Welcome to DebtorsPrison

Today my credit card debt stands at $23, 210.24. This debt is larger than my annual take-home pay. It is over half the take-home income of my wife and I.

Seven years ago, the only credit card I could get had a $500 limit, secured by a $500 bank account which I was required to maintain for eighteen months in order to prove my creditworthiness.

I guess I proved it, because now even this huge debt is just a fraction of the money that MasterCard and Visa have made available to me.

I used to think that responsible behavior like paying your bills on time was the key to earning good credit. I now realize that what brings you the whopping high credit limits is irresponsibility, the willingness to surrender your good judgment to the lure of desire.

I love my credit and am grateful that it has allowed me to build a happy life for my wife and myself, to own a home, to have traveled to over thirty countries, and to own a hell of a lot of stuff. Nevertheless, for all the freedom my credit has brought me, the accumulated debt brings a powerful burden of worry. Even worse, it now serves to constrain my freedom. I have entered a type of debtors' prison.

This weblog intends to examine this peculiar consumer society of ours. Life with easy credit and abundant choice can be very sweet indeed. And yet we are also living in a kind of madness, continually tempted and urged to do things which are not necessarily good for ourselves, for society or for the planet, things we might not have done if we had the constraints of tight money and fewer choices.

I don't intend simply to rant and blame society, corporations, the government or the media. That would be too easy. It's true that my politics are left-leaning, pro-conservation, suspicious of big capitalism, and generally appalled by much of the mindless consumption I see around me. Nevertheless, it is also true that despite my political beliefs, my good intentions and my low wages, I too have been lured into the debtors' prison.

This is not meant to be only my story. If society has constructed for us a debtors' prison, then it is a prison into which many of us have freely, willingly and even joyously entered and remained. I hope this, and a future website, can become a forum for people all over the world to discuss their debts: how they got there, how they deal with them, their feelings about it both good and bad.

I hope that through our stories and our insights, we can learn to fight back. By looking at everything around us with a fresh eye, by better understanding both the rewards and the consequences of our possessions, we can gain the tools we need to resist the siren song of "you want this, you need this, you have to have this, now buy, buy, buy......