This week’s readings and video all explore the concept of “stuff” and the values with which we place in them. Each looks to different aspects of both the economic and non-economic value that specific objects and products can hold, and questions whether a price even should be placed on certain things of significance. This creates a dilemma that can only be resolved through changes in our own ways of thinking, and as such continues to vary a great deal.
In Annie Leonard’s video, “The Story of Stuff,” we get to break down one of the aspects of this dilemma. Leonard analyzes the true costs of various goods, beyond the sticker price that we pay as consumers. She brings up the fact that people in other countries are having to pay “with the loss of their …show more content…
However, we continue to place value on such objects, beyond what they cost us economically, in part because our consumer culture encourages it. Leonard discusses the ways that society and advertisements insist that our own individual value is impacts by the “stuff” we own, and as such we get stuck in an endless loop of buying these things that really shouldn’t be important and are not healthy for the environment. To resolve this, she believes that we must curb our levels of consumption and place value instead on new ways of thinking and means of sustainability, rather than marketed goods (Leonard). John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” brings up similar problems with the constant feed of advertisements and publicity that are often much more influential than we realize, even impacting the things in which we place our values (Berger 130). He states that “capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible,” which is today being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable” (Berger 154). The article also breaks down art as an example, something that holds a cultural and historical significance,