Are New Levels Of Luxury Spoiling Us Rotten?

Roy Congrove's depiction of a typical house in my parents' era shows how modern technologies have added an incredible number of labor saving and entertainment devices we've come to take for granted.

In my lifetime there has been an unprecedented increase in the amenities we Americans enjoy, greatly adding to both our convenience and comfort and to the ease and speed of our transportation and communication. In fact, these many luxuries we and our children now feel entitled to are no doubt equal to, or even greater than, all of the accumulated advances made during the time span from Abraham and Sarah's time to the time of my birth.

Think about  it. In 1946, six years after I was born, my parents bought a farm and moved to Virginia and had to rely on kerosene lamps for light in our modest farm home in rural Augusta County. The former owners, frugal Methodists still recovering from the Great Depression, simply hadn't felt able to afford getting the place wired for electricity and having the power brought in from the nearest transmission line a half mile away. President Roosevelt's FDR's Rural Electrification Act had of course only been passed ten years before, legislation that made it possible for my parents to borrow enough money to get on the power grid for the first time in their lives. 

Even then at first we had only one bare light bulb in the ceiling of each room of the house, and my mother still used a wood burning kitchen range or our two burner kerosene cooking stove for a number of years before she got her first electric range. 

They next installed indoor plumbing, which meant not having to rely on water hand pumped from a cistern filled with rain water collected from the house roof, or on water carried several hundred yards up hill  from our spring. An electric water heater came next, and having our first bathroom--equipped with a single commode for a family of nine children--came still later, and was welcomed as an unbelievable luxury.

Today most of us enjoy a multiplicity of artificial lamp and light sources with instant light switches, along with state of the art ranges, microwaves, self-defrosting refrigerator/freezers, automatic dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, mixers, toasters, blenders, can openers, vacuum cleaners, and other labor saving conveniences we no longer even regard as luxuries but as totally necessary house furnishings.

Then there is the unimaginable technological and information revolution we've witnessed in the past decades. In my childhood my family belonged to a faith community that avoided radio and television entertainment entirely, and when we got our first telephone we were on a party line we shared with three other neighbors. Some of these more worldly neighbors did have radios, and some bought TV's in the 50's, but which enabled them to access only one or two stations on a good day, with black and white programming that began at 6 am and ended at 11 at night. 

We did have access to a daily paper linking us to news of the outside world, and my parents subscribed to several periodicals as sources of news, information and/or inspiration, but we had only a few shelves of books at home and limited access to libraries at school or in town.

Contrast that with to the near unlimited sources of knowledge (not necessarily of wisdom) we have access to today. Even our school age grandchildren can access more information on their smartphones than could have been found in the entire Library of Congress when I was their age.

In these and so many other ways we are deluged with an abundance of luxuries that could not have even been imagined less than a hundred year ago by parents and grandparents whose lives and lifestyles were more like those of the Biblical Sarah and Abraham than of our own.

Meanwhile, we who are in the upper 3-5% of the world's wealthiest people are increasingly out of touch with the hard lot experienced by the vast majority of the rest of the members of our global family.

"The more things you own, the more things own you."

Joe Bauman, Farmington (MO) Mennonite Church