The story of stuff

The story Annie talks about is seemingly about the process of from producing stuff to final disposal, but I recognized that what she actually wants is the real change of behavior of government as well as the common people toward stuff things. The system of stuff consists of five stages, which start from extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and finish at a stage of disposal. However, the thing is that this linear system is now in obvious crisis and there have been lots of problems during the system working.

Firstly, I would like to talk about people. The words such as ‘of/by/for the people’ captivated me several times during listening to her. This is right. Government’s one of main roles is to take care of us protecting us from harmful, dangerous, and detrimental things. Have they been doing well like this? In fact, some governments don’t have the power to control so-called big corporations. As a result, for example, we are truly exposed to lots of advertisements encouraging us to purchase any stuff continually.

We also should think about our environment. Usually, when people buy things, they are not likely to consider what the earth will look like in some years. However, it is the time to be aware that the entire world is now in crisis and to take realistic measures globally. According to her, 2,000 trees are being cut a minute and 100,000 synthetic chemicals have been emitted a day in U.S. I was really surprised to hear that human breast milk is getting more contaminated due to super-toxic substances. In the case of U.S, 4.5 LBS of garbage is disposed and actually we have no choice but to burn or recycle them. Considering that when burnt, toxic substances are also definitely given out, getting in an international trouble will be a matter of time. No, it already is now.

Finally, it was quite surprising that the degree of national happiness has been declining since 1950s, even though the stuffs people everyday buy are getting various and updated. It tells us that no matter how hard people work and no matter how good things they shop, they actually cannot gain the real feeling of happiness, which can be achieved from their family, friends, and enough leisure time. All of theseㅡnew technologies, updating fashion clothes, and overflowing advertisementsㅡare supposed to be for meeting people’s needs. However, the situations now might be upside down. That is, people are struggling barely keeping up with those stuffs.

It is truly important that government as well as the mass needs to aware of what to be done first. Instead of consuming energy continually, replaceable and renewable energy should be considered first. People’s health care or sustainability should be ultimate purpose, not consuming goods. In order to achieve these, all of us at any time at any place should make efforts because this problem is true of all over the world, not only U.S’s.