The economy is a very fragile thing; however it can have an enormous impact on people. Americans especially are affected because they are so greedy, they always want more. Because Americans are very materialistic, they can become overly arrogant and possessive since they are used to getting their way, on account of having money.
Some people are never satisfied with what they have; they are always on the lookout for more money and more possessions. Man requires food, shelter, clothing and fuel everything else is superfluous. Luxuries lead to things like materialism and greed. People need to realize that everyone is the same on the inside. Our ancestors didn’t have technology or a ton of money and they somehow survived. “For the improvement of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors”. (Thoreau) Thoreau knew what most people today don’t, that we are all the same no matter how much money we have. Greediness can lead to negative characteristics such as gluttony and wastefulness. Our time on Earth is very limited; we do not have time to waste on materialism and greediness. We must focus on improving ourselves and our country.
In Thoreau’s Economy, he compares greedy humans to being cooked because they are heated by their unnecessary materials. “The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode.” (Thoreau). People are constantly striving to have more than what they have. “...the need to ‘keep up’ have long been part of American culture.” (Schor) The need to have the newest and latest gadgets is very strong in Americans. Produc...
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As a native of Texas, Lendol Calder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980 and went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1993. Calder is currently a Professor of History and African-American Studies at Augustana College and is presently working on an analysis of the thrift ethos in American history and culture with a team of scholars organized by the Templeton Foundation and the Institute for the Advanced Study of American Culture at the University of Virginia. He is a scholar of the history of American consumerism and this interest led him to study the progression of consumer credit in America when little else had been published on the topic. Calder draws from some of his own experience with consumer credit in the form of a department store credit card he and his wife obtained early in their marriage to purchase what he says was “a suite of furniture costing twice as much money as we could have scraped from our bank account.” (p.5) Most of his presumptions, however, were discarded in his explorations of the “peaks and valleys of consumer credit” (p.16) due to the fact that most common sense beliefs about the history of credit are in actuality a myth. In Calder’s Acknowledgments, he gives thanks to his parents for coming to his aid and saving him “from having to do some unwanted personal research into the subject of debt.” (p.xiii)
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In the modern world, people posses more than what they can actually keep tract of physically and mentally. Everyone wants to live the “good life” where they can have no limits to the things they want. Whether it is clothes, cars, jewelry, or houses, the need to buy things that are affordable and are in style preoccupies the minds of many people. The argument for necessity goes against this way of modern living, but agrees with Thoreau's view on it. The argument is that people should have enough of each just ...
The expectations to own a house, to wear fancy clothing, and to fit in with the rest of society condemn mankind to a life of constant toil. The end result is a kind of stupor. Millions of men are awake enough only to work. Fewer still are awake enough to think. Only a few, says Thoreau, are fully awake. According to Thoreau, man has sacrificed his greatest asset, his individuality, for the baubles and trinkets civilization offers.
...tlessly pursuing its own destructive materialism. It is a human fault however, having possessed wealth, like a drug, one must have more and more still until nothing else in the world matters. Money being power and power money, mankind foolishly is seen destroying itself for the betterment of a select few.
In English 1102, I was exposed to a variety of different genres, including, argumentative research paper, an annotated bibliography, an analytical paper, and a workplace specific piece. Entering this class the majority of papers I had written were all analytical, and in this class we went above and beyond the basic 5 paragraph essay. Though each paper had a different genre and style, I learned that each project was similar in composition.
With the statement, “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them,” Thoreau is saying that many people in the world, including the United States, are not able to enjoy life because they are too preoccupied with working and earning wealth to buy unnecessary goods. Thoreau believes that men only need four things to survive: fuel, food, shelter, and clothing. However, according to Thoreau, people still strive to obtain more and more unnecessary material goods. To obtain these goods, Thoreau writes, “He has no time to be any thing but a machine,” meaning that men are so busy working to make excessive money that work consumes their entire lives. Thoreau, on the other hand, ignores “factitious cares” such as excessive wealth, furniture, and a large home, in order to enjoy his life and not be forced to live his life as a machine.
Shea, Renee, Lawrence Scanlon, and Robin Scanlon. The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2013. 525-529,546-551. Print.