Marie Kondo, Ozempic and the American Dream
how to spot a complex system with excess energy inputs
(this is a quick thought experiment that is part of a longer series unpacking Growth-Degrowth arguments. Will be framing up more theoretical bits in coming weeks)
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Was driving to the airport the other day and saw a giant sign for a new facility. “Extra Space Storage” it read, helpfully. It’s the newest version of the self storage places popping up all over the place these days.
Despite doubling the square footage of our homes since the 1970’s, we’re still running out of room for all of our stuff. Americans spend over $60 Billion every year just to have someone else hold onto their shit.
Stuff that’s not useful enough on the daily, but too “valuable” to throw away.
That got me thinking about the current craze for Ozempic too. We’ve been storing all of those extra calories as well. Just a little closer to home.
Never mind “calories in/calories out,” moderate exercise, or any of those other quaint nostrums to live a healthy life.
Now its just a quick injection to rejigger our insulin response. The pounds melt away with barely any trying. (unfortunately, so does a slug of muscle, along with your prior metabolism).
Which brings me to a broader debate going on these days: are we consuming too much to be sustainable, or should we keep going full steam ahead?
It’s a weirdly complicated and contentious argument. Often fraught with ideological clashes that make it even harder to sort out what’s the best way forward.
We’ve got free market accelerationists on the one hand, “decel” democratic socialists on the other, and tons of people in between who just want things to stay on the rails so they can live the life they’re trying to live.
The drawdown folks claim that it would take between 4 and 5 planet earths to bring everyone up to American standards, and take that as an ironclad reason why the only ethical thing to do then, is reduce how much we’re consuming so other folks can have a fairer share.
Bizarrely, the free-market accelerationists take this exact same fact, that there’s simply nowhere near enough to go ‘round, and flip it to justify ongoing innovation and production as our only way out (or a return to Dark Age poverty if we stopped now).
It’s wild!
But to all of these endless and confounding back and forths–about whether Americans consume way too much and we should cut back, to “Americans are forging the future for freedom and any attempt to throttle us is tyranny” (they’re coming for our hamburgers and our coffee next!)…
to the comparisons with countries like Denmark that use half the energy the US does, while enjoying higher standards of living…
Just forget about all of that, and remember that Marie Kondo and Ozempic are two of the biggest things to hit America in the last five years.
We have too much cheap shit to even know what to do with it all.
And we have too many cheap calories (exquisitely tuned to the salt, sweet, and fat pleasure centers of our hunter-gatherer selves) to refrain from bingeing ourselves silly.
And our answer to both of these problems hasn’t been to empty our closets and tighten our belts. (despite Marie K’s advice)
It’s been to spend billions on storage rentals and quick-fix weight loss drugs.
Nothing quite sums up our current moment like those two simple facts.
So libertarian tech bros and politicians can wax poetic about American ingenuity, the miraculous power of free markets, Silicon Valley, the Heartland, or any other trope of American exceptionalism. And to be fair, there’s some real truths buried amidst their huff and bluster.
(we’ll be unpacking some of these details in later posts)
We have invented our way out of a bunch of problems and into a bunch of prosperity, Again and again.
But when it comes to teasing apart our amazing inventions from our dismaying consumption, Marie Kondo and Ozempic are all we need to know right now.
Nothing screams “this complex system has excessive energy inputs and is unsustainable at current levels” like too much plastic, and too many calories.
Can’t help but wonder: what if we could keep the invention and quit the consumption?
Now that would be an innovation worth bragging about.
There are a ton of people downsizing their lives, and their careers to match. I don't work much, live off of very little, and have never been happier. Nobody lays on their death bed and says that they wished that they had worked more, or bought more shit.
This is a great article. "Can’t help but wonder: what if we could keep the invention and quit the consumption?" I think going forward we (humans) need to define economic terms, accounting for current externalities. What does consumption and production mean? Should it be GDP? Primary energy/exergy use? Some other thermoeconomic measurement? Happiness index? Once terms are defined, what functions do we want to optimize both in relative terms and absolute terms? i.e., GPD per capita, energy intensity per happiness unit, environmental pollution per capita per life satisfaction, GPD per exergy destruction or entropy production, etc...