After spending last week’s column encouraging us all to shop locally, I spent the weekend getting rid of the fruits of my own shopping. Most of it was household clutter, a lot of it was books, and it ended up taking five van loads to get rid of it all. If you are in need of some truly great stuff, get to the Goodwill before it’s all sold out.
What prompted this great purge was a 10-day vacation, in which I realized that I was perfectly happy living out of a suitcase, and I didn’t miss any of my things while I was gone. Quite the opposite, I dreaded having to come home and deal with managing all of this “inventory” in my house.
Well, there was no magical epiphany, no shining moment, and I didn’t achieve enlightenment sitting under an artificial bodhi tree at Disney’s Animal Kingdom (it’s just a zoo; save your money). After sifting through years of accumulation, I just finally became disgusted with it all.
Psychologists know that true disgust is the only way to drop a habit, or a learned behavior. That’s hard to stick with in America, though. We really love our stuff, and are regularly hit with messages encouraging us to consume more.
Right now, there are more than 20,000 full-service advertising agencies in the United States who spent over $250 billion in advertising last year, and whose job is to convince you that we have barely enough to survive in modest comfort. Constant, seductive advertising helps to create this delusion. Advertisers regularly deceive us into thinking that we genuinely need one luxury after another, and we are convinced that we are in competition with our neighbors.
Advertising tells us things like, “If only you were thinner, dressed with more style, had better jewelry, drove a Jaguar, lived in a nicer house…” you could find happiness. I’m not immune to this seduction.
Have you ever been surprised by an empty bank account? I have, and a few years ago it was happening nearly every month. Well, it wasn’t “happening,” I was creating that problem. Looking at all of the stuff I was boxing up this weekend, I could see that full boxes equals empty bank account.
Making more money didn’t solve the problem; the level of spending just increased to keep pace with the extra income. We always say, “If I could just make $50K or $100K a year, I’d be set. I could live on the $25K I make now, and save the rest.” I used to say that, I couldn’t do it, and I don’t know anyone who’s pulled it off.
I think that if we’re going to overcome this habit, we must redefine “the good life.” We must develop a theology of enough. The idea that increased consumption leads to greater happiness is at the heart of our dilemma. We tend to measure our happiness by how much we consume relative to how much our neighbors consume. As we all try to get ahead, most of us tend to rise together so everyone is frustrated by our unsuccessful efforts to get ahead of the others. Being wealthy is the goal, and it will always remain a distant one; always chased but never caught.
If you think, “If I just had this item, I’d be really happy.” Well, I’ve managed to buy nearly everything I’ve ever wanted (except a jet pack), and I didn’t reach ultimate happiness, so let me save you the burden of longing for those non-essential things.
The past decade or so, there’s been a mildly popular movement towards simpler lifestyles. There’s a whole new magazine industry to support this lifestyle, which is ironic because they actually encourage you to buy more stuff to help make your life simpler, complete with ads selling even more stuff. I’d think that a publication devoted to making your life simple could be summed up in a brochure, “Stop buying stuff. Get rid of the stuff you have. Learn to live with a lot less stuff.”
Of course, since 70 percent of the American economy is driven by consumer spending, the economy would tank if we all bought into this way of thinking.
Let’s just keep it our little secret, huh?
Ryan Ryals lives in Maple Valley and writes a weekly column about politics and life in the city.
