New Year’s Eve, 2025
Suddenly, it is New Year’s Eve. Are your resolutions lined up for after the gluttony and consumerist excess of the “Holiday Season.” Can we make 2026 a good year? Opinions vary, as well they should, given the diverse indicators suggesting multiple sources of chaos emerging.
Are you determined to live the “Good Life” starting tomorrow? Or, well, maybe right after the festivities of New Year’s Day? What would that involve? What is the Good Life anyway?
Is it to be more of the same, or less of what has caused so much consternation and suffering this year? As we look at the trends in the human condition and the differences around the world, it is abundantly clear that over all—despite the financial success and abundance for an increasingly small minority—the opportunity for the human condition to emulate an ideal of ‘the good life, is ever more tenuous. The deep contradiction, of course, is that amidst growing abundance for the few, the conditions for the many are moving in the wrong direction.
Consumptive Habits and Diminishing Opportunity
How do we choose to live the good life? Well, that would certainly require a sense of what is good for us and what is not. And, of course, it would require that we have some sense of what it really is to be a human in the twenty-first century on planet Earth. For too long now, the propaganda of the industrial-consumer global political economy has shaped modernist culture to focus on the consumption of its products as the indicator of “success” in the modern world, and on the extent to which your job offers prestige or not.
But wait, there’s less. Even if we were to take the propaganda of the marketing/advertising industry at face value, it is just not working out as promoted. The large-scale numbers do not add up to a good life, however defined, for most of us. The story has always been that, as my Econ 101 professor claimed in 1963, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The claim that a growth economy would provide more well-paid jobs for all, and a life more prosperous than that of our parents, seemed to be working for a while. But by the seventies cracks began to be seen.
Back then, we had not yet come close to experiencing directly the Limits to Growth, so precisely predicted in 1972 by Donella Meadows and her colleagues at MIT, who applied one of the earliest computer simulations of economic growth, resource use, pollution, and environmental effects into the twenty-first century. Conventional economists denied and ridiculed the prediction of limits to the economic growth that was at the core of their economic ‘theory,’ which insisted that the idea of endless growth on a finite planet was ‘science,’ despite the absurdity of a model that claims unlimited expansion of an economy that operates within unchanging boundaries of the very Earth System in which it exists.
Meanwhile, the plunder of the ‘Global South’ by the colonialist nations of the ‘global north,’ which had boosted their power and wealth and sustained them for centuries, continues today under the lopsided so-called ‘trade agreements’ that have the same effect on economic wellbeing as did the original colonial systems. Today’s ‘settler’ mentality still frames the subordinate nations with a dehumanization that matches the continued exploitation as if slavery were still the framework for relations between the metropole and the rest of the world.
However, the ideology of endless economic growth was, and is, so engrained in the popular culture as well as the ideology of the financial elite, and so essential to the continuation of the hierarchy of economic power, that the reality of restrictions to extraction, production, consumption, and waste, is lost in the fog of Big Box “bargains” and economic improvement imaginaries. The impending shortages of plastic enclosed produce and increasing prices for lower quality goods and less nutritious foods are not felt directly until tipping points toward chaos and collapse arrive.
Perpetual Imaginaries and a Fading Image of the Good Life
The so-called ‘underdeveloped’ countries are instilled with marketed incentives to emulate the consumerism of the North Americans and Europeans, but without the wherewithal to execute much on the consumer motivation. Remarkably, however, the economies of the global south reflect the consumerist ‘lifestyle’ at a more limited scale. The elites live like Norte Americanos and every product is wrapped in or made of plastic. Shelter and food for the vast majority are severely constrained by ‘economic necessity.’
In all cases, among the rich and poor, and the shrinking middle classes, the imaginary good life consists of greater consumer power. However, the data on who is happiest in the world tell a different story. While ‘consumers’ everywhere imagine having the wealth that would allow them to buy the latest status symbol, the fundamental sources of human happiness are taken from them as they are told that happiness lies elsewhere in a greater level of consumption.
Happiness and Human Wellbeing
As the evidence of growing loneliness, especially among the youth who spend most of their time interacting with the unrealities of the iPhone, tablet, or laptop, the social cohesion that makes any society work, fades away. The formerly widespread engagement with the actual world, via playing outdoors with your friends, and engaging both the physical world and the neighbors, is lost to the attachment to avatars, bots, and other imaginary ‘others’ which cannot substitute for human socialization, but foment fear and hatred of unfamiliar others.
The ‘successful’ teenagers I know, who are engaged in the real world, are those whose parents had the forethought to restrict their use of the internet and especially social media until they had matured enough through real-world engagement to put such devices in their proper context as just one small factor in their lives.
The happiest people on the planet are not those who die with the most toys. They are the people, often with little economic power, who are fully engaged with other human beings on the scale of everyday life. They may or may not engage in social media, but most do not. They live happy lives because the good life is the life lived in association with loved ones and friends, whatever the economic context. That is the good life, and in the current historical context, it is very hard to achieve. Happy New Year! Say hello to a stranger and connect directly with friends and family, for a better chance at living THE GOOD LIFE.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 