The Things You Own End Up Owning You
There is something sad about all this stuff we work so hard to buy, can’t live with, but inevitably can’t bear to part with. In the same way that we focus on where to bury our waste, not where the waste came from, we also spend inordinate amounts of energy and money storing excess stuff rather than asking the hard truths of why we have so much in the first place. The comedian George Carlin riffed on this in his classic stand-up routine about stuff: ‘The whole meaning of life has become trying to find a place to put your stuff. . . . Have you ever noticed how other people’s shit is shit and your stuff is stuff?’39 The controversial David Fincher film Fight Club struck a painful chord with viewers who have ever experienced that addictive feeling of always wanting more, regardless of how much they have. Most people remember two lines from the movie: ‘The first rule of Fight Club – you do not talk about Fight Club’ and ‘The things you own end up owning you.’
Tyler and Jack, the two main characters in the film, seem to represent the stark choice that modern consumerism offers, best summarized by esteemed German social psychologist Erich Fromm as ‘To Have or to Be?’40 Jack (Ed Norton) is a stereotypical thirty-year-old insomniac yuppie who keeps trying to fill his emotional void and feel ‘complete’ with the things he acquires. ‘I flip through catalogues and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person.’ But no matter what Jack buys, he’s never satisfied. That’s before he meets Tyler (Brad Pitt), who throughout the film takes anticonsumerist jabs such as, ‘You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet. . . . You are not your grande latte. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.’ Tyler shows Jack that acquiring more and more stuff is a meaningless pursuit devoid of purpose and fulfilment. ‘God damn it . . . Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.’ The main theme of Fight Club runs counter to much of what consumer advertising preys on; we won’t find happiness or the meaning of our lives in the shopping centre or in the click of a mouse.
Research has proved that people who can afford to buy and hold on to more material goods are not necessarily more satisfied with their lives. Indeed, the reverse is often true. Economist Richard Layard has researched the relationship between growth, hyper-consumerism and happiness. His findings are illustrated by a graph on which one line represents per capita income and personal consumption since 1950 and shows a soaring increase (it has more than doubled) while the other line, marking Americans and Britons who describe themselves as ‘very happy’ in an annual Gallup survey, remains flat.41 In fact, the number of people describing themselves as ‘very happy’ peaked in 1957 just as the conspicuous cycle of ‘work and spend’, and a revolution of rising materialistic expectations, began. Happiness became an elusive moving target. Nothing was ever enough.
Telling societal indicators paint a vivid picture of this decrease in well-being. Since 1960 teenage suicide rates have tripled in the United States; the prison population has quintupled; and the percentage of babies born to unmarried parents has sextupled. Not exactly indicators of a satisfied consumer society. And it is only getting worse, as indicated by the massive increase in depression, anxiety, insomnia, heart disease and obesity since the eighties.42 As political scientist Robert Lane comments in The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, ‘The appetite of our present materialism depends upon stirring up our wants – but not satisfying them.’43 Economists describe this emotional phenomenon as the ‘hedonic treadmill’. We work hard to acquire more stuff but feel unfulfilled because there is always something better, bigger and faster than in the present. The distance between what we have and what we want, the ‘margin of discontent’,44 widens as the number of things we own increases. In other words, the more we have, the more we want.45
We are taught to dream and desire new things from an early age, as we are frequently asked, ‘What do you want for Christmas?’ or ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ Susan Fournier and Michael Guiry, former associate marketing professors at Harvard Business School, conducted a study called Consumption Dreaming Activity. They asked participants, ‘What things would you like to own or do someday?’ Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, the lists varied little regardless of sex, income, education or standard of living. Generally speaking, lists were full of desires for material possessions; almost half the sample (44 percent) mentioned new cars; more than one in four (29 percent) listed luxury items such as yachts, antiques, jewellery and designer clothes; and 16 percent just asked for the money – enough to buy anything they could possibly want. Where the study gets most interesting is not just the type of items respondents wrote down but the level of detail and elaboration they included; 42 percent of all things listed were described vividly. One participant wrote down wanting not just a car but ‘an emerald green Jaguar’. As the professors noted, ‘This level of detail and elaboration could reflect that consumers have “perfect things” in mind when they formulate wish lists.’46 Here we see the amount of time and headspace most of us give to future purchases. Not only do the things we own fill up our closets and our lives, but they also fill our minds.
Chapter Two
All-Consuming
On Friday 28 November 2008, Jdimytai Damour, a thirty-four-year-old Wal-Mart temporary security guard, was trampled to death at 5:00 a.m. by a stampede of frenzied shoppers. The two-thousand-plus crowd had been gathering at the Valley Stream, New York, shop since 9:00 the night before by a sign that read ‘Blitz line starts here.’ By dawn they were chanting, ‘Push the doors in.’ According to witnesses, the doors shattered under the weight of the crowd rushing forward, mowing down Damour, a big man at 270 pounds, who was doing his best to keep the crowd under control. What was the crowd in such a craze for? The bargains promised inside included the latest fifty-inch plasma HDTV, on sale for a price of $798.
The paramedics who came to help were also jostled and stepped on by the shoppers. Damour was pronounced dead of asphyxiation just after 6:00 a.m. Unbelievably, after the police declared that the shop was closed because it was now a crime scene, people kept shopping. Some even refused to leave, yelling, ‘I’ve been queuing since yesterday morning.’ The next day, when this same Wal-Mart reopened, crowds lined up again.
The courts have not yet concluded the Damour manslaughter case, but reports indicate that there were ‘so many contributing causes to this tragedy’ that it will be difficult to assign individual blame. No matter who is to blame for the incident, Damour’s terrible end is a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large – a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down people simply to buy more stuff.
Hyper-Consumption
Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian economist and sociologist, first coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in 1899.1 He used the term to describe the nouveau riche, a class emerging during the nineteenth century made up of people eager to display their wealth and social power. They spent lavishly on visible goods such as jewellery and clothing to show they were prosperous and to differentiate themselves from the masses. In this sense, the nouveau riche, just like their counterparts in earlier Roman, Greek and Egyptian civilizations, bought and consumed goods for self-advertisement as much as, if not more than, utility.
What interests us the most is not the luxury status or elitist side of conspicuous consumption that Veblen referred to, but the excessive mass consumption binge kick-started in the 1920s that exploded in the mid-1950s. We refer to the endless acquisition of more stuff in ever greater amounts as ‘hyper-consumerism’, a force so strong that there are now more shopping centres than high schools in America.2 There is now more than sixteen square feet of shopping centre for every man, woman and child in the United States.3 Our challenge is not the fundamental consumer principle in itself but the blurred line between necessity and convenience; the intoxicating addiction of defining so much of our lives through ownership; and the never-ending list of things we ‘have to have’. And hyper-consumption has brought us to a place