The unbearable loneliness of Affluenza

Smartphone: check. iPod: check. Designer clothes: check. Sense of superiority: check. Lack of intimacy with others: check. Anxiety: check. Substance abuse: check. This is the (oversimplified) route of the affluenza virus.

Symptoms include caring about possessions more than people and then wondering why you’re so depressed. Look around: Warwick, and the world, is riddled with the virus. Oliver James has investigated his ideas on affluence in two books. Just reading the first, Affluenza, a doorstopper of doom, will tie your mind in knots for days.

First, you become hyper-aware of people playing with gadgets during conversations, of mentions of money, fame and graduate careers all in the same sentence. You stop yourself in the shops; remember what Oliver said. You don’t need another DVD for your out-of-control collection, you only want one. You don’t need an iPhone 5 (clearly a new model will have arrived by next week). What are we chasing exactly?

Warwick students strongly expect that when they graduate, a top degree from a top university will deliver wealth and success. This is fair to an extent. Everyone needs to eat and pay rent and if life is short, you might as well be the best.

However, there is no ceiling. Certain students want wealth and fame for the sake of it; they see it as their God-given right. They stare at you blankly when you suggest a life where you have what you need – your health, a roof, a full fridge – and where your biggest priority is your family and friends. For these individuals, people are pawns. Use it or lose it, ‘it’ being coursemates, housemates, neighbours, relatives. They stamp their foot each day, looking shocked and disgusted when the world doesn’t fall at their feet and cater to their every whim.

In a community of thousands of students, hopefully some of them are learning to care, to cooperate, to become more tolerant of others, otherwise the word ‘community’ will cease to exist. However, immunity against the virus is low. Any day now, you or a friend could slip under. As for a cure, try telling people that money and fame aren’t everything.
At recent TEDx and One World Week events, speakers envisioned a world of social entrepreneurship where business is not the root of all evil. Bill Gates has convinced a bunch of billionaires to pledge to donate half their fortunes, people who had far more moolah than they knew what to do with. When you’re at the point where you could happily take a bath in your cash, it’s possibly time to assess how the money could be better used.
Unfortunately, judging by the virus-stricken at Warwick who have been hit before they even start earning, by the time they make millionaire status, they’ve already burned all bridges, grown horns and a tail, and are in therapy/on tranquilisers/due a heart attack.

If they never hit millionaire status then they are also in therapy/on tranquilisers/due a heart attack, asking why a money tree didn’t grow in their back garden like mummy and daddy said it would, and asking why they are living in an empty house. Probably because they kept trading in people like they did their possessions. You don’t need an iPhone, you want the best-looking boyfriend/girlfriend, and you want a shiny new update every few months. Social entrepreneurship is an unfathomable, unnecessary concept to the virus-stricken: ‘You mean the profits go to the locals as micro-loans? Why? How do I buy a yacht with that?’ Having money and wanting money, as Oliver James found in his research, do not make the majority of people happy. They only create new tidal waves of want. We’ve forgotten how to live for the sake of experiences with people rather than for the sake of paycheques.

I don’t have any intention of selling my iPod or of moving into a tent on Tocil Field. If I got offered a monster salary for a job I genuinely enjoyed, I doubt I’d say no. However. what you then do with your outrageous salary and how this affects others says volumes about you.

Do you have affluenza? Will you let the disease wither you until you are crouched in a corner, rocking back and forth, clutching a Facebook account with 2,000 friends you don’t even know? Do you see pound signs instead of faces? Is this what you came here for? Don’t let affluenza consume you the same way we consume everything else.