”The story stuff”

I am sorry for the delay of my comment to Leonard’s interesting and very important clip. I have been busy studying another course, witch I study so that I sometime in the future will get a nice work and can buy new clothes, cars, vacations etc. I do that because this, we think, will make us happy. And to be happy must be a plausible answer to why we want to live.

As you all know Leonard tells us about her view and the consequence of our material lifestyle. Leonard talks about the lifecycle of a product, from extraction to disposal. In our books, in economics, a products lifecycle is known as “the value added chain” witch gives the producers and consumers more utility along the refinement. Leonard talks about the failure of it. Every link creates costs and Leonard means that it is a system in crises.

The crisis can be derived from companies, inequality, workers and our consumption pattern. The problem is that “If you don’t buy or own a lot of stuff – you don’t have value”. Meanwhile the companies make this worse when they change the look of the product, witch makes us feel less satisfied with our old product, and despite it still works. This makes us consume new products and toss functional goods. The consequences of this pattern are fewer resources, more garbage, more pollution and more work (to be able to buy new products we need to work more).

The new product maybe will make us more satisfied for the moment, but it will take time from other parts and interests of our lives, for example family. So is the price in the store really what we pay for the product? Instead of buying a new car, maybe we shall spend more time with our family; consider the consequences in the nature when we toss a functional product, are the product cheap because it is less environment-friendly, child workers or maybe the fact that living animals have been tortured (like the feathers industry).

The consumption has become a bad habit and the companies make this worse. And the price for this is high. Therefore we should stop all unnecessary shopping. But at the same time we here pray from the government to consume more and save less to stimulate the economy, because otherwise the downturn will get deeper and more will loose their work. This is a tragic paradox. Maybe the solution is to buy, as Leonard say, more renewable products and consider what truly makes us happy.