living rooms and on our PCs. The 24-7 advertising cycle glorifies these people’s luxuries as seemingly accessible to regular folks while implanting deep in our subconscious a sense of entitlement to that luxury.
The commercial world, it goes without saying, does not support the healthy satisfaction of postconsumerism. However, armed with the understanding that genuine happiness comes from living our personal core values, we can take perverse pleasure in seeing through the message. It’s our victory over the billions of dollars poured into advertising’s millions of silky, smooth, sexy seductions that all boil down to one message: “What you really want doesn’t matter because we’re telling you what you want.”
Well, my personal response to what the media are hawking is that I prefer my dreams of winning the lottery. At least I know that it’s a fantasy.
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