VANCOUVER LANDFILL// The Happiness Placebo. Our rate of consumption is not sustainable.

We’re sold the message that when we get the right stuff, job, clothes, relationship, we'll be happy. If this were true and stuff held intrinsic happiness, we wouldn't need to keep buying, and producing. Because once you got the thing you’d have happiness forever, you wouldn't need more.

A few weeks ago I walked around downtown past stores and buildings and a lot of people who didn’t look very happy or connected. Maybe it’s a utopian dream based on dystopian reality, but it felt like the Hunger Games, with Gucci shoes in store windows and so many things to buy.

The reality is we’re playing a balancing game, and at some point the bubble is going to pop. Because what happens when there’s so many microplastics in our water we can’t drink it. Or there’s a breakdown in our recycling collection and trucks can’t take away our garbage?

When this happens, and it will, unless we change, there’s going to be a major shift in what we know to be reality. And having the newest phone, right shoes, more followers or successful career isn’t going to mean anything.

One tall office building downtown makes dumpsters of garbage everyday. It’s every person, on every floor in every building. All the plastic that’s ever been brought to the Vancouver landfill is still buried in the earth, it hasn’t broken down. We’re just adding, like a never ending waterfall made of garbage.

What if you had to take responsibility for your own garbage? If the things you bought, donated, threw out and recycled, accumulated in your own home? If you couldn’t send your stuff into other spaces would you make different choices?

We live in a place where our garbage gets taken away, where our donated clothes get shipped around the world. Other people and animals live with the effects of our consumption, and we’re pretending we don't know.

We’re self destructing for an idea that's defective. Because if external stuff actually made us happy, we’d get the need met and it would be enough. It’s like buying into a dream selling a faulty placebo where you think you’re buying happiness. This kind of make believe reality, where we keep buying isn’t going to last forever.