Affluenza (n.)- a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.
So begins the book, Affluenza. It’s a catchy title that’s endured long enough to merit a third edition but I’ve only recently become acquainted with it. And the core message is that we should learn to be satisfied with “enough”. Keeping up with the Jones’s is a fool’s errand. Clutter stifles. Deficit spending depresses. Winning the rat race? You’re still a rat. You get the picture.
And about this picture? Planning to read a quote from the book to one of my yoga classes, I pulled a shopping bag out from the small collection in a kitchen cabinet and Neiman Marcus is what I got. The irony wasn’t lost on me. A NM bag to hold a book on Affluenza!
The quote is from Lily Tomlin (but it could have just as easily been George Carlin). “We buy a wastebasket and take it home in a plastic bag. Then we take the wastebasket out of the plastic bag, and put the bag in the wastebasket.”
May as well hear what Carlin had to say too. “A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”
Enough said!