The Good Life v. The Goods Life

This was the title of a talk I heard recently by psychologist Tim Kasser. Kasser has been studying happiness and materialism. He has a book: The High Price of Materialism.

In his talk, Kasser revealed his findings that those who have higher materialistic values are less happy. They score lower in vitality, general satisfaction, and pleasant emotions while scoring higher in anxiety, depression, headaches, and drug and alcohol use. Socially, they tend to help others less -- treating others as a means rather then as ends in themselves. They also have less concern for the environment -- having higher ecological footprints (the # of acres of land it takes to sustain them).

On this note it was brought to my attention that if the arable land of the Earth was evenly divided among human inhabitants, each individual would have 5 acres of land to support themselves. The average American has an ecological footprint of 30 acres. This means that if everyone lived as a typical American does, we would need 6 Earths to support ourselves.

Scary thought.