As there are food gluttons, so there are energy gluttons. One difference is that energy gluttons are typically oblivious to how much energy they consume and the source of that energy. Their energy gluttony is a side effect of insatiable desire for material goods, which themselves are often associated with social status. Nonetheless, steps taken to deal with energy gluttony parallel those taken with food gluttony. Typically these fall into three categories: educational, political, and technological. I will examine a fourth, however, best characterized as philosophical. I will show how, by following the advice of the ancient Stoics and training ourselves to care less what others think of us, we can help overcome our desire for social status, resulting in a reduction in our desire for material things and a significant reduction in our personal energy bill. The pessimistic conclusion, however, is that most people are probably unwilling to undergo the self-analysis and self-transformation that this philosophical approach requires. 916 ZygonThe concept of energy gluttony, though, requires some clarification. A glutton in the usual sense of the word is a person who craves food and is more concerned with quantity than quality. Thus, a food glutton might drive to the supermarket at midnight to buy a pint of ice cream, despite having eaten more than three square meals the previous day.An energy glutton, by way of contrast, does not consciously want to consume energy. He does not, for example, drive to a gas station at midnight with a craving to burn a few gallons of gasoline. To the contrary, he is generally blissfully unaware of the amount of energy he consumes. For the energy glutton, energy consumption is simply a byproduct of satisfying various other cravings he experiences, including, perhaps, a craving to own a bigger home, a newer SUV, and the latest electronic gadget.In this paper, I will investigate energy gluttony. I will argue, to begin with, that our energy gluttony is a consequence of our wanting a variety of material goods. This claim, to be sure, is neither novel nor startling. I will go on, though, to make what I hope is a more provocative claim: in all too many cases, we do not want material goods for their own sake; instead we want them in order to fulfill certain social desires that we experience. Why, for example, do some people want to acquire a Rolex watch? Not, in most cases, for its own sake; to the contrary, they want a Rolex because they want to gain the admiration-or, better still, the envy-of other people.But if our energy gluttony is indeed a manifestation of our desire to improve our position on the social hierarchy, it suggests a rather unorthodox strategy for overcoming energy gluttony: we need to stop caring so much about what other people think of us. On completing my examination of the causes and consequences of energy gluttony, I will explore this strategy for dealing with it. It is, as we shall see, the strategy that the ancient Stoic philosophers would have regarded as obvious, had the...
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