More and more Americans are foregoing vacations, according to this statistics-laden article in Slate.com: Each passing year, more Americans view something that used to be an entitlement—paid time off—as an increasingly unaffordable or unavailable luxury. If John McCain and Barack Obama are serious about wooing working-class voters, they would be…
The title to this post is a teaser, of course. After a certain point, having more stuff does not make people happier. In his new book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and a Durable Future (2007), Bill McKibben asks why having more stuff usually doesn't make us happier. He…
At Alternet, Tana Ganeva reports on Gigi Durham's new book, concerning the corporate media's sexual objectification of girls. Durham characterizes the overall problem as the "The Lolita Effect," which is the media's sexual objectification of young girls. Here's an excerpt: In 2006, the retail chain Tesco launched the Peekaboo Pole…
Imagine that you were about to accept one of three comparable jobs. You need to choose the job. Would the house your future boss lives in provide information that would assist you to choose? The person who would be your boss for Job A lives in this house: The person…
Back in February, I posted a quote from The Gods Must Be Crazy about the needless complexity of modern life. The quote has made me stew on the topic ever since. We live in a world awash in technologies designed to make life easier, but that often only bog us down. An air conditioning unit may cool your brow and make you happier and more productive in the summer months, but only if you don’t spend seven months attempting to get your evasive landlord to either have the cursed, broken thing fixed or replaced entirely. Not that I would know. A computer makes it easier to write and send documents- unless it freezes, or the printer jams, or the email server has gone down, or you can’t get a decent wireless connection, or the power goes out. I hear, at least, that can prove extremely frustrating.
More technology spells more helplessness when that technology fails. If only I had just suffered through the heat, and adjusted to it; if only I had elected to write a letter by candle light! Instead, I became attached to the convenience of modern goodies. But technology is not the first or only huge complicator in our lives. No, today I’d like to focus on stuff. Things, junk.
We all have too many pieces of stuff lying around our homes, all designed to make life easier. I often suspect these handy doohickeys waste more space and money than their limited “uses” justify. I’ll take some …
