America! Ocean of loneliness. This loneliness manifests itself in the most innocuous of ways. It is the T.V. that displaces a conversation between lovers; it is the music that fills the car’s cabin as we watch the desolate highway littered with billboards fly by. Our melancholy culture sighs throughout valleys of skyscrapers and overdeveloped hilltops that displace nature.

Before the recent terrorist attacks and the recession, various pundits, politicians and the like, extolled us to revel in our newfound wealth - our ability to instantly gratify every passing fancy. This is high civilization they said, what’s to be sad at? Even America’s poorest have access to every day things the developing world would consider luxuries.

Regardless, as Thoreau succinctly put it, we live lives of quiet desperation.

What satisfies us in America? Well if you ask free-market economists, it is conspicuous consumption. That is the ability to stuff ourselves till our sides split, or until our bank accounts bleed red.

What makes us happy according to this ideology?

Happiness is rolling around in an SUV that gets 8 miles to the gallon – never mind the hideous dictatorships we sponsor to keep the crude cheap and plentiful.

Happiness is the latest Nike’s while perfectly good pairs line our closet floor – never mind the Indonesian woman who suffers sweltering, suffocating sweatshop labor for 2 dollars a day.

Happiness is fountains of Coca Cola that line elementary school hallways causing obesity in children – never mind the Colombian unionist who dies a horrid death for attempting to unionize a bottling plant.

While we overdose on convenience, basic human rights are sold in the marketplace. Behind every product we consume, lies the blood and sweat of another human being.

But our total dependence on consumer goods doesn’t just hurt those thousands of miles away; it also destroys America’s social fabric.

Now your typical economist will say this is nonsense, a bunch of ballyhoo cultivated by religious ascetics and anti-globalization activists. Their theory is the more prosperous a society, the happier the society. But are the tens of millions of Americans who wash down Prozac or Paxil at the bathroom sink each morning happy?

Of course not, and here’s why.

Social scientists are discovering the happiness a community derives from its wealth bottoms out, especially in an industrial society characterized by deep disparities of wealth. As deep inequalities persist, the rise of consumer culture appears and entrenches itself, sucking the life out of once close knit communities. It seems that the more unequal a society becomes, the more individuals look to each other’s material possessions to evaluate their lives. Rather than cooperating to achieve our goals, we compete individually in a battle for winner-take-all. The measure of a person fails to be the content of their character; but the contents of their 401K.

This pressure to consume the trendiest gadgets, cars, and clothes leads to isolation, alienation, and deteriorating health. To achieve our shallow goals we labor longer, consume over our means, and neglect leisure and loved ones for self-defeating goals.

Compared with other rich countries, American workers labor the longest to maintain a living standard thirty years old. If we lump together production and nonsupervisory workers comprising 80 percent of the work force, workers labor 6 extra weeks per year to live as they did in 1973.

Since our wages no longer buy what Madison Avenue deems fashionable, Americans suffer under excruciating levels of consumer debt. Currently, the average American’s disposable income to debt ratio is over 100%. That means for every dollar you take in, you have over a dollar in debt. Because credit companies are more than happy to allow you to service this debt on a monthly basis, you can keep a lifestyle over your means.

Not a bad deal, right? Wrong. The more credit card debt an individual holds, the greater the stress, the greater the health consequences. The more we strive to keep up appearances of prosperity, the more we live a lie that translates into depression, loneliness, and susceptibility to disease. The more time we invest in trying to live a billboard lifestyle, the more we allow our spiritual side to disintegrate. The richer we are in material goods; the poorer we are in spirit.

We are a culture desperately searching for meaning in this materialistic culture. The solution to our search is to take Thoreau’s advice and “Simplify, simplify!” This doesn’t mean one must live life austere, but it does mean we must stop sacrificing our friends, family and lovers for career, clothes, and cars. The day we do this is the day the anti-depressants disappear from the medicine cabinet and find their way into the trash.

Matthew Thomas Harwood, a resident of Brooklyn and a free-lance writer, works in New York City.

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