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SUVs are gas guzzlers, which negatively impacts the environment, which presumably should be preserved for the very benefit of those children sitting in the SUV. Are you really protecting your kids by buying an SUV, or are you an addict using your family as a justification for getting something you crave because you’re swept up in a cultural contagion?
    “We are being promised by a techno consumer culture that if we only take in more then we could be more ‘ourselves.’ And in the very process of pouring in more goods, more information, we are being depleted of ourselves.”
    —Eugene Halton, author of The Great Brain Suck
    You Need That? Really? Seriously?
    While buying something that you actually need is not addictive shopping, the culture has played a shell game with us, creating all manner of artificial needs that are really not needs at all. You can make a reasonable argument for needing a toaster, but do you really need a high-tech coffee maker that spits out a small, disposable, plastic coffee-grain container after every single cup it brews, a container that’s extremely hard to recycle because it’s filled with wet, used coffee grains? These environmentally insensitive individual-cup coffee makers are now popping up in homes and offices everywhere.
    Birthdays, baby showers, weddings, the ever-growing number of holidays, and all other special occasions are opportunities to enforce the rules of the cult. You need to get a wedding gift! You need to send a card on Mother’s Day. You need to buy everyone you know some kind of present for Christmas or Hanukah. NO, YOU DON’T! Not if you don’t listen to the cult. There are many other ways to say “I love you.” In fact, you can just say , “I love you” and mean it. You can make a donation to a charity in someone’s name. You can re-gift things you’ve been given but can’t use. I have a friend who keeps a big box where she puts all the stuff she can no longer use. She carefully matches up these items with the needs of her friends and is always bearing gifts, albeit previously owned ones. Now I’m starting to do it too. It’s a fun way to get rid of clutter.
    The First Step Toward Freedom from
Any Addiction Is to Admit You Have It
    We simply cannot continue living the way we are without destroying our physical world. But to change, we must first acknowledge the truth: America is addicted to stuff. The mob psychosis that demands material gifts for all these occasions is wreaking havoc on our finances and on the environment. The wrapping paper alone is an ecological disaster, with Americans piling up 4 million tons of waste every year just from wrapping paper and holiday shopping bags. Four million tons! 2 That’s a lot of forests destroyed. For what? Something you look at for five seconds before ripping it away? In fact, paper products are the second most frequently purchased packaged goods found in American homes, right after bread and other baked goods. 3 With the exception of toilet paper, lots of those paper goods are totally unnecessary. Gee, what did people do before they had paper towels? A simple switch to dishrags would save forests and dramatically reduce pollution from manufacturing sources. Absent that, a simple switch to recycled paper towels would do wonders. The recycled paper company Seventh Generation lays it out right on its paper towel wrapper, noting, “If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 120 ct. virgin fiber paper towels with a 100% recycled one, we could save:
    933,000 trees
    2.4 million cubic feet of landfill space, equal to
    3,700 full garbage trucks
    350 million gallons of water, a year’s supply for 2,700 families of four
    and avoid 59,600 tons of emissions.” 4
    We all know the truth in our bones. We Americans are using way more than our fair share of the world’s finite resources. The United States accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s population yet accounts for one-third of global consumption!