This week’s readings really resonated with me. At times, I found myself actually nodding my head in agreement with what Lanham was saying. However, chapter 1 “Stuff and Fluff” impacted me the most. I feel that this chapter is a pretty decent synopsis of life in the United States today.
When I was little, I remember always wanting to have a huge mansion full of stuff. I wasn’t quite sure what stuff, but I wanted stuff. It seems a bit odd to me, now that I’m older, that I was so bothered with stuff. My small, uneducated brain was more interested in the actual act of having stuff than really caring about what kind of stuff I wanted.
This happened because I was a product of society. Though I was so young I couldn’t even read, I knew what stuff was and I knew that I had to have it. I knew that I wanted an expensive car because the ads on television were always so compelling. By the age of 5, I knew that a Mercedes costs more than a Honda and I wanted the expensive car because expensive equals better. Now, when I think back to my childhood, I think it was quite sad that I was already a consumer before I could read. It’s even sadder that I knew expensive meant better, though that’s not the case now.
So what does all this mean? It means that we (the United States, and possibly the world) have a problem. We value our stuff way too much. We also value the idea of stuff way too much. I think that we need to rearrange our priorities a bit and think about what is actually important, and stuff, dare I say it, is not important. Lanham says, “We must understand better than we do now the paradoxical relationship between things and what we think about things.” Perhaps society could take some advice from Lanham.

Quote from: The Economics of Attention by Richard A. Lanham, chapter 1, page 22