Money DOESN’T buy you happiness:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/43884/output/print

http://www.forbes.com/2004/09/21/cx_mh_0921happiness.html

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/060629_money_happiness.html

Money DOES buy you happiness:

http://www.livescience.com/health/090207-money-happiness.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16leonhardt.html

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5944.html

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Who knows?

What amount would make me happy? Well, enough to cover health insurance, pay the mortgage on a small house, utilities, car insurance, leisure and entertainment purchases, etc.

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My boss lent me some issues of Adbusters, much to my delight. I love the artwork scattered throughout the issues. A lot of the art is stuff I haven’t seen online so it’s nice to see something new once in awhile. Also, while I have read some of the Adbusters excerpts online, nothing compares to reading the articles juxtaposed to the artwork they were printed with in the magazine. My favorite article so far is Roland Kelt’s “Japan’s Private World”. He writes in response to a talk given by famous animator Hayao Miyazaki who declared that Japan’s current generation was too “weak” and was due mostly in part to media/entertainment. Kelts discussed how Japan’s current generation is so far consumed with material goods, the internet, video games and the media that they just can’t function. The birthrate is at an all time low there, less and less women are getting married and moving off on their own and, increasingly, more and more men are falling in love with virtual ‘characters’ (here’s an unforgettable article I read in the NY Times Magazine).

It’s interesting to see the effects of consumer culture, materialism, and the media on some other country that isn’t America.

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Here’s a sneak preview of what I’ve been working on this weekend:

They are more exercises with consumerism of course. Next week I really REALLY want to invest time in illustrating my consumption/purchases a la similar to what Kate Bingaman-Burt did with  Obsessive Consumption. I want to tell a “story” with my purchases using illustrations. I want to do this especially because I’ve already documented an entire month of spending and I think it’d be a worthwhile experimentation to illustrate my purchases from memory. Maybe my memory/perception of my purchases will alter my illustrations of them (if that makes any sense).

I would have done it this weekend, but I wanted to work on finalizing all my data for the month of January and categorize it. I also wanted to document my own 24 hours of consumption.