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This has given us an entirely new problem. Because, although the automatic impulse to eat as much as possible is no longer relevant, we haven’t been able to simply switch it off like a light switch.
The idea that we are making decisions in an age of abundance using mental tools honed in an age of scarcity might seem obvious. But it is worth repeating at a time when many millions of us not only have enough, but way too much stuff. Evolutionary psychology is key to understanding why we keep wanting and buying more, even when we already have far more than enough.
Maybe one day products that cause clutter, and that bring more anxiety and stress than happiness, might carry warnings like ‘Having too much stuff may be hazardous to your health’.
A political scientist, like Inglehart, for instance, would say that because more of us have grown up in stable situations where we haven’t had to worry about where our next meal is coming from, we have become less concerned about basic material needs like food and shelter, and more interested in ‘post-materialist’ needs such as having the freedom to say what we want to say and do what we want to do.
Materialism, and the consumer culture and capitalist system it underpinned, was the right idea for the right time. It meant that the masses, for the first time in human history, lived in abundance rather than scarcity.
it is time to discard the old belief that more stuff equals more happiness, and, in its place, to create a new equation for happiness, and build a new manifesto for life.
As more people, like Nicodemus, question the system and decide that more is not better and that they will not find happiness in possessions, we will see nothing less than a cultural revolution.
Instead, you are now less likely to be impressed by what people have and more likely to be interested in what they do.
They were amazed at how little time adults were spending outside in their gardens – less than fifteen minutes per week on average, even though they had often spent a lot of money on fancy barbecues and outdoor dining sets.
well as being a lot of things, there are two further requirements, Arnold says, before you can call a group of objects clutter. Those are that the things should be messy, and they should be in the wrong place, like toys strewn all across the house, from the living room to the bathroom, and down the hallways and in the garage.
There are only two ways to tell if someone has a clutter crisis. You either ask them how they feel or you measure their cortisol levels through the day.
To begin with, why the difference between men and women? Are women fundamentally different? No one knows for sure at this stage, but the correct explanation is less likely to be biological, and more likely to be cultural – because in our modern culture women are far more likely to take responsibility for the home, and therefore are more likely to get stressed out by a home full of clutter
Three, hoarders are terrible at organizing. They can’t work out what is important and what isn’t. They can’t decide how to categorize things or where to put them.
Who hasn’t, in the middle of a clear-out, kept something ‘just in case’, even though they haven’t used it for years?
There is no material difference between you and a clinically diagnosed hoarder, you see. It is a difference of degree.
And we all save things for the same reasons: because it’s pretty, because it reminds us of something, because it’s useful.
Rather than making us feel good, materialism is making millions of us feel joyless, anxious and, even worse, depressed.
Instead of pondering meaningful questions, like ‘Why am I here?’, ‘What happens after death?’, ‘How should I live?’, it’s easier to focus on questions like ‘The blue one or the red one?’,
And, brainwashed by the system, when the goods we buy fail to match up to those deep desires, instead of giving up on material goods, we just keep banging our heads against the wall and buying more.
Because in today’s meritocratic society having goods signifies success and, equally, not having goods says failure.
Austerity as heroic disruption?
The seemingly obvious answer would have been to get the farmers and the factories to produce less. This was what men like the economist Arthur Dahlberg and the corn-flake capitalist W. K. Kellogg proposed. This solution would be simple to achieve. Its outcome was more predictable. The people would work less. They would have more time off.
The conventional wisdom had been that the best way to become prosperous was by saving, not by spending. But Mandeville showed that things that were sins in the eyes of the church – like being greedy and buying more than strictly necessary, or showing off by throwing extravagant parties – produced work, jobs, and wealth. In other words, the private vices of the rich led to public benefits for all.
It all hinged, as you can see, on consumers acting like hard-working and, even more importantly, high-spending bees.
To make the people buy more, they would have to change behaviours and attitudes that had evolved since the dawn of time, the sort that said: prize the possessions you have, then be careful with them and look after them, because they cost a lot of time and effort and energy to get.
They should turn goods that people used, such as motor cars and safety razors, into goods people would use up, like toothpaste and biscuits. Instead of selling products that were built to last, they should sell ones that were made to break.
Instead of just manufacturing products out of raw materials, industry should manufacture consumers.
what is beautiful can also be engineered, and manipulated according to a manufacturing cycle, to keep people buying.
In this new vision, people would buy a new car, clock, carpet, or a new anything, as Calkins wrote, ‘not because the old one is worn out, but because it is no longer modern. It does not satisfy their pride … because it is out of date, out of style, no longer the thing.’
No wonder the waste that came with the throwaway culture resonated so strongly with the captains of consciousness. To them, discarding the old was more than simply a way to increase profits. It was proof that American industry, and society, was evolving.
materialism, fuelled by people and nations wanting to keep up with their neighbours, was unquestionably the best idea of the twentieth century. How ironic, then, that it has also given us one of the most pressing problems of the twenty-first century.
The last thing he wanted was to ruin the country that had treated him so well, slash land prices, and create a plague that would waste millions of man-hours and cost millions of dollars.
just as the industrialists had learned to mass-produce products by taking advantage of the new machines and systems of the Industrial Revolution, so the Mad Men and women learned to mass-engineer consumers by leveraging the new tools of mass media that appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: magazines, newspapers, cinema, radio, and television.
One path that most governments and businesses do not want us to go down is minimalism. Why would they, when their economic and financial models are based on materialism, on us wanting and buying more?
We would happily shift away from material objects to technological solutions: from having a library of books or a collection of CDs to a hard drive of e-books or songs, for example, or even not owning them at all, but only having access to them.
is this an argument for renting and subscription models, or for stealing and open access?
the question shifts from ‘Will things change?’ to ‘How will things change?’
stuff is good, because it connects us to others, to events, and to our own pasts.
minimalism is not very aspirational. Who, after all, drives a car with the brakes on all the time? That is hardly the type of lifestyle that the masses will aspire to and buy into and fall in love with.
Published in 1981 and again in 1993, Elgin’s book, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, struck a nerve with many of the overworked and overspent Americans of the era.
The reason why so many of us think we want a simpler life with fewer possessions, while at the same time leading a more complex lifestyle with more stuff, can be found by taking a close look at the system the captains of consciousness engineered.
this lifestyle is more like a ‘No thanks, I don’t think I’ll bother with that’ shrug.
Rather than fret about the competitive arms race that is conspicuous consumption, it consumes as and when it needs.
Going further down our respective career paths would likely mean more work, greater responsibilities, higher stress, and less time to lay around the living room with the kids.’
just because it is easy to grasp, that does not mean that the medium chill is anything less than a radical and very important idea.
It is a signpost, if you like, to another way of living, one which is slower and gentler and more human.
The industrialists, with their machines and factories and clock-time, began the onslaught against anyone who was happy to take it easy.
Then, with the help of the captains of consciousness, they exploited the masses’ natural inclinations to keep up and do well, and conditioned them into believing that their ultimate goal should be ever-higher standards of living.
When you think of it like this, the medium chill is a liberating philosophy. It frees you up so that rather than always thinking about tomorrow, the future and what might be, your focus is on today, the present and what actually is.
If you buy something with the aim of acquiring experience, that is, for the event or events it will provide, it is an experiential possession. But if you buy something with the primary intention of having a physical, tangible object that you keep in your possession, it is a material purchase.
while material purchases tend to keep people apart, experiences are more likely to make them feel part of a group.
In some circles it is now not only socially acceptable, but also socially expected to prefer experiences over stuff.
