Everything is cyclical. Fear and greed. Hope and despair. War and peace. Creation and destruction. Minimalism and maximalism. Monogamy and harems. Happiness and sadness. Boxers and G-string chaddi (remember this). More and less. Untorn jeans and torn jeans. Things come and go, but the more things change, the more they remain the same.
There was a time when more was good. There was even a word for wanting more—aspirational. Things have changed. If you are the kind of person who likes more stuff, you will be labeled a planetary murderer. Wanting more is passé. Wanting less is the new virtue. Wanting less even has a new branding—minimalism.
The reason I’m writing is because of a long read (archive) in The Guardian on the cost of mindless consumerism by Chip Colwell. The article is an excerpt from his book Stuff: Humanity’s Epic Journey from Naked Ape to Nonstop Shopper. It’s an article about the emptiness of consumer culture and his attempts to embrace a minimalist lifestyle.
By the tour’s end, I couldn’t help but admire the landfill’s efficiency, the engineering that goes into managing so much waste. Dads enables the endless cycle of consumption of my city to go on uninterrupted while reducing the chances of immediate environmental harm. But not every place has the resources to manage such monumental waste. Ghana, for instance, imports around 15m items of secondhand clothing from countries including the UK, US and China every week. Many of these garments end up in informal dumps, which, after seasonal rains, wash out millions of rotting, tangled pieces of clothing on to local beaches.
There are a wide range of possible motivations for this kind of strategic living: an aesthetic sense (when people like spaces with fewer things), sustainability (driven by concerns over the environment), thrift (saving money), mindfulness (wanting to be more intentional in one’s life) and experience (when people are excited to try different lifestyles). For my daughter, it was the environment; for my wife, mindfulness. For me, I lean toward a minimalist aesthetic. But mainly I was exhausted by endless shopping, and terrified by the possibility that our over-consumption was destroying the planet.
All humans, even the quarter-witted ones, know that overconsumption is bad. Despite this knowledge, why do we keep buying stuff?
That was the question in my head after reading the article. So I started looking around for some answers. What follows is a collection of seemingly random perspectives on materialism and consumerism from a wide variety of thinkers.
One of the first things that popped into my head as I was reading the article was the brilliant George Carlin bit on on stuff:
That’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it? Trying to find a place for your stuff. That’s all. Your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much goddamn stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. That’s all your house is; it’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You see that when you take off in an airplane and you look down, and you see everybody’s got a little pile of stuff. Everybody’s got their own pile of stuff, and when you leave your stuff, you’ve got to lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They don’t bother with that crap you’re saving. Ain’t nobody interested in your fourth-grade arithmetic papers; they’re looking for the good stuff.
That’s all your house is; it’s a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. Now, sometimes you’ve got to move; you’ve got to get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff. You’ve got to move all your stuff and maybe put some of your stuff in storage. Imagine that; there’s a whole industry based on keeping an eye on your stuff.
Enough about your stuff; let’s talk about other people’s stuff. Did you ever notice when you go to somebody else’s house, you never quite feel 100 percent at home? You know why? No room for your stuff. Somebody else’s stuff is all over the place. And what awful stuff it is. Where did they get this stuff?
And if you have to stay overnight at someone’s house unexpectedly, and they give you a little room to sleep in that they don’t use that often, someone died in it 11 years ago, and they haven’t moved any of his stuff or wherever they give you to sleep, usually right near the bed, there’s a dresser, and there’s never any room on the dresser for your stuff. Someone else’s [ __ ] is on the dresser. Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?
It’s brilliant. Stand-up comedians are philosophers and the sharpest observers of the human condition. What did I tell ya?
Now to the question at hand: Why do we buy stuff even if we know we are making ourselves miserable and destroying the planet?
A few weeks ago, I started writing a post on behavioral economics that I’ve yet to publish. While I was doing some research for the piece, I read a little about the evolutionary psychology perspectives on human behavior. I think the discipline is fascinating and adds an important dimension to our thinking about why humans do what they do. So I started searching the evolutionary psychology literature for some insights on consumer behavior. I came across a fascinating paper by Douglas Kenrick, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, and Vladas Griskevicius, professor of marketing and psychology at the Carlson School. Here’s their hypothesis on why we consume and the consumption choices we make:
The fundamental motives framework highlights that people everywhere have the same ultimate motives. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, all humans have an evolutionary need to evade physical harm, avoid disease, make friends, attain status, acquire a mate, keep that mate, and care for family. These deep-seated ancestral motives continue to shape consumer preferences and decision making, albeit not always in obvious or conscious ways.
People everywhere have the same evolutionary needs, and these fundamental needs have a profound influence on people’s preferences and behavior. While an evolutionary perspective points to the ultimate reasons for human behavior, it does not in any way suggest that proximate reasons are irrelevant or uninformative. Rather, an evolutionary perspective highlights that there are critically distinct and complementary levels of analysis. At the proximate level, consumers seek goals such as novelty, value, self-esteem, meaning, quality, happiness, simplicity, reliability, entertainment, efficiency, identity, and hundreds of other goals. But at the ultimate level, people are often pursuing something very different, even if we’re not always aware of what’s happening behind the curtain of consciousness. The brain is designed to solve a set of perennial ancestral challenges. The need to solve these deep-seated evolutionary challenges continues to powerfully influence modern product choices and economic decisions.
— Fundamental motives: How evolutionary needs influence consumer behavior (archive)
They contend that our consumption choices are influenced by deep-rooted evolutionary imperatives. Here’s a cool table from the paper on evolutionary motives and how they manifest in terms of consumption choices:
Here are a couple of examples from a brilliant talk by Dr. Gad Saad (archive), who also applies an evolutionary lens to marketing and consumer behavior:
To give you another example of how gorging manifests itself in the human context, there was a classic study where the number and distribution of colors of M&Ms were manipulated. Objectively, the coloring is odorless and tasteless; objectively, there are no differences in taste between the various conditions. Yet people end up consuming more when exposed to greater variety. Their brains are visually tricked to eat more precisely because of what is known as the ‘variety effect,’ which has also been shown using single versus multiple flavors of yogurt, and by manipulating the number of pasta shapes in an offering. Now, the evolutionary reason is quite simple: our bodies actually need to sample a multitude of nutritional sources, but secondly, if we only eat one source of food and if that source is contaminated by food pathogens, then that’s a real problem. So you’re diversifying your risk of being exposed to pathogens by sampling from multiple sources. This was a mechanism first proposed by Paul Rozin, a food psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. And so here, even though objectively speaking, people should not be succumbing to the variety effect, they do because it is such an alluring Darwinian pull to do so.
In the next example, we’ve got grizzly bears that have to gorge on a lot of fatty salmon if they hope to survive the period of hibernation. And, of course, we pick the juicy burgers and we’re more than happy to gorge on that fatty food. The Atkins diet was very popular for many years because it actually prescribed a behavior that was perfectly consistent with our evolved gustatory preferences. It didn’t say, ‘Eat all you can eat raw celery.’ It said, ‘You can eat fatty burger patties, steaks, and eggs and bacon, and guess what? You’re actually going to lose weight.’ Now, of course, what the Atkins diet doesn’t tell you is that some of your cholesterol metrics didn’t fare too well, but from a strictly commercial perspective, it worked well because it was consistent with what our evolved gustatory preferences were expecting. If you look at the top restaurants in the world, they’re top restaurants not so much because they’ve got Justin Timberlake as an endorser; they do very well because they provide us with exactly what we want, which is fatty foods—fatty and tasty foods.
Ok, all these fancy evolutionary theories are nice, but how did modern consumer society come about?
Most explanations about the prosperity of the modern world start with the industrial revolution in Britain, which started in the second half of the 1700s. The putative explanations for the origins of the industrial revolution range from Marxian explanations of the exploitation of labor by capital to progressive explanations of slavery to technological explanations of the birth of the steam engine, rail roads, containerized shipping, immigration, mechanized production, etc. For some, the problem with these explanations is that they may be teleological—they explain the effect and not the cause.
Here’s Jared Rubin (archive), who, along with Mark Koyama wrote How the World Became Rich:
During the millennia from the caves down to 1800 the average person on the planet earned and spent in today’s prices some $2 or $3 a day, as now in the Central African Republic. By 1800 the average person in the richest countries, such as Holland and Britain and Britain’s newly independent daughter in the New World, had attained perhaps $6 day, as now in Afghanistan. Still pitiful. But in the 19th century, after a precarious beginning during the 18t,h century in Britain, a Great Enrichment transformed western European countries and their offshoots.
But Dierdre McCloskey disagrees with these explanations. She argues that while capital, labor, technology, etc. were needed for the industrial revolution, the secret sauce was individual liberty. In other words, the vanishing distance between barons, bishops, and serfs and the death of hierarchies. An enlightened environment of economic equality that lets anybody with an idea have a go at it to make their own destiny was what led to the birth of the age of plenty.
What we can show very clearly is that the usual suspects do not work. The slave trade, colonial exploitation, overseas trade, rising thrift, improved racial stock—no such material cause works to explain he modern world. We must recur—as other economic historians like Mokyr are recurring—to ideas, the ideas about steam engines and the ideas about the standing of bourgeois people who make the steam engines and the ideas about liberty that allow the ideas to change. The change in ideas arose perhaps from the turmoil of 17th-century Europe experimenting with democratic church government and getting along without kings. It certainly arose with the printing press and the difficulty of keeping Dutch presses from publishing scurrilous works in all languages. It arose also from the medieval intellectual heritage of Europe, free universities and wandering scholars. In short, it was free people who innovated and kept their just rewards. — The Industrial Revolution (archive)
The enrichment, I repeat, is recent. Some centuries before 1800 a few technological ideas had started to be borrowed by Europe from China and other economies to the east and south—paper, for example, and gunpowder, and the silk worm, and the blast furnace. But from the seventeenth century onward, and especially after 1800, the political and social ideas of liberalism shockingly extended the technology, through equality of liberty and dignity in Holland and Britain and Belgium and above all in the United States, and then beyond. The economic historian Joel Mokyr in a new book chronicles the improvements in communication and the welcoming of novelties that made for a freewheeling and largely egalitarian Republic of Letters after 1500, and especially after 1600.3 The outcome of such rhetorical developments was a technological explosion, especially after 1800, that radically improved on Europe’s old overseas borrowings. The Great Enrichment is not to be explained, that is, by material matters of race, class, gender, power, climate, culture, religion, genetics, geography, institutions, or nationality. On the contrary, what led to our automobiles and our voting rights, our plumbing and our primary schools, were the fresh ideas that flowed from liberalism, that is, a new system of encouraging betterment and a partial erosion of hierarchy. — Liberalism Caused the Great Enrichment (archive)
Mass consumerism was born in Europe, then spread to America, and then to the rest of the world through movies and music as the world got richer and more globalized.
If liberty is our greatest export, consumerism is a strong No. 2. Americans figured out how to tap into the brainstem to persuade people without ever reaching the cerebrum. It works–and merchants everywhere are adopting it. Including idea- and candidate-merchants. — David Von Drehle
If consumerism had its initial roots in Europe in the seventeenth century, as the fruits of conquest and colonization gave rise to increasing material wealth and a growth in the range of products available for consumption (McKendrick et al., 1983; Brewer and Porter, 1993), the ‘imitation’ that quickly took hold in the American colonies, and then in an independent USA, became from the late nineteenth century the ‘real thing’, a way of life to which, in due course, more and more people around the world have aspired, albeit while also at times attaching local meanings and values to the commodities and services purchased and consumed. — Consuming: Historical and Conceptual Issues (archive)
If we stop buying stuff, what should we do instead?
In the previous edition (archive), I had quoted this wonderful bit from Stephen Fry’s interview with John Cleese:
So I… I had this empty hole in me, this vast empty hole that said, “Feed me. I need this sugar. I need it.” And then when it wasn’t sugar, it became tobacco, and I smoked. And then in my 20s, it became cocaine. I just… And I couldn’t sit still without going, you know, and it’s that addictive impulse that many people, many people watching will know what I mean. And many people won’t because this is the important thing to remember. I said, “Not everybody has this.” And it’s a kind of addictive gene. And I guess the money people have it for money. There’s this hole in them they have to acquire and they have to own.
This hunger for moar and moar reminds me of a passage from the book Balance: How to Invest and Spend for Happiness, Health, and Wealth:
Here’s the point of this story: If Andrew and I were sharing stories around a campfire with friends today, we might talk about the crazy fight in the hotel lobby. We might laugh about begging our way onto a local Cuban bus while the driver stopped to pick up milk and chickens. But we wouldn’t likely talk about anything we bought that year. We value our experiences over the things we buy. Yes, we might be a couple of dorky dudes, but most people prefer life experiences over stuff.
When I give talks about happiness and money, I ask attendees to recall their most memorable material purchase. Sometimes, I ask them to write down what they felt when they first acquired that purchase. I recall one gentleman saying, “I love tech gadgets. When the first iPhone came out, I was one of the first to buy one. I loved it. I thought it was amazing.”
Next, I present the following scenario: You have one more month to live. The Grim Reaper says, “I’m going to erase one of your memories. It’s going to be the memory of your favorite material purchase or the memory of your favorite experiential purchase.”
Not surprisingly, the man said he would sacrifice the memory of any “thing” he bought before relinquishing a memory of an enjoyable time with his family.
Sounds sensible, doesn’t it?
Not so fast.
Sash Chapin wrote a wonderful response to this topic (archive) of spending on things vs. experiences. The TLDR of his long post is: It’s complicated. That we like experiences over possessions isn’t as black and white as people assume. Meaningful and utilitarian material possessions can be as fulfilling as experiences.
I guess it should go something like, “try to buy experiences instead of possessions, or maybe buy possessions that enrich your life by enabling novel experiences, or, if you’re the kind of person who tends to buy possessions over experiences, ignore us, we wouldn’t dare make broad generalities and purport to know better than you do about what makes you happy based on a couple of surveys, happiness is way too complicated for that.”
Adam Mastroianni studies human behavior and also writes a substack that I really enjoy reading but am not smart enough to understand in full. He had an insightful reply to Sasha Chapin’s post:
I agree. It’s not clear to me how you could reasonably answer a question like, “Which makes you happier, things or experiences?”
Buying my toothbrush didn’t make me particularly happy. But if it fell in the toilet, should I say, “Too bad I can’t buy a new one, because to maximize my happiness I should really put that $1.50 toward buying Coldplay tickets”?
In fact, I bet people overestimate their momentary happiness more when predicting for experiences than for possessions. There’s research on how people expect fun experiences (like a European vacation) to be great, they remember them being great, but when they’re actually experiencing them, they’re less great: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103197913330
That’s because when you imagine going to Rome, you picture yourself sucking down Negronis and strolling through the Coliseum. You don’t picture yourself waiting in line, or getting dehydrated, or tossing and turning while sirens wail outside your AirBnB. All those things fade in memory, both because negative things fade faster than positive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading_affect_bias), and because you had a strong theory in the first place that “European vacation = fun”, and things that don’t fit with that theory tend to get lost.
I bet this happens less with possessions. I buy a TV in the hopes of watching entertaining images on it, and that’s exactly what I end up doing. I never expect buying a new thing to make me transcendently happy, but I do expect experiences to do that for me sometimes, and I’m often disappointed.
TLDR: We’re all beautiful and unique snowflakes.
Going back to the question of why we want moar and moar, I found a couple of brilliant perspectives. The first perspective is from the great American novelist David Foster Wallace, talking about the ethos of individualism and consumerism in America. After I watched the video, I was ashamed that I didn’t know who he was. The man is a goddamn genius.
A few highlights:
In the book, there’s an element in which various people are living out something that, I think, is true, which is that we all worship, and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different. For instance, pleasure or drugs or the idea of having a lot of money and being able to buy nice stuff.
Whatever the conditions of hopelessness you’re talking about, at least in “Infinite Jest,” have to do, I think, with an American idea, and not a universal one, but one that I think kids get exposed to very early. That you are the most important and what you want is the most important and that your job in life is to gratify your own desires. That’s a little crude to say it that way, but in fact it’s something of the ideology here. And it’s certainly the ideology that’s perpetrated by television and advertising and entertainment and the economy thrives on it. Well, of course, nobody tells you. I mean, mom and dad don’t sit you down and say this. This is something very subtle and is delivered by a great many messages.
That feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire. It seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery. Nobody talks about it as such though. It talks about the freedom of choice and you have the right to have things and spend this much money and you can have this stuff. Again, saying it this way, it sounds to me very crude and very simple, but that’s sort of the way. And it works very well as a system for running an economy and keeping goods produced and sold. It works wonderfully. The ways in which it doesn’t work are much more difficult to talk about. One of the things it causes is tension and unhappiness in people. I don’t think it’s very complicated and I don’t think I’ve named the only reason for it. The paradox is that that sort of tension and complication and conflict in people also makes them very easy to market to. Because I can say to you, ‘Feeling uneasy? Life feels empty?’ ‘Well, here’s something you can buy or something you can go do.’
The legendary linguist, activist, and philosopher Noam Chomsky has a darker take on consumerism:
We should be careful to consider consumerism and the consumption culture, which is largely artificially created. This is not just my opinion; if we go back to about a century ago and examine the origins of the public relations industry, including the advertising industry, we find an interesting history. In the freest countries in the world at the time, such as England and the United States, there was a conscious and articulated recognition among elite sectors that enough freedom had been won through popular struggle. As a result, people couldn’t be controlled by force anymore, so alternative means were necessary to control them. This alternative means was the control of attitudes and opinions, leading to the call for the manufacture of consent.
We indeed need a mechanism for the manufacture of consent, but we also need to create conditions where people are driven towards more superficial aspects of life, like fashionable consumption. I’m actually quoting from the business press when I say this, as they recognize that by creating such conditions, we can effectively control people. This concept is often referred to as “fabrication of wants,” a term used by the great political economist Thorstein Veblen, who understood and wrote about it. By fabricating wants, we can trap people into consumerism and debt, among other things.
If you examine television content directed at infants and two-year-olds, you’ll notice that it’s already attempting to create a culture of demand for goods. In fact, there’s now an academic discipline within Applied Psychology that deals with the concept of nagging. The reason behind this is that the advertising industry recognized a couple of decades ago that a significant portion of the population doesn’t have disposable income, so they can’t make purchases. To address this, they focus on children, as they can influence their parents through nagging. For instance, a child might insist, “I need that toy or video game,” and this form of advertising, targeting children through television and other mediums, employs various types of nagging techniques tailored to different kinds of purchases. The overarching idea is to ensnare infants and children into a culture of fabricated wants, so they can later be ensnared into a consumer culture, effectively controlled alongside the manufacturing of opinions.
Chomsky sounds like one of those conspiratorial kooks, but he isn’t wrong. American consumerism was both a grand psychological experiment and an explicit political project. At the turn of the century, the biggest worry for American companies was: What if people said enough and stopped buying more? An excerpt from Jeffrey Kaplan’s brilliant post on the history of American consumerism:
By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption” — the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”
If you had read my previous post on the history of media, you’d remember that by the early 1900s, advertising agencies were beginning to mushroom in America. American companies wanted to sell more. With the help of advertising agencies, they unleashed what can only be termed a deliberate campaign of propaganda to convince and program people into believing that they always needed to buy more. Advertisers perfected the art of hacking people’s desire for status. A key figure in early American advertising was Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Thanks to him, propaganda became public relations, and people became guinea pigs on a hamster wheel of endless consumption:
Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime.
Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”
Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To overcome “sales resistance” to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”
In the 1930s, he promoted cigarettes as both soothing to the throat and slimming to the waistline. But at home, Bernays was attempting to persuade his wife to kick the habit. When would find a pack of her Parliaments in their home, he would snap every one of them in half and throw them in the toilet. While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer. — The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations (archive)
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ― Edward Bernays, Propaganda
We don’t consume in isolation but in a social context—we’re all keeping up with the Joneses. In other words, we have a reference group against whom we compare ourselves. Our friends, neighbors, peers, and popular culture all have an influence on what we consume. Juliet Schor (archive), a professor of sociology and economics at Boston College, has an interesting theory of how America became a nation of shoppers. The reference group for Americans in the 1950s were their neighbors. The wants and desires of Americans were in comparison to what their neighbors had and wanted. But then married women entered the workforce and were exposed to a diverse group of people. As neighborhood bonds weakened, the reference group for comparison shifted upwards to successful people in professional settings.
The other key factor was inequality. The share of income going to the richest 20% kept increasing. As radio, TV, and the Internet proliferated, Americans were exposed to more media than ever. Nobody likes watching poor people on their TVs and phones, so the media started broadcasting the lives of the rich and the famous. This further led to an upward shift in reference groups. Americans no longer wanted to emulate their neighbors or bosses but wanted the lives of the rich and famous—the ones on TV and glossy magazines. So they started working more at the cost of family time, friendships, and leisure to earn more. When that wasn’t enough, they started borrowing more and piling on mortgage and credit card debt so that they could have a piece of that juicy American dream. I believe this is what’s happening around the world. We are in an age of aspirational inflation.
There’s what I’ve called competitive consumption, you know, where we just want to maintain our position in society. Not necessarily trying to get ahead of everyone, but simply keeping up and not falling behind. In a world with a growing economy, this often entails escalating our standard of living.
Growing social inequality fuels a spiral of “competitive consumption.” As the wealthy get richer, the pressure on the middle class to maintain their relative position intensifies. This manifests in a constant need to keep up with the rising standard of living, even if it means acquiring unnecessary luxuries. This fear of falling behind and losing social status is exacerbated by the widening gap between the rich and everyone else.
Consumption as a remedy for economic woes: The Great Depression and its aftermath instilled a fear of economic collapse. Consumption, in this context, is seen as a way to keep the production engine running and creating jobs.
Questioning consumption, but not jobs: While the idea of endless consumption for happiness might be debatable, the need for employment is less so. Hence, consumption carries a “golden halo” as a solution to unemployment.
An AI generated summary of this video of Juliet Schor
Some of these perspectives give the impression that we’re all mindless robots without agency, consuming our way to oblivion. I’m not sure how I feel about that. The notion that we’re all mindless puppets and playthings in the hands of brands and advertisers to be molded and programmed to satisfy their needs is depressing. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but we have to accept that there’s an element of unconscious consumption. We give into our evolutionary impulses because we’re easily aroused by things. People selling trinkets have perfected the art of making humans horny for shiny objects.
Modern life is hard. Consumption is as much a social activity as it is an individual one. We’re all infected by the raging epidemic of social comparison, and there’s no known vaccine for it. Having said that, while it’s fashionable to rant against consumerism, we have to start by accepting that modern prosperity has given us many good and pleasurable things—it’s made our lives better. As economist Jayati Ghosh put it eloquently, romanticized notions of an ideal past are wrong and useless.
But we should not romanticize life in the past, which in much of the world, until quite recently, could still be characterized, in Thomas Hobbes’s formulation, as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In the long course of human history, one of the most striking features of the twentieth century—simultaneously a terrible time in many ways and for many people—was the dramatic increase in life expectancy in all the regions of the world. After around two millennia when average life expectancy is estimated to have remained broadly flat at around twenty-eight to thirty-two years, it started increasing in the nineteenth century in today’s rich (then, colonizing) countries. Over the twentieth century the average of world life expectancy doubled—and the gains were spread across countries. What is more, the gaps between countries, though still very large, have reduced since 1950. Max Roser notes that “today most people in the world can expect to live as long as those in the very richest countries in 1950.” — Degrowth Is a Distraction. The distribution of gains is more important than GDP. Jayati Ghosh (archive)
Consumption isn’t bad; it’s rampant consumerism that’s bad. They aren’t the same thing. It’s our collective inability to say enough that’s at the root of most modern ills. Consumerism was born from a war on enough. The result was that the ever-elusive ideal of a good life—the one on Instagram and magazine covers—became a benchmark for all of us. You can see this from the fact that the poor want to be rich and the rich want to be happy. At some point in all our lives, we have to change our benchmarks and start to define our own happiness.
We can change. It’s hard, but we can break out of the cycle of pointless consumption by prioritizing things that add value and meaning to life, however you define that. Realizing that we can never outrun our insecurities and feelings of inadequacy, no matter what we buy on Black Friday and Singles Day, is hard. Money and consumerism are cocaine for our insecurities. It’s not going to be easy because we’re up against capitalism, and capitalism is a gorgeous model seducing us with a promise to make us happy (don’t be a pervert; it’s a metaphor). It’s in capital’s interest to leave you with holes that can’t be filled so that you keep shoveling stuff (again, don’t be a pervert).
We’re social animals; we’ll always compare ourselves to others, we’ll always feel inadequate, and we’ll always want more. We will never fill that hole inside of us, even if we spend a decade in a Tibetan monastery, wearing a loincloth, chanting weird things, sitting in an eternal selfie pose, and banging brass plates. We’re all damned by a customized version of the Sisyphean curse. The trick is to get to a place where you grunt instead of yelling “you piece of shit” when you wake up and look yourself in the mirror. I hope to get there one day.
Trigger alert, but here’s another gem from old George:
Then you have advertising. Advertising is the businessman’s cheaply dressed two-dollar blow job. Advertising sells you things you don’t need and can’t afford that are overpriced and don’t work, and they do it by exploiting your fears and insecurities. If you don’t have any, they’ll be glad to give you a few by showing you a nice picture of a woman with big tits.
I don’t know if Chuck Palahniuk was inspired by George Carlin or the Dalai Lama, but here’s a banger from the movie Fight Club, based on the book of the same title:
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
I asked you to remember the g-string chaddi. Here’s why:
This is the cruel and twisted consumerist world in which we are living. Less coverage area around your Latin American region is more costly than more coverage.
Reading and watching recommendations
The Boston Review published an amazing series of articles on hedonism in 2022. The lead article in the series is by philosopher Kate Soper (archive). It’s a brilliant article in which she paints a depressing picture of the emptiness of modern life in capitalist societies and suggests ways to get off the consumerist treadmill and embrace simpler and more fulfilling lifestyles. Sustainable lifestyles in which happiness doesn’t come from buying useless shit but from being part of local communities, social enterprises, and the knowledge that one’s lifestyle isn’t destroying the only home we have.
I first read the piece at the beginning of the year, and I keep rereading it every now and then. The article left a deep imprint on me and forced me to question many things about my life. There are responses to Kate Soper’s exhortation from a variety of equally brilliant thinkers, the links to which are on the right side and at the end of this article.
How Humans Became ‘Consumers’: A History (archive)
A Brief History of Consumer Culture (archive)
The Gospel of Consumption (archive)
The Politics of Consumption: an Interview with Juliet Schor (archive)
This Is What Happens to All the Stuff You Don’t Want (archive)
How the young spend their money (archive)
How Consumerism Sold Democracy to Postwar Germany (archive)
Empire of Things: a New History of Humans and their Stuff
Civilization Episode 5: Consumerism
How the World Became Rich – Deirdre McCloskey
Things I read
Walking the city, walking the world (archive)
For a long time, scaled consumer marketing has created status roles where none used to exist, and amplified division and class as a way to create insufficiency and generate sales.
But what we see when we look at the media or at a stack of resumes doesn’t accurately represent the world as it is.
We are all weird, and that’s okay.
All the Carcinogens We Cannot See (archive)
This is a fascinating article on the impossibility of figuring out what factors cause and trigger cancer. I kinda felt depressed when I learned that we’re all filled with cancerous cells just waiting to be triggered by something like air pollution or inflammation.
The fact that, in almost one in ten cases, we can’t identify a clear mechanism for the development of lung cancer even in smokers gives us all the more reason to think that we may be missing a plenitude of cancer-causing agents. The multi-hit model tells us about what’s happening within a cell, but Balmain knew that a cell is not an isolated spaceship floating between planets. That’s why he came to suspect that some of the “hits” have to do not with the cancer cell but with the tissue milieu in which the cancer cell finds itself. The snake, venomous as it is, must still be whipped to provoke its attack; the hound must be painted _and_ set to roam the moor.
Hill, Lim, and Weeden aren’t the only researchers to have found potentially cancerous cells lying dormant in tissues. In 2015, a team of scientists studied cells from the eyelid, an area of skin routinely exposed to UV light. (The tissue came from patients who’d had “eyelid lift” surgery.) Roughly a fifth to a third of the cells carried skin-cancer-driving mutations, and clones carrying some of these mutations had expanded, suggesting positive selection. Yet none of these patients had overt skin cancer. Such research suggests that healthy people may have a cadre of potentially cancerous clones.
How Anxiety Became Content (archive)
Derek Thompson perfectly captures the essence of something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: depression and anxiety have become sexy. I want to be clear: I don’t mean people aren’t anxious or depressed. I’m saying a lot of people are confusing the realities of life for mental health issues. Perversely, this makes life difficult for people who are actually suffering from anxiety and depression.
Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.” On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.
How Twitter broke the news (archive)
But the context collapse that made Twitter so dangerous and so reductive was also what made it thrilling — your feed could contain everything from tech executives to Beyoncé fans to the president, and anyone’s tweets could be quote-tweeted and sent to viral heaven at any time, rocketing people into 15 minutes of deeply fucked-up fame.
How Jamie Dimon Built JPMorgan Into a $4 Trillion Colossus (archive)
People on Wall Street love — truly, love — talking trash about their competitors, but when I researched this article, I found surprising respect for JPMorgan. A board member of a rival bank marveled at how the bank’s employees all seem “to row in the same direction.” One hedge-fund manager told me that JPMorgan’s research and trade execution is generally the best of the banks he deals with — as are the ethics of JPMorgan employees, who lack the “spiciness” of other bankers. (And this guy once sued JPMorgan over the terms of a credit-default swap!) Another customer told me that JPMorgan’s commercial banker had an intellectual depth and command of the details above other bankers and a long-term relationship focus that eschewed many of the ticky-tacky fees banks annoy their customers with. JPMorgan has achieved this through a GE-style focus on culling underperformers and an ability — thanks to its profitability — to retain long-tenured employees. It never hurts on Wall Street when you can pay people more.
Coinbase targets financially vulnerable young adults (archive)
Coinbase’s ad is not the first time that a crypto company has aired ads focused on exploiting economic insecurities. In 2022, FTX launched a Super Bowl ad starring actor Larry David. The ad shows David expressing skepticism about famous inventions throughout history, such as the wheel and the lightbulb, and arguing that they would not catch on. At the end of the ad, someone tells David about investing in crypto through FTX. “I don’t think so, and I’m never wrong about this stuff. Never,” David responds. The tagline of the video, “Don’t Miss Out,” insinuates that the invention of crypto investments is akin to the invention of coffee, forks, and toilets and that people who do not invest will miss out on a lucrative opportunity.
Don’t applaud the COP28 climate summit’s loss and damage fund deal just yet – here’s what’s missing (archive)
While any deal on funding for climate disaster damages was sure to be portrayed as a historic win, further investigation suggests that it should be welcomed with hesitation and scrutiny.
First, the fund contains no specifics on scale, financial targets or how it will be funded. Instead, the decision merely “invites” developed nations to “take the lead” in providing finance and support and encourages commitments from other parties. It also fails to detail which countries will be eligible to receive funding and vaguely states it would be for “economic and non-economic loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events.”
Stop buying things online and start feeling miserable a little—it’s for the planet. We only have one earth, and there are no returns.
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