n. An extreme form of materialism in which consumers overwork and accumulate high levels of debt to purchase more goods.
2003
Our society is more troubled by problems of overabundance. We are three times richer than in the 1950s, and diseases particular to "affluenza" clog our social and individual arteries. We are more overworked, more stressed, more depressed and much fatter. …
Critiques of affluenza go deeper than puritanical dismay at the aggressive vulgarity of materialism. The centrepiece of the argument is that we are obsessed privately with more income and better goods, and collectively with "growth" and "progress". Yet all the scholarly work on well-being shows that after passing a benchmark of real deprivation, greater prosperity does not lead to increased happiness.
Critiques of affluenza go deeper than puritanical dismay at the aggressive vulgarity of materialism. The centrepiece of the argument is that we are obsessed privately with more income and better goods, and collectively with "growth" and "progress". Yet all the scholarly work on well-being shows that after passing a benchmark of real deprivation, greater prosperity does not lead to increased happiness.
1979
Ann [Beattie] gives readings all over the country. Ann's picture was on the cover of the SoHo Weekly News. Ann gets mail from men in prison who have read her stories and fallen in love with her. And a Boston paper even referred to the people she writes about, usually disenchanted orphans of Affluenza, as The Beattie Generation.
1973 (earliest)
The disorder is called "dysgradia" — a term coined by Dr. Wixen to describe the free-floating anxiety that stems from a lack of goals in the lives of people with more money than they know what to do with….
[W]e poor wretches have come disorders we can be proud of, too. In fact, the worst of all may be one I find myself afflicted with from time to time. That would be affluenza — the morbid desire to contract a severe case of dysgradia.
[W]e poor wretches have come disorders we can be proud of, too. In fact, the worst of all may be one I find myself afflicted with from time to time. That would be affluenza — the morbid desire to contract a severe case of dysgradia.