...“Stuff Is Not Salvation,” belongs to Anna Quindlen criticized the consumer culture. She talks on her essay about the people who buy some not need stuff and goods and waste their money on junk which is not need. The thing, which she argues with people in her essay that, we can be happier if we live simple without unnecessary items. Also, Quindlen shows at the end of her essay that happy people do not actually rely on material things at all but just a few which they really need. Quindlen does a really great job with her argumentative essay by supporting it in a lot of details, personal examples and statistics. She also gets some conversation which attracts the reader by asking questions and make them think more about her argument. She said, “The...
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...Valued Possessions vs. Insignificant Desires Anna Quindlen, a novelist, social critic, and journalist wrote an intriguing essay “Stuff is Not Salvation” about the addiction of Americans, who splurge on materialistic items that have no real meaning. The ability to obtain credit is one of the main reasons to blame for society’s consumption epidemic. However, Quindlen feels the economic decline due to credit card debt is insignificant compared to the underlying issues of American’s binging problems. Quindlen’s essay gives excellent points regarding the differences in America’s typical shopping habits. Additionally, she mentions how people acquire all this “stuff” but seem to never realize, “why did I get this?”(501). Quindlen makes her audience visualize a world where we acquire our needs versus our meaningless desires. Yet, she fails to mention people who could live a life of happiness through the possessions they acquire. In summary, Quindlen supports her point of view with examples of American spending habits in the past decades of depression compared to now. She mentions Black Friday and how people become enthralled by cheap bargains (Quindlen 500-501). In Quindlen’s essay, she refers to an accident in which a worker at Walmart was trampled to death by a mob of shoppers and despite the horrific incident people kept shopping (500). With the U.S. depression, Black Friday brings hopes of more money spent, therefore a rise in the markets. The dream of an uplifted economy became...
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...2015 Anna Quindlen judges the consumer taste . She claims that people frequently waste money on “junk” that they do not need, such as “appliances, toys, clothes, [and] gadgets” (Quindlen 1). Quindlen encourages her audience to realize that “stuff does not bring salvation” (1). She argues that people can be happier if they live simply without unnecessary products and desires. Quindlen makes a few interesting claims about the consumer culture, but her argument is slightly weakened because she only uses her personal experiences, future statistics, and inappropriate comparisons. To support her claims, Quindlen incorporates her personal experiences into her essay. First, Quindlen describes a part of her childhood: “Television advertising… made me want a Chatty Cathy doll so much as a kid that when I saw her under the tree my head almost exploded… but I didn’t even really like dolls, especially dolls who introduced themselves to you over and over again when you pulled the ring in their necks” (1). Her personal experience during her childhood gives an example of how people buy products that they may not like or need. Her personal experience is also relatable because many readers have experienced losing interest in toys that they persistently begged their parents to buy for them. In addition, Quindlen mentions that she knows a family in rural Pennsylvania (1). The members of this family have little desires and only possess items that have “real meaning” (Quindlen 1). Quindlen uses...
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...“Why in the world did we buy all this junk in the first place?” (159). In Anna Quidlen’s essay: Stuff is Not Salvation, she criticizes American consumer culture, diagnosing consumers generally as having “an addiction to consumption so out of control that it qualifies as a sickness” (159). To make her case Quindlen compares her view of a morally deficient materialistic present to her version of a more morally wholesome idealized past. Throughout the essay Quindlen chooses to use emotionally charged events and language, like her reference to the trampling to death of a Walmart employee by holiday shoppers, or when she writes ``these are dark days in the United States: the cataclysmic stock-market declines``. What Quindlen does not provide are any logical lines of reasoning or support. To better understand and analyze Quidlen`s essay we will refer to an essay on a related topic by David Guterson: Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured., published in 1993. This essay relates Mr. Guterson`s experience of a one week tour of the Mall of America, in Minneapolis, at the time the largest mall in the world. Mr. Guterson is much less ambitious in his claims but actually provides support by tracing the history of consumerism in America as expressed in malls. Mr. Guterson also draws heavily on his analysis of interviews and comments made by shoppers at the world`s largest mall. Sometimes considering when an essay was written is important to help us understand the approach the author took. It is...
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