I have talked about Standard of Living (SOL) and Quality of Life (QOL) a lot in this blog (e.g., Centralized versus Decentralized Living 2 – Economic Considerations (Nov 2019} (click on the ‘Quality of Life’ at the bottom of this linked post tag as a search term for other similar posts within my blog)).
I have long argued that our current hyper-consumerism lifestyle is based on a rising ‘Standard-Of-Living (SOL)’ concept that has been detrimental to the overall well-being of people and the planet. In an economic rush to comfort, luxury and labor-saving technology, the very aspects that create ‘Well-Being’ have been greatly diminished or even lost. In the more developed world, for a couple of decades (1960-1970s) the SOL rose steadily as consumerism took hold and people acquired lots of ‘stuff’ that made life pleasanter. The dream of affluence went into full swing. But then in the 1980s, we started getting ahead of ourselves and instead of just feeling affluent, we aspired to the ‘playboy’ mentality. This set-off hyper-consumerism in which consumerisms ‘stuff and toys’ got bigger and more expensive. A consequence of this was bludgeoning personal debt and feeling trapped by a system of always needing more and better and newer stuff.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution the rise of technology allowed us to acquire resources at a greater rate to improve our standard of living. At the same time, the human economy allowed us to manage the allocation of ‘scarce resources’ – that idea of scarcity was always the trap of consumerism-materialism. As the standard of living rose it was seen that initially the quality of life also rose – the more money that was gained the more consumer goods could be acquired for comfort and ease of living. And so, monetary wealth became synonymous with standard of living, and as importantly, was linked to increases in ‘Quality-Of-Life (QOL). For a short time, it can be argued that this was indeed the case – and still is in many developing countries at this time. Rising out of extreme poverty to a higher SOL does bring many health and reduced stress benefits within the consumer-materialist lifestyle. It is the erroneous and continuous linking of SOL to QOL that is our downfall. As modern living becomes increasingly stressful and ecological systems fail, our QOL diminishes slowly then faster and faster.
What is often overlooked in this rush to advanced ‘modernity’ are the industrial consequences and consumer stress related problems that create most of the world’s environmental problems so prevalent in industrialized countries. Most of these ecological problems are also transboundary in that they move into the air and water outside the regions where they were created, thus ultimately affecting everyone and everything, everywhere on the planet whether they benefit or not from the technological advancements. In essence our global SOL has increased for well over a hundred years, but our QOL has been slowly decreasing in the past few decades. We all know it, but we keep getting told economically that everything is fine, despite endless economic recessions and even depressions where we suffer, but the 0.1% benefit.
As for the consumer stress related problems, the rush to an elevating SOL also saw an increasing urbanization with its new neighborhoods. The concurrent advent of ‘Television’ also created a separation where people stayed indoors instead of meeting with their neighbors for entertainment during their non-work hours. Social media exacerbated this further with little need for personal face-face connectivity. To keep it simple, this has all led to a consequential loss of ‘community’ amid growing individualization – we no longer needed each other for community or social interaction.
In more developed countries, services that were always part of communal-living are now commodified. Where once local services and skills of people in the community were bartered as part of living together, outside professionals are now contracted in to perform services, maintenance, and repairs. Not that there is anything wrong with bringing in external tradespeople – it improves the local economics to a certain extent. But it also serves to increase separation of individuals and a further loss of community. The point I am trying to make is that it drives us deeper into the consumer materialist mindset with its sense of separation and economic obligation. Don’t get me wrong, even in a sustainable living society, I’m sure that some community services will still involve external suppliers.
It’s the QOL that I need to discuss here. Quality of life has less to do with consumer capitalism and more to do with socio-cultural factors of enjoying life. As I quote myself here, “Quality of life slowly diminishes as you begin to spend more time earning money instead of enjoying it. In addition, the increased materialism through the consumer mindset causes increased waste and hazardous output from manufacturing, which further diminishes the quality of the environment. This increase in ecological problems – and hence, decrease in quality of life – is rationalized as acceptable because the standard of living (as determined by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) is still [apparently] increasing.” For GDP, it doesn’t matter if money is moving through a community, or whether it is simply funneling up to the monetarily elites (the 0.1%) as long as money is moving. (I’ve talked about this quite a bit as well – see How the Control Happens and use the ‘economics’ tag, or Rethinking Economics 2 and using the ‘GDP’ tag).
This preoccupation with SOL and GDP as measures of success is what has gotten us into the global problems we now face. By locking onto the assumption that SOL and QOL are directly connected, economists stopped any attempt to measure QOL – it’s too subjective, unlike simply stating how much money you have. It also ignores the loss of QOL in many others ways, such as preoccupation with digital media and diminishment of direct interpersonal communications and personal contact. This also adds further to the disintegration of the cultural commons, which adds so much to our QOL.
Wendell Berry expresses this loss of cultural commons in describing the American Agricultural systems: “…it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons. In all of this, few people whose testimony would have mattered have seen the connection between the ‘modernization’ of agricultural techniques and the disintegration of the culture and communities of farming – and the consequent disintegration of the structures of urban life…It is the work of the institutions of agriculture: the university experts, the bureaucrats, and the ‘Agri-businessmen,’ who have promoted so-called efficiency at the expense of community (and of real efficiency), and quantity at the expense of quality.”
Cultural Critic, Wendell Berry, comments further on this in his book The Unsettling of America, about divergent worldviews and how control and support of economic systems underlies what is of value and priority within the natural and human world, “Our government has shown considerable enthusiasm for “leveling the playing field” in the interest of international corporations. It’s enthusiasm for leveling the playing field in the interest of local economies and local ecosystems remains to be demonstrated.” And of course, since the advent of ‘globalization’ since the 1980s, governments worldwide have excessively pampered transnational corporations and monetary elites to the chagrin of the rest of us that let it happen. We could take back our own power, and I think we are going to see this begin this year (2024).
To Be Continued …………………
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