Addiction.

          Time and time again we get government reports on addiction, drug addiction, alcohol addition, gambling addiction, but there is one addiction that the government never reports on. As a matter of fact they and their corporate buddies will do everything in their power to keep people hooked on this particular addiction, it is their life blood, it fills their coffers, they are the pushers and they grow fat on our addiction, it is the addiction to consumerism. Once again some wise words from Gregg Koep at Not Buying Anything:

 

         Most addictive drugs flood the brain with dopamine. Shopping does the same thing, but online shopping does it more, making it more addictive.
         Online shopping can stimulate as much or more dopamine production in our brains as in-store shopping. If shopping at the store is heroin, online shopping is heroin laced with fentanyl.
          In some cases digital consumerism can cause twice as much neurotransmitter as shopping bricks and mortar, making it twice as dangerous.
          Researchers are finding that attaining a reward is not the main thing that boosts the brain chemical that regulates our impulse to seek out pleasure.
          Anticipation of reward also releases a rush of feel good chemical.
         Ordering and waiting for a package builds anticipation. Anticipation causes dopamine release. Dopamine makes us feel good.
         But it is not all good.
         A dopamine rush can negatively affect our ability to control our impulses. This can be dangerous while spending money.
         The report entitled "Digital Dopamine," presented results from interviews and surveys of 1,680 shoppers from the US, UK, Brazil, and China in 2014.
From the report:
         "Seventy-six percent of people in the US, 72 percent in the UK, 73 percent in Brazil, and 82 percent in China say they are more excited when their online purchases arrive in the mail than when they buy things in store.”
         The bottom line is that online shopping is the crack cocaine of consumerism. That's the real reason they have been relentlessly pushing us toward it for decades.
         What isn't acknowledged enough is that consumerism on steroids comes with dangerous side effects for consumers, communities, and the entire planet. If we don't break free of the advertising/marketing-consumerism complex we will get stuck seeking selfish pleasures instead of helping others and developing our own creative gifts and moral character.

Only you can set yourself free.
Once you know more,
you'll say,
"No more!"

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info      

TOMORROW'S WORLD -- THEIR'S OR OUR'S??

      We live in an ever changing world and though it is filled with hope and dreams, it  can also be a very depressing place at times. It is through this fog of depression that we have to continually plan and build a better world for our children and our grandchildren, we can't leave them the nightmare that we have put on the horizon.

      The following is a short extract from "We Have to Dismantle This" by Derrick Jenson.

       The unprecedented reality of the present is one of enormous sorrow and cynicism, “a great tear in the human heart”, as Richard Rodriguez put it. A time of ever-mounting everyday horrors, of which any newspaper is full, accompanies a spreading environmental apocalypse. Alienation and the more literal contaminants compete for the leading role in the deadly dialectic of life in divided, technology-ridden society. Cancer, unknown before civilization, now seems epidemic in a society increasingly barren and literally malignant.

       Soon, apparently, everyone will be using drugs; prescription and illegal becoming a relatively unimportant distinction. Attention Deficit Disorder is one example of an oppressive effort to medicalize the rampant restlessness and anxiety caused by a lifeworld ever more shrivelled and unfulfilling. The ruling order will evidently go to any lengths to deny social reality; its techno-psychiatry views human suffering as chiefly biological in nature and genetic in origin.

        New strains of disease, impervious to industrial medicine, begin to spread globally while fundamentalism (Christian, Judaic, Islamic) is also on the rise, a sign of deeply-felt misery and frustration. And here at home New Age spirituality (Adorno’s “philosophy for dunces”) and the countless varieties of “healing” therapies wear thin in their delusional pointlessness. To assert that we can be whole/enlightened/healed within the present madness amounts to endorsing the madness.

        The gap between rich and poor is widening markedly in this land of the homeless and the imprisoned. Anger rises and massive denial, cornerstone of the system’s survival, is now at least having a troubled sleep. A false world is beginning to get the amount of support it deserves: distrust of public institutions is almost total. But the social landscape seems frozen and the pain of youth is perhaps the greatest of all. It was recently announced (10/94) that the suicide rate among young men ages 15 to 19 more than doubled between 1985 and 1991. Teen suicide is the response of a growing number who evidently cannot imagine maturity in such a place as this.    

 

TOMORROW’S WORLD!!

See the fat cat’s grinning smile

as Corporate Capitalism runs amok,

Chasing profit as it goes

firing millions of ordinary folk.

Raping and polluting land after land,

starting bloody wars.

Toxic waste, sweat shop wages

and oil covered sea shores.

Where have all the flowers gone

beneath this ozone free sky?

To join the birds, to join the fox

on yonder plutonium field to die.

Mercury fish, strontium lamb

trees that never show a leaf,

radio active beaches, toxic streams

good lean BSE-antibiotic beef.

In a world of epidemic, plague and famine

it’s bottled water and chemical food.

Of course, it’s all tested on rats and mice

so you know its got to be good.

Beneath a sky that’s always black,

hurricane winds and endless drought,

its oxygen masks for the toxic air,

corporate profit’s what its all about.

ann arky's home.