Michelle's Mindworks

The Contradiction of Consumerism

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“Live simply so that others may simply live.”

Mahatma Gandhi

In other words, consuming more than your fair share impoverishes others. But J.B. MacKinnon finds that “in capitalist countries, it rarely if ever works out that way. Live simply, and it’s much more likely that the wealth you’ve forsaken will end up in the hands of someone who was better off to begin with.”

Humanity’s consumption is suffocating our wildlife, our planet, and ourselves. So far, our efforts to green it “has yet to result in an absolute decrease in material consumption in any region of the world” though it has helped.1

Consuming less would result in the greatest impact. But if it doesn’t work out that way where you live, what’s the point?

The Thought Experiment

J.B MacKinnon didn’t come to this conclusion lightly. In his book The Day the World Stops Shopping, he entertains what would happen if global consumption decreased by 25 percent.

The idea sounded outlandish until the pandemic did exactly that. “In the United States, household spending dropped almost twenty percent across two months. The hardest-hit industries, such as tourism, sank four times as far.”2 Still, on paper, the Great Recession nor the pandemic can be called a national disaster despite tens of thousands of Americans facing hardships.  Wealthy nations have a long way to fall before they hit rock bottom and compared to the Great Depression, the Great Recession was a cake walk.3

Environmentally, during the pandemic and MacKinnon’s thought experiment, the world improved. Skies got bluer as air pollution cleared. Wildlife flocked to reefs previously overrun by tourists. Lights dimmed, allowing us to better see the stars while animals like scarab beetles, mayflies, and moths became a little less disoriented by our light pollution.

In the thought experiment, unlike post-pandemic times, global consumption doesn’t climb back up. Humanity, and the economy, adapt. “Low or no economic growth was the norm through nearly all of human history” and it’s not only still present today, it’s more common than you might think. “Wherever you go in the world, family firms will likely make up 70 percent of all companies.”4 You don’t expect the local mom-and-pop shop to endlessly expand. You don’t want profit to be the top priority of your independent doctor, dentist, plumber, or roofer— you want them to take pride in their work first and foremost.

Consumers, meanwhile would shift to buying fewer, better things: let’s say a quality pair of jeans that’ll last ten years instead of two. They’d embrace wabi-sabi, the Japanese art of impermanence, by mending the jeans and admiring their flawed beauty. They’d spend less time shopping for jeans and more time creating, participating, and exploring.

The Contradiction

But what about inconspicuous consumption? We don’t consider most modern day luxuries— like lighting or air conditioning— to be luxuries, let alone products we consume or shop for.

Advancements that were supposed to save time, energy, and money often encourage us to use more. Energy saving LEDS led to us buying more lights. Washing machines led us to do more laundry. Energy efficient appliances led us to buy more and bigger appliances. In economics, this is known as “Jevons paradox.” As people find new ways to use resources more effectively, they use more resources. “A complicated interplay of product prices, consumer demand and higher profits was putting [resources] to more and more uses.”5

We can escape Javon’s paradox by not using the money we save on the energy efficient TV to buy several bigger TVs. But then what are we spending that money on? A vacation? A streaming service? Air conditioning? We can’t really know if our environmental impact of our lifestyles is actually improving.

Sufficiency Behavior

But a small fraction of the population “really does reap the full benefits of switching to greener lifestyles and technologies.” These people voluntarily cut back on goods and still feel satisfied with what they have.

Voluntarily simplifiers, who choose to consume less, have the most success when it comes to reducing their environmental impact. “They were nearly twice as effective as the second place group, the tightwads” who hate spending money. Frugals, who take pleasure in saving money, and green consumers didn’t lessen their impact at all.6

You can also view voluntary simplifiers as anti-consumers, who value having control over their consumption compared to mainstream consumers. They make an effort to understand what they want and why they do things, then bring that mindset into their consumption habits. They make active, informed choices, are less swayed by ads and fads, and are less likely to use shopping as a means of escape.

Simplifiers shrink their needs and gravitate towards intrinsic values— values that are important for their own sake, not because they lead to external gains. They make room for what matters to them. “Since intrinsically oriented activities meet psychological needs better than materialism does, simplifiers often increase the amount of time spent on them by cutting back even their consumption of social media, TV, or recorded music.”7

Simplifiers value creation and participation over consumption and they seem to be happier for it.

Cyberspace

In the digital sphere, you can buy, own, build, and design “while using only the tiniest fraction of the planet’s resources that doing these things in real life would demand.”8 In a world that stops shopping for material goods, consumerism might be able to live on in Cyberspace with little environmental impact.

Society has already moved a plethora of activities into the digital sphere. My childhood bedroom was filled with toys, board games, CDs, VHS tapes, and books. By high school, DVDs replaced the tapes and my junk drawer held three mp3 players. Today I mostly listen, watch, play, read, and write on screens.

By there’s still the material and energy demands to worry about. Growing up, I filtered through so many technical gadgets, which produced material waste. During the pandemic, we bought fewer new phones, but more TVs and gaming consoles. The European Union even asked Netflix and YouTube to lower their picture quality to keep the internet from breaking.9

Holding onto our technology for longer, forgoing TVs in nearly every room, and repairing what we can are some ways to minimize material digital waste.

To curtail the energy demands of digital waste, we can bring the simplifier’s strategy of fewer, better things into the digital sphere. Delete unused and addicting apps. Replace doomscrolling with reading or walking your dog. Turn on airplane mode before bed to encourage offline activities.

The Separation of Tasks

Consumerism is embedded in our culture and contemplating the full scope of it’s circulation is a headache and a half. Even a voluntary simplifier, who buys a pair of quality jeans, can’t escape the rebound effects of consumerism. How will the jean manufacturer spends that money?

That’s where Adlerian psychology comes in.10

Alfred Adler, the 19th century founder of individual psychology, calls for us to separate our life tasks from other people’s life tasks. We can influence people, but we can’t control them.

There’s no point in fretting over what the jean manufacturer does with the money the simplifier spent; it’s out of their hands. They operated within their values and did what they could with the knowledge and resources they had.

Thinking too far outside of one’s realm of control and adopting a nihilistic view on environmentalism won’t do them or the planet any good.

Our Actions Still Matter

MacKinnon says that “the forces stacked in favor of consumerism… have always been a stronger influence than popular movements urging us to live simply.”11 Voluntary simplicity will likely never be mainstream.

We, as individual consumers, are outmatched. But climate change isn’t a game we either win or lose. A little less pollution means air that’s a little cleaner, an ocean that’s a little less plastic filled, a world that’s a little more biodiverse. Multiply that by a whole movement of people who care about the environment and we’re capable of making a dent.

Especially if we combine a movement of voluntary simplicity with other strategies. “Governments around the globe are beginning to assign climate pollution a price, often by charging a tax on carbon emissions in order to make industries and shoppers pay something closer to the true cost of the fossil fuels burning up for their benefit.” If we applied this to other natural resources, companies might be incentivizing to create products that last. Companies that already value durable and environmentally friendly goods might be able to compete with ones that don’t.

Through legal systems, we the people can demand the right to repair our goods. Taxing the ultra-wealthy can help prevent and reverse inequality. We can shift away from measuring success through the GPD, which measures a country’s economic output, to something like the GPI, which also takes into account social and environmental costs.12

Consumerism and the climate crisis won’t be solved by simple living alone, but that doesn’t mean it’s all for naught. Forsaken wealth might end up in the hands of someone already wealthy, but can the same be said for material goods? Supply and demand are still factors.

Simple living won’t hurt the environment more than materialistic living and it has other benefits: A happier, more fulfilling existence. A mindful outlook on life. A focus on things within one’s control. And with a minority of participants, it won’t harm the economy like MacKinnon’s thought experiment or the pandemic did.

Maybe we should give simple living a shot.

  1. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 24. ↩︎
  2. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 33. ↩︎
  3. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 152. ↩︎
  4. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 131, 270. ↩︎
  5. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 332. ↩︎
  6. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 33.8-339. ↩︎
  7. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 377. ↩︎
  8. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 384. ↩︎
  9. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 386. ↩︎
  10. Kishimi, Ichiro and Koga, Fumitake. The Courage to be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness. (Atria Books, 2018). ↩︎
  11. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 442. ↩︎
  12. MacKinnon, J.B. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves. (HarperCollins B, 2021), 137. ↩︎

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