Affluenza and sustainability are two completely different ideas. According to Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, Affluenza can be considered as; “A painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more” (de Graaf, Wann and Naylor, “Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic” 3). Affluenza can be considered as an epidemic of overconsumption that affects the rich societies. In people, it has the form of disturbed or unhealthy relationship with money without considering the socio-economic status.On the other hand, Sustainability can be defined as; “The endurance of systems and processes” to keep people happy for longer times, whether happiness is considered just a part of sustainability or a part of nature. Superficially, Affluenza may seem easier, but sustainability, unlike Affluenza, will give more free time to people providing a better future for the earth and can save more money of those who practice it in the long run. Therefore, Sustainability is a better option than Affluenza.
When Affluenza is replaced by sustainability more time will be available for friends, family and everyone in the community. Moreover, as Schor said, “The pace of work has increased quite dramatically. We are working much faster today than we were in the past. And that contributes to our sense of being overworked and frenzied and harried and stressed out and burned out by our jobs” (de Graaf, Wann and Naylor, “Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us—and How to Fight Back” 38). Affluenza in the constant pursuit of more and more, and that constant search can be quite expensive. People end up with more work to live the life according to different things or luxuries they have bought. They are then left with no time to enjoy what they have actually bought. In short, to buy more, people have to work more. Sustainability may not directly be associated with the time people have in their hands, but once they embrace a more sustainable lifestyle, they can start giving their workers reduced work load because they don’t need to buy more.
Our future would be either healthy or it would be dismal lacking any resources, but every one of us has a desire to have a healthy and happy future. In this regard, sustainability will provide us with a healthier future, whereas Affluenza, in the form of a sickness, can take the healthy future away from us. Affluenza shows that the more we purchase, the more resources will be used. These resources include water, food, and trees, all of which are essential to life. On the other hand, Sustainability shows the optimal use of resources confirming a healthy life from generation to generation. Sustainability is doing this by not only helping us in reducing our waste, but also by finding a way to use our resources and related wastes for a long time.
Many people think that the planet is something different from us and start detaching them from the earth. Due to this feeling of detachment from the earth, people may start thinking that earth is a type of resource to be depleted rather than a home for the future generations. However, it is a kind of selfish thinking that someone is using all of the food, water, trees, animals, and many other natural things, without considering the life of future generations. They have to consider that human are just as much a part of this earth as any other creature living on it. No one can live without water or food, but still there is no thought for these things to last longer. Instead of becoming helpful for future generations, human beings are continuously burning up fossil fuels, changing the ecosystem and endangering species without even noticing the damage until it starts hurting them. Sustainability checks these problems in detail and confirms to use helpful resources optimally.
Finally, sustainability is better than Affluenza in that Affluenza is so much more expensive as compared to living sustainably. Although living with Affluenza is easy, but this facilitation comes with a cost. This cost is not only in theoretical sense of health and time, but it is also a literal cost. In this case, you can imagine that keeping up with new phones is really an expensive task as, for example, Apple has presented new iPhone, that’s great, but getting rid of older phones at lower costs and purchasing new phones would increase the cost of living, thereby affecting the life through Affluenza. Affluenza can result in decreased public services. It can also be considered as the problem behind the funding shortages for schools, hospitals, universities, and public transport, as people want more money for themselves. On the other hand, it can be admitted that initially the cost of living sustainably could be high but after some time you can save a good amount of money, i.e. with the passage of time, you can get the money back that was spent initially. So, it is important that instead of buying a new and costly car by replacing the old one, or buying the new house, which you can’t afford in reality, in place of old one; it is important to live sustainably.
Overall, we can say that it is easy to find the differences between having Affluenza and using sustainability for the life. Affluenza and Sustainability are completely opposite things. Sustainability improves a healthy lifestyle leaving more time in a day, giving our earth a better future, and saving a huge amount of money. It can help in promoting a healthy lifecycle. It is clear that if we start living more sustainably, we will be able to save more money that would be of great help in reducing the word load, thereby giving us more time to spend with our friends and family, and interestingly this time will be without any worry about money. Sustainability can help in removing the confusion about the worthwhile life by developing a circle of sustainability considering economics, ecology, politics, and culture (James xii). Most importantly, in the present era of increased involvement of economics in our life, sustainability is of great help. On the other hand, Affluenza ensures that we will need more jobs, so that we can afford the stuff, we have bought, thereby affecting the resources of our planet, taking all the money we have earned, and giving us less time to spend with social circles. Most importantly, Affluenza can be considered as a condition in which people are confused about a worthwhile life.
After looking at the pros and cons of both Affluenza and Sustainability, we can find that sustainability is the superior choice, as it can save time, health, and money of people. Considerable work has been done on the development of sustainability at the national and global level (Magee 227). Moreover, futurists are considering that sustained growth is important for the transformation of the society and making it such a society in which people would be able to devote them to the activities that can be fulfilled and that are not only to live a happy individual life.
Works Cited
de Graaf, J., D. Wann, and T.H. Naylor. Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001. Print.
de Graaf, J., D. Wann, and T.H. Naylor. Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us—and How to Fight Back. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014. Print.
James, Paul. Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice: Circles of Sustainability. Routledge, 2014.
Magee, Liam, et al. "Reframing social sustainability reporting: towards an engaged approach." Environment, development and sustainability 15.1 (2013): 225-243. Web.
