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second mortgage on your home used to be a sign of financial desperation. But the banks renamed second mortgages “home equity loans” and encouraged Americans to raid and pillage their own castles. As one bank ad proclaimed, “There’s got to be at least $25,000 hidden in your house. We can help you find it.” Home equity loans became a social contagion! 11 Of course, when the realestate bubble hit, those with two mortgages found themselves in double trouble, much more likely to be upside down on their house. Here’s the added danger of social contagions. They make self-destructive behavior like massive personal debt socially acceptable. That, in turn, gives people a false sense of security. But there is no safety in numbers. If I’m thundering toward a sharp cliff, I may feel safer if I’m part of a huge herd doing the same thing. But in reality, it simply means we’re all going to die. After the real-estate bubble burst, the cult of consumerism started feeling more like the 1970s killer cult of Jim Jones.
    Most addicts don’t ponder the cost or consequences of their habit. Getting their next fix is always priority number one, so very few addicts seriously plan for the future. Most Americans live in complete denial about how much they will need to live decently in retirement. The Motley Fool puts it this way: “Let’s say you’re retiring in thirty years, and you want to live off the equivalent of $50,000 a year in today’s dollars. By then, that $50,000 will need to be $150,000 thanks to inflation, and if that amount is 4 percent of your savings (the guideline espoused by the Fool’s Rule Your Retirement service), your total retirement kitty will have to total $3.75 million.” 12 Good luck with that.
    Meanwhile, as we fail to plan for our retirement, the pushers of products have developed a growing body of scientific research centered on understanding why people buy for all sorts of irrational and unconscious reasons. It’s all part of a master plan to figure out new ways to get us to buy even more. In the United States alone, market research is a $12 billion a year industry. 13 Martin Lindstrom, the author of the revealing book Buyology is a global branding expert and a leader in the field of neuromarketing. Using cutting-edge brain-scanning instruments, he has studied the brainwaves of thousands of volunteers as they’re shown ads, commercials, logos, and products. 14 He writes that his research “revealed the hidden truths behind how branding and marketing messages work on the human brain, how our truest selves react to stimuli at a level far deeper than conscious thought, and how our unconscious minds control our behavior (usually the opposite of how we think we behave).” 15
    “The government is so often focused on economic growth as the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ of its aims. And of course economic growth relies about 70 percent on consumption in a nation like ours. You can see it in the thousands of commercial impressions that children and adults are exposed to every day—all of which have the same underlying message: buy something and your life will be better.”
    —Tim Kasser, professor and chair of psychology at Knox College
    Often the reasons for a purchase have little to do with practicality and rational need and much more to do with deep-seated, even primal desires for social acceptance, sex, and status. Lindstrom describes one study where a car maker showed volunteers various images of automobiles and observed, “. . . just as male peacocks attract female mates with the iridescence of their back feathers, the males in this study subconsciously sought to attract the opposite sex with the low-rising, engine-revving, chrome pizzazz of the sports car.” 16
    Unlike peacocks, human beings are supposed to be able to man- age their instincts and impulses. Addiction is what happens when our instincts betray us. When we get an urge to buy something, it often feels urgent , like an instinctual