The american dream is bad

Well, lot's of people have and continue to make personal sacrifices for the greater good, not all follow the Darwinian paradigm, there's nothing inevitable about Americans or anyone else simply copying what everyone else is doing in a particular environment. Just because one is raised in the US does not automatically condemn one to having to live a particular way.

However, even if one is following a selfish Darwinian approach, it isn't necessarily conducive to one's survival to blow one's income on superficial luxuries and getting fat.

Well, the material comfort angle is ONE interpretation of the American Dream, another is the idea of the rags-to-riches, anyone-can-make-it if they try thing, and it's kinda telling when Americans in particular subscribe to the former, more consumerist view. Some of the more SUCCESSFUL Americans probably subscribe to the latter view.

But to go with your take on it, no, not everyone craves material comfort and luxury. Not by a long stretch. There aren't really that many things we need to survive, food and shelter being among the most important. Beyond such obvious essentials, it gets a little more difficult, because we have to differentiate between things that - while not absolutely essential - are USEFUL, and things which are, for the most part, a luxury, an indulgence of very marginal benefit, or even detrimental.

So, yeah, I don't absolutely NEED a washing machine. I could wash my clothes by hand, but the machine saves a lot of time and hassle I can use on other more useful and productive things. On the other hand, people who invest their wages on stuffing their faces and getting fatter, are not only not getting any real benefit, they are creating problems for themselves.

Well, this reinforces my point. You're less likely to step from luxury to poverty if you invest in things that will have lasting value than in things which are transitory and perhaps counter-productive. Quite a lot of people suffer an abrupt set-back in their career; some hold back on the luxury and invest in things that will provide some insurance should the rainy day come, others invest in luxury hoping they'll never take the hit.

It's very true that some who are better-off can't conceive of a situation in which they might not be so well off. Others can, of course: to some considerable extent it depends on your imagination. But we can all do it to some extent: I mean, I don't need to put my hand in a fire to know better.

The idea of enjoyment that doesn't require luxury... that's an interesting point. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg type thing, because you can say that people who've always had luxury don't learn to enjoy things that don't require conspicuous consumption or whatever... but you can also see people who crave luxury precisely BECAUSE they can't find the worth in other things. There are quite a lot of people who are quite well off, who don't especially get turned on by luxury. It is, again, something of a question of imagination. Any number of very rich people have blown their fortunes because they invested them in some dream, some invention, rather than buying another yacht.

Perhaps one of the bigger lessons in your experience is not so much that you can get by quite happily without luxury - because the whole point of luxuries is that they aren't that important - the supposed pleasure comes from the indulgence. The lesson is how easily and quickly one can go from having a lot to having very little. A lot of people are just one paycheck from disaster. Maybe the luxuries create the illusion that things aren't as precarious as they really are.

On the face of it, this sounds like good advice. Basically, you're giving us the cliche "don't judge". And yeah, being judgemental can be a real pain in the arse, and people often make mistaken judgements about things which they don't know much about, and which aren't any of their business.

One should always be CAUTIOUS before rushing to judge. But all that goes out the window when someone's selfish, indulgent lifestyle starts impacting on others. If, say, the American fondness for cheap oil leads to wars elsewhere and wrecks the climate for the rest of us, you can't really expect us not to comment. If a fondness for consumerism leads to slave labour in other parts of the world, again, people are going to have their say.

And even if it's something like someone stuffing their face full of food, you can say that it's their body and they can do what they like with it, but that rings a little hollow when they've got dependents. The problem with consumerism of the more indulgent kind, is that at best it doesn't make life much better in the long run for the indulger or others, at worst it makes life WORSE.

Obviously, a lot of conspicuous and relatively frivolous consumption goes on in America. But just because it is commonplace, doesn't make it desirable to mimic it, to follow that kind of a dream. Equally obviously, there are a fair number of Americans who don't feel the need to invest so much in consumption and who invest instead in other things, who aren't slaves to any consumerist creed. Some of them hold the OTHER interpretation of the American Dream.

 

Hmmm, I know there was a disconnect here, PsyGrunge--I might be more with you than you think. You were having fun, whereas I was having...ummm, less fun. But just for the hell of it I'll say some of the tedious analytical shit that jumps into my head, and see where it goes: My comment was meant to be laughable. Are you saying its laughability made it inferior in some way? Is "laughable" a synonym for "pathetic" in your idiom? I think your heart is in very close to the right place...and yet, isn't it true that there was maybe a tiny bit of ego in your statement, and that it was meant more for you than for me?

It's not Al Murray I'm talking to, it's you I'm talking to. Tell me what I need to know in your own words. I'll try to stop stuffing my fat American face and listen to you. Anyway it's too tedious trying to listen to what Al Murray has to say with my cheap dial-up connection that runs in fits and starts. Please enlighten me in your own peculiar fashion, PsyGrunge. I'm anxious to find out what that consists of.

Help me connect this disconnect, brother. You might know the most profound secrets of the universe, but if you can't communicate that to someone who needs it in a way that opens their mind to your truth...who gets saved? Where is the benefit to humanity?

 

Wow prellaen, here I was thinking nobody paid much attention to what I have to say. Well I guess we'd better start digging into the issues you raise.

You have a lot of good points in your note, however I have a couple of issues with your viewpoint: (1) You make a couple of unsupported assumptions, and (2) you seem to have the common misunderstanding of Darwinian theory. Both of these issues are evident in this passage from your note. Let's talk about Darwin first:

"Selfish Darwinian approach?" Actually what Darwin said is that the fittest survive. Who are the fittest in terms of humanity? Here's a little surprise for a lot of people: One of the traits that has allowed humans to thrive is intra-species cooperation and compassion. This is survival of the fittest in our species. Not "me above everybody else," but rather "me helping my fellow humans." I was useful to other people, and other people paid me well for it. The key to survival as a human is to be useful to other humans.

I said some things that were a bit misleading. It's true that I made a six-figure income for a few years, however it's not exactly true that I lived a luxurious lifestyle. I lived in an average working-class neighborhood. My wife didn't work, whereas most of the wives in our neighborhood did work. So my single income was equivalent to a lot of people's double income in my neighborhood. I wanted for years to take a trip to visit my parents 2000 miles away in California, however it seemed that there was never enough money to do that, so we never did. So you see, I misled you about my lifestyle. My apologies. I suppose I was partly just looking for a reaction. Looks like I succeeded. I don't believe I "blew my income on luxuries," actually. So maybe I'm not actually the person you need me to be to support your arguments. LOL

And yet: The news media remind me daily that my life is far more luxurious than that of most people in the world. And I daresay yours is, too.

One of your unsupported assumptions appears to be that I'm fat. I'm not fat, and I have never been fat. My wife is also slender, in spite of having borne seven kids. Hmmm, I'll bet you're going to have a problem with that. It wasn't totally my idea, but the whole situation is more complicated than I care to explain in this note, and it's outside the scope of your comments, so we'll just postpone that discussion.

Oh btw, my wife is vegetarian, and though I do eat meat sometimes on my own, I eat my wife's vegetarian cooking when I'm at home.

I'm going to hold you to what you said about the washing machine, and that illustrates my point: People want to be comfortable. It is not inherently evil to want to be comfortable. You do not need to ask forgiveness from God or humanity because of your desire for comfort. What you're talking about is moderating your desire for comfort with some self-restraint based on your intellectual evaluation of the effect of unrestrained pursuit of comfort at others' expense. "Craving" comfort is not exactly what I was talking about. Of course, you are correct.

What if the people with the most resources spent their energy finding ways to benefit people less well-off instead of feeding their appetites? Isn't that what you're getting at? Sure, good point. I've been supporting kids in impoverished areas of the world with some of my money--even during times that I wondered if I would have enough to feed my own kids. Should more people maybe give more of their resources to that kind of support instead of building a bigger house and eating out more often? Probably so. I'll come back to this later...

Damn prellaen, you've got some good thoughts there. I especially like where you quoted a distant relative of mine--it was a distant cousin of mine, Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term "conspicuous consumption" in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. And LOL you are really closely skirting the edges of my main point, which I'm getting around to pretty soon...

I very much respect your thoughts, pellaen. You have obviously given much consideration to many things. And again, you're skirting close to my point...

Absolutely. Comment away. The issue of "cheap oil" is a whole nuther discussion, and a fairly complex one. I daresay that the "American fondness for cheap oil" is not so much fondness for cheap oil as fondness for continuation of civilization as we know it, as flawed as it may be, yet that too is a subject for more and complex discussion...

I confess I was a bit flippant in my note. Partly owing to the ill-considered opinions I had seen carelessly rattled off in previous notes, and partly owing to the vodka I had been sipping. Yours is the most thoughtful note I've seen so far in this thread, and I'm trying to respond in kind.

My viewpoint can be communicated most simply by a quote from a Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki: "Everything is perfect, but there is a lot of room for improvement." That comment distills a huge amount of thought into a tiny space, and I can't hope to sum up all the ideas that go into that thinking in this little space.

Yes: Many people in Amerika are too focused on luxury and selfish consumption. Part of the point of my notes is to say: Don't lump us all into one conglomerate. This is part of the definition of bigotry, isn't it? Most of the people in this country are hard-working, middle-class folks struggling to survive in an environment that is at least partly artificial due to building codes and other government intervention...for example: It is unlawful to build a house out of cardboard in the USA. In my opinion, this particular law condemns lots of people to homelessness who would otherwise have at least some form of shelter. In our neighbor Mexico, there is no such law, so the poorest of the poor can still lawfully create some form of shelter for themselves. Government constraints like these raise the bar regarding what a family must accomplish in order to survive.

Another part of the point of my notes is to say: People the world over are selfish, and untold millions are corrupt. In the USA, such selfishness and corruption is more visible because of our overall wealth and prominence (dominance, you might say, and probably do) on the world scene. I know about other parts of the world. I converse with the many, many immigrants from India who work in my office, and the stories they tell me about their homeland make it obvious that selfishness and corruption are not limited to those of us in the wealthy USA.

I don't mean to say you have no right to comment. I only mean to suggest that you might consider moderating your harsh judgments with some understanding of human nature in general, and remember that social environment, though not a dictator of behavior, is still a very strong influence and tends to create blinders--not only here in the USA, but everywhere else as well. Effective dialogue needs to include these considerations, otherwise it simply deteriorates to finger-pointing and name-calling.

 

Actually, that's an unsupported assumption of yours, as shall become abundantly apparent...

Yeah, we're all aware of the concepts of altruism and reciprocity in evolutionary theory. But your elaborations were more specific and suggested you didn't necessarily hold to that view, for example when you said "Am I willing to sacrifice material comfort for the greater good of worldwide humanity? Ummm, let me think about it...LOL."

If you wanna change your view now and argue instead in favour of mine, I don't have any problem with that. You are giving an example of how investing in a different way can be more useful and rewarding than blind consumerism, and that was my point.

This may come as a surprise to you, but this thread isn't all about you. You can make up whatever you like about your life, it will have little bearing on the discussion, which is about whether the American Dream is a good thing or not. Regardless of what you claim about yourself, or how you change your story, my point remains true: that if you invest in luxury at the expense of other more useful things, you run the risk of suffering for it later.

Once again: this thread isn't all about you. No one is claiming you are fat. We are all talking about the thread topic, the virtues or otherwise of the American Dream, which many have interpreted as being one of needless consumption. Someone stuffing their face is an example of such an activity, and in particular one that has detrimental effects. An example of how the pursuit of luxury and comfort might not be the ideal course of action.

Unless, of course... you fooled us all again!! Maybe... maybe you're gonna change your mind again later and tell us, your wife isn't really a vegetarian!! Maybe... you're not even married?!! OMG!!!

Oh God. Where to begin. First of all, no, I'm not simply talking about the impact of one's actions on others. I'm talking also about the impact of one's actions on oneself. Hence why I used the "fat" example.

Secondly, I'm not against comfort. And I'm not talking about morality either, so there's no need for all the stuff about evil and forgiveness. I didn't give my view on whether or not people SHOULD help others or not. What I did was point out how unenlightened consumption can create problems for oneself, and how if what you do has impacts on others, they are liable to have something to say about it.

You were suggesting people shouldn't judge, and I was pointing out that if one person's actions affect anothers, that's unlikely to be taken seriously. Trying to recast my arguments as being statements of subjective morality and personal value isn't going to work.

Suuuurrrre you have. We believe you. I mean, you never change your story, do you??

But again, no. I wasn't saying people should help others rather than themselves. I didn't say they shouldn't either. I didn't address that at all. That's another one of your unsupported assumptions. What I DID do was challenge the idea of yours that everyone wants material comfort.

OK, if you think it'll help.

You must be great fun at parties...

You know, it's a good job you don't feel the desperate need to resort to adopting a patronising tone, because that would come across as being really "lame"...

Still, when in Rome...

I very much respect your thoughts too! You quoted a book! Your wife cooks vegetarian!! You would never try and change the subject in an argument to avoid being wrong. You would never try and claim you were joking and change your argument in desperation, like the average net wannabe troll!!

Yep. That must be it. Every time an American goes to fill up their car with cheap gas, they're are thinking about protecting civilisation as we know it. And when an American pres sends the country to war in an oil-producing nation, it has nothing to do with his daddy being involved in the oil industry.

Oh, it's good you were only being flippant. It would be a shame if it came across as being arrogantly superior, and rushing to judge others and their "ill-considered" opinions as you put it, cos that might appear hypocritical.

That's OK, because Shunryu has already summed them up for you in that quote you gave.

That was precisely my point. That there are some who follow the consumerist thing, and others who choose not to, who (in the example I used to end my post) follow another interpretation of the American Dream. That not everyone is all about the material comfort thing. You're agreeing with me again, but acting as if you're not.

You know a casual reader might assume from that that I had in some way claimed that Americans were the only selfish people on earth. But I didn't. This thread is about the American Dream, so naturally it's about the behaviour of Americans. But you can't take from that the unsupported assumption that we therefore think other nations don't exhibit selfishness.

That's a lot to lay at my door now. Where's the evidence that I think that way, though? What else are you going to claim that has no foundation?

For the record, I'm fully aware that environment can play a part in people's behaviour. But also, that some people manage to transcend their environment in ways that others don't.

Look, I hate to see someone getting all confused, and tying themselves up in knots. My points are straightforward enough:

1) Not everyone is interested in more material comfort and luxury. In fact, some actively seek to avoid it.

2) The pursuit of such things can be detrimental at times to both the person pursuing it, and at times to others. It isn't necessarily the dream some seem to think it is.

3) If it's at the expense of others, it's no good telling them to shut up and not to judge, and to accept it's because the perpetrator was brought up a certain way. Those enduring the effects are liable to have a say about it if it affects them

4) There are no more points!! There's nothing about "evil", or being a vegetarian or forgiveness from God or humanity.


Now, if you have a problem with any of these points, then feel free to comment. But spare us more of those hallucinations of yours, please?

 

Yet another new sig-pic, PsyGrunge. I confess I like this one more than the previous one--a lot more.

Occsionally, in good weather, I hike along the centuries-old Native American trail through the woods behind my house. I sit on a rock overlooking a main thoroughfare of modern civilization, and I smoke...a cigar.

Well look, it's right in view of any police cars passing, isn't it?

 

Wow prellaen, I never realized I was such pigshit. I guess I'll just go sip some more vodka and leave the serious discussions to the big kids.

 

Pigshit? I don't think that was one of my points.

Maybe the vodka isn't helping though...

 

Maybe the pigshit is just another of my hallucinations.

Seriously, prellaen, I think you might have made your points with fewer jabs in my guts with your dagger. Were the personal attacks really justified? If they really were, I'll eat my crow, but it strikes me that you were unnecessarily hostile.

 

Hostile??

(Where's the vodka...)

 

LOL Fine, maybe the hostility was my hallucination too. You want some of this vodka? I have a few jiggers left in this bottle, where the hell do I mail it? LOL

I don't know if I'm fun at parties, it's been too long since I've been to one. Well okay, I've been to a few, but not the kind that serve vodka. I'm stuck here in New England, the Land of the damn Puritans.

 

England!! Haha.

Yeah, not far from where I live, there's like a square mile without any pubs. I found that somewhat alarming... turns out it was an area once run by Quakers or something, who banned all hostelries. Happily there are plenty hostelries in the other direction...

 

Yeh well, "New" England is a bit of a twisted bastard of the the mum, ain't she?

It's the same with the Damned Fundamenalists the world over, isn't it? I believe I have the right to say "Damned Fundamentalists" since I used to be a leader in a fundamentalist church.

And by the way, prellaen: It IS all about me, dammit.

And all ass-kissing aside, the two weeks I spent touring England with my first wife were among the best times in my life. When we were in London, we scanned the papers to see what jobs and housing were like. I didn't check the pub distribution, though--I guess that would be the next most important criterion.

Gotta go now--my light-nazi wife is demanding that I turn off my laptop so she can sleep.

 

The American Dream is the hope of becoming rich throught hard work, and the hope of becoming happy throught money... :withstupi


Of course everybody should have a dream of it's own, and there is no reason for it to call it american.
Also I find that very few people actually ask themselves what there dream is. They just follow what's "common". It fills me with confusion when I hear 16 year old girls saying there are gonna marry a doctor or a lawyer.($$$)

 

The American dream is garbage.

First of all, dreams are intangible, so to give them a nationality is just fucking ludicrous.

Second of all, the majority of Americans dream about owning the best products. The status and future of America and those who it has effected is little less than a nightmare.

 

Glad I am blessed
to live in Ireland!

 

Never been there, though it seems a lovely place from what I've seen and heard. And of course, it's where Guinness comes from, and therefore somewhat sacred.

 

haha...sacred indeed...

There is a beautiful spirituality here, which is timeless...

People live for the day and dont worry tooo much what will
transpire on the morrow...

lovely way of life...lucky me....

Are you living in America?

 

I'm blessed, really. Yes, America, the commonwealth of Massachusetts. It really is beautiful here. We're surrounded by woods, and there's a trail through the woods behind the house that is part of a much longer trail known to have existed since at least the late 1600's, probably longer. Having grown up and spent most of my life in crowded suburban housing tracts, this is a bit like paradise. It's a bit ironic that at this time in my life I'm worth less on paper than I was when I was 19 years old, yet I live in a more idyllic setting than at any other time in my life. There's a story behind that, but this is probably not the place for it...as it is, we've shanghai'd this thread for our own purposes. LOL