That is the cry of my new anti-consumerism hero, Henry David Thoreau, in probably his most famous work- Walden. I still hold a soft spot for Tyler Durden as well, but compared to Thoreau he is a little off-the-wall.

If you haven’t read Walden, I recommend changing that ASAP. It’s a tedious read at times (especially if you aren’t 100% awake), but well worth it. The funny (and disappointing) thing is that one of Thoreau’s key messages- shunning a life of needless consumption and luxury, and instead living simply, is much more relevant today than it was in the mid-1850s. If HDK can see how materialistic society has become, I for one do not want to know what he has to say about it…

Especially on Black Friday, the unofficial holiday where we celebrate by rushing to the store in the middle of the night to buy more crap we don’t need and often can’t afford. It reminds me of a commercialized version of trick-or-treating, except that the goody-seekers have to wait in obscenely long lines and sometimes trample each other in pursuit of whatever the hottest must-have item is. Also, these treats don’t come for free, although with a handy-dandy credit card you can avoid worrying about that fact for the time-being.

Thoreau would most definitely be blown away by it all. Here’s a small taste of the philosophy in Walden:

“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

Interesting. Was this guy really an American? We must not have invented the materialist-driven American Dream yet.

“No man ever stood lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”

Boy would Thoreau be confused by the paradox of fashionable jeans today. Wearing old jeans that have been remedied by a patch? Preposterous! Buying $75 Abercrombie jeans that were made with holes in them? That makes you cool.

Heading into the heart of the holiday season, we should keep Thoreau’s message of simplicity in mind. That’s not to say we need to do as he did; drop everything, venture deep in the woods, and live primarily off of homegrown beans, but instead to question and reconsider the materialistic, unnecessarily complicated world in which we live. Simplicity doesn’t mean deprivation- it means ignoring and getting rid of the burdensome to concentrate on what’s most important.

“Yo, that 60 inch LED HDTV is pretty slick! Just remember though, it’s unlikely to leave you any more fulfilled at the end of the day.”

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“…the cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism. We don’t have to buy products that destroy or from companies that harm or are unresponsive. If we want business to express a full range of social and environmental values in their daily commercial activities, then we, too, will have to express a full range of values and respond to the presence or absence of principle by how we act in the marketplace.” –Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce.

Political elections often have critical implications, and we pay an awful lot of attention to them, but Hawken’s words are dead-on. Formal voting is an occasional event, but the real voting, whether we realize it or not, takes place on a daily basis. The decisions we make as individuals affect our collective well-being just as surely as those made in the Oval Office.

We apparently have a lot to complain and worry about a lot in a world seemingly controlled by big governments and big corporations, but it’s our own actions that helped create and continue to foster these unpleasant realities. The things we buy. What we eat. How we use energy. These seemingly private choices all have very real impacts on the world:

• Participating in rampant, excessive consumerism is voting for continued degradation of the earth, its resources, and oftentimes its people. Buying a lot of unnecessary crap may stimulate the economy, but it’s definitely not stimulating any positive gains for humanity.

• Eating a lot of cheap, processed foods is a vote for unsustainable agricultural practices. Despite what it seems like, that seemingly harmless McDonald’s meal didn’t appear out of thin air upon your ordering it. The harms that result from industrialized agriculture are tremendous in scale (The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an great book on this subject). Suddenly French fries don’t sound nearly as appealing…

• Using an excessive amount of fossil fuel for home and transportation is to vote for energy instability and environmental harm. What irks me about this one is that the energy-gluttonous among us seem to be the first to complain about high gas prices. Is it just me, or is that hypocrisy at its finest?

“Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.” Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.

This is something I need to consistently remind myself of. It’s an easy concept to grasp but far tougher to put in practice on a daily basis. I consider this a public reminder to myself to work on doing just that.

Does spending money increase fulfillment? To an extent, probably. All else being equal, we probably feel more fulfilled in a position where quality shelter, food, and clothing are at hand, as opposed to being in a chronic state of severe poverty.

But exactly how much satisfaction can be purchased?

I’m currently reading ‘Your Money or Your Life’ by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, which far exceeded my already high expectations going in. The authors describe the point of ‘enough’, the upper limit of fulfillment that can be reached specifically through spending money on things.

Their Fulfillment Curve explains it best; I recreated a similar curve below.

Mostly self-explanatory…

I’ll let Robin and Dominguez explain what the point of ‘enough’ is. “At the peak of the Fulfillment Curve we have enough. Enough for our survival. Enough comforts. And even enough little ‘luxuries’. We have everything we need”.

As you can see, beyond the point of enough, the curve doesn’t simply level off. Living in a state of excess not only fails to add fulfillment, it actually decreases it. Spending more money can actually cause us to become unhappier?

“(At the point of enough) there’s nothing extra to weigh us down, distract or distress us, nothing we’ve bought on time, have never used, and are slaving to pay off”.

It all relates to one of the main concepts in the book- that of ‘Life Energy’. Our time on earth is finite, therefore we only have so much Life Energy with which to work. By investing our time, energy, and resources into material gain beyond the point of enough, we certainly aren’t using it wisely. We’re drowning in our excess.

Obviously we must know where ‘enough’ is, otherwise we could easily blow right past it without realizing it until later. Essentially, we must become more and more conscious with what we spend our money on. The authors do a tremendous job putting forth a plan to do just that, so I won’t do them any injustice by attempting to summarize their work here.

The fact that the Fulfillment Curve falls beyond ‘enough’ is a testament to the fact that we humans desire meaning in our lives. We may attempt to trick ourselves into the delusional belief that we can fulfill the hunger within with gluttonous consumerism, but the gaping emptiness reveals that it isn’t working. The Fulfillment Curve falls because we know, deep down, that we should instead invest in self-actualization; in becoming part of something bigger than ourselves. When we do this, our meaning and fulfillment can absolutely blow away that which can be had through things.

Check this…

This altered Fulfillment Curve shows what’s possible when we forget about searching for happiness in things and turn our attention to achieving what matters most to us.

The vertical line that begins at the point of enough is one that the authors talk about in the book. At this point a person knows they have enough, and they invest more of their time and energy in pursuits that mean a great deal to them. The person can achieve much greater fulfillment with the financial and material means they already have. Volunteering is a good example. So is a person who forgoes more luxuries to cut back on work and spend more time raising their family.

The diagonal line is another possibility. After a person has enough, spending more money doesn’t necessarily decrease fulfillment; it depends on what we spend it on. If we shift our attention away from increasing our material well-being and invest our resources in causes that we are deeply passionate about, we can rise far above the material fulfillment ceiling. For example, a well-off individual begins a non-profit to address local environmental issues, and the organization’s goals are more effectively met because of the healthy capital infusion.

Of course, neither of these alternative routes are easy. It’s much easier (and common) to continue seeking fulfillment in the material world even when we have enough. It’s probably frightening to admit that one has enough though- it forces us to really ask ourselves what we want out of life, or even question what our purpose is, but it might be the only way we can live for something greater than consumerism.

By White Stone Motion Pictures, here is Consumerism! The Musical.

“I got a 700-something on my FICO score, which means I don’t own a thing and I can buy even more!”

Here is a tribute to what Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, in Your Money or Your Life, describe as ‘the all-American form of substance abuse’.

Hat tip: Beating Debt.

Chuck Palahniuk’s book, Fight Club, and the movie adapted from it have developed quite a following since their respective releases in 1996 and 1999. I only recently saw the movie for the first time, but I’m certain I will not be forgetting it anytime soon.

The coarse, violent, and gloomy story limits Fight Club’s appeal to the masses, but it’s essential to the message it portrays. At it’s core, I believe it’s a tale about stepping out of our comfort zones of half-conscious existences and superficial pursuits and living for something bigger and more meaningful. Rather than sugar-coating this in a feel-good story, Fight Club acknowledges how difficult, painful, and even frightening this can be.

With that, here are some of my favorite Tyler Durden thoughts from the movie (I’ll try to avoid any spoilers for those of you who haven’t seen it):

1.) “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f’n khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

American consumerism has long had us searching for happiness, identity, and meaning in more money, bigger houses, and more stuff. I highly doubt anyone has succeeded in doing so, yet it remains typically American to try.

2.) “God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. 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.”

One of the best scenes from the movie…

3.) “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

I love the little thought experiment where we ask ourselves if something will matter 5, 15, or even 100 years down the road. In order to do something truly remarkable, we have to let go of trivial matters and focus on where we can actually make a lasting impact.

We have no shortage of convenient distractions to drown out our longing to do amazing things and remain safely within our shell .

4.) “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

This could be interpreted as a cynical phrase, but I don’t see it that way. Rather, it reminds us of the finite nature of our existence here on earth. The time is going to pass no matter what you do, whether you’re playing video games, watching TV, working towards more material “success”, or busting your ass to do something worthwhile.

5.) “Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.”

Taken out of context, this doesn’t mean much. If you’ve seen the movie though, you probably remember this scene. While Durden’s method of instigating Mr. Hessel to follow his dreams is a bit over the top, this is in essence what we collectively need. We need someone to get in our face, shake us up a bit, and convince us to quit settling for mediocrity and do something more.

~

Fight Club certainly isn’t inspirational in an uplifting kind of way like a cliché-ridden sports movie, but I think it offers a deeper sense of motivation that lingers long after the closing credits are done rolling. If you haven’t seen it, do so.

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Unless you live like Thoreau in Walden, it’s nearly impossible to completely remove yourself from the madness of American consumerism. But we can to a large degree, which I believe is the simplest way to eliminate many materialist influences and desires.

As it is, we subject ourselves to an onslaught of corporate messages. TV advertising is one of the most common mediums for these messages, so let’s consider the following facts about TV use (Nielsen stats found on CSUN site):

-The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV every day.
-In the average American home, the TV is on for 6 hours and 47 minutes a day.
-The average American youth spends 900 hours in school each year, and 1,500 in front of the TV.
-The average American child will see 20,000 30-second commercials each year.

Is it any wonder that corporate America has such an enormous influence over the masses? We collectively sit and stare at their messages for hours each day, and they know how to turn our passive viewing into profits. Many billions of dollars have been invested in researching the psychology of consumers; the commercials we see are the finely-tuned end-result.

Advertisers must instill a desire in consumers to purchase their good. To do so, they need to makes us feel inferior and incomplete in some way without said good. The seemingly innocent commercials on the air are usually attempts to do just that. Beer commercials are an excellent example. The images of people having a wild, carefree time are a subtle message that associates excitement and social fulfillment with drinking. Most ads use similar techniques. Judging by the massive amounts of money that corporations spend on advertising, it clearly works.

However, no matter how clever these marketing messages are, they are useless if they do not find a recipient.

By far the simplest, easiest, and quickest way to counter consumer messages is to remove yourself from it. Work to tune it out; to ignore it. Turn off the TV, resist the urge to go browse at the mall, and put down the catalog that’s chock-full of ads reminding you that you are imperfect and incomplete.

Instead, engage in something more meaningful- exercise, go to a park, write, paint, spend time with friends and family, read, work on a project, brainstorm, etc. There are a gazillion more rewarding ways to get engaged in life than by propagating consumerism.

As I mentioned in the second part of this mini-series, I’m definitely not against ownership of physical goods. Rather, I’m against subjecting myself to constant messages that try to influence my wants. I would rather consciously decide how I manage my money, what I buy, and what I pass up. It’s kind of an insult to my own intelligence to submit to the influence of others who have a keen interest in persuading me to do something.

It may be impossible to entirely eliminate the persuasion of the materialist propaganda that pervades our lives, but we can undercut its influence.

We’re led to believe that buying stuff is generally good. After all, we’re stimulating the economy when we do so. The GDP goes up, stocks go up, employment goes up, and economic progress is made. One might even feel patriotic by spending money, especially on domestically-originated goods or services (the American automakers have been playing that card big-time).

The above effects in and of themselves are certainly positive developments, but there is far more to the picture. Let’s consider a few less-desirable consequences of a material-crazed culture.

1.) Environmental destruction:

The American way of life has literally been destroying the planet. We’re addicted to big houses, big vehicles, big malls, and tons and tons of stuff. The resources to fill our wants don’t come from nowhere- we’ve been overexploiting the world’s resources to get them.

Everything about our current economic system, from destructive resource harvesting to the end waste products, is completely unsustainable. A big problem is that we don’t feel the harmful effects of our decisions. Most of us don’t personally see the clear-cutting of Amazon rainforests, the destruction of acid-rain, or the extinction of another native species. Sure we hear about such tragedies, but hearing and feeling are too completely different things; the former doesn’t often overcome our earthly desires.

We’ve all probably heard the following statistic-with roughly 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes around a quarter of world’s energy. The figures for the solid waste we generate are also extremely disproportionate. The world does not have enough resources for many more people to live a similar lifestyle (or even to sustain the current imbalance for much longer). Unless we quickly move towards embracing a lifestyle that doesn’t trash the environment to fill our gluttonous ways, we are in serious, serious trouble.

I have Paul Hawken to thank for truly opening my eyes on this issue. I recently read “The Ecology of Commerce“, a book I will most definitely never forget. I can’t wait to get my hands on some more of his work, primarily “Natural Capitalism“. I couldn’t recommend Hawken’s writing enough.

2.) Financial health:

Consumerism has absolutely wreaked havoc upon our nation’s financial health , in large part leading to the recent financial crisis (I kind of touched on this here).

We largely set ourselves up for great unleveraging that began last year. Without a lick of common sense, we collectively chased houses, cars, clothes and hoards of other material goods without the means to actually pay for them. Since we didn’t have the money to pay for something right away, nor the patience to save up until we did, we just tapped into the great river of easy credit. Foreigners supplied much of this credit, allowing government and individuals alike to spend beyond our means.

The financial crisis was a major wake-up call- it was if someone rattled our cage and woke us from our dreamland.. The bill (the first installment of it anyway) arrived, and we stared at it in awe wondering how we could have been so foolish.

Thankfully Americans are doing much better nowadays. The personal savings rate is the highest its been anytime over the past decade- imagine that, Americans actually spending less than they earn! Businesses and individuals who provide repair services are thriving, because we’re fixing things rather than automatically throwing them away and buying new. People are flocking to libraries, thrift stores, Craigslist, garage sales, and bulk retailers. We have generally become more thrifty in the past year.

Of course, the big test of our newfound frugality will come when the economy starts to improve. When the nightly news talks about something other than economic Armageddon, will we maintain our sustainable financial ways? Or will we fail to learn from history once again and revert back to material-crazed lunatics?

I believe there’s a pretty strong negative correlation between excessive consumerism and our nation’s financial health. By placing such a high value on physical stuff and wanting it now, we’ve been borrowing against our future.

3. Quality of Life:

This one is definitely more subjective than the first two, but I think it’s still worthy of mention. It’s easy to lose a sense of what’s really important when we get caught up in the rat race of working harder and harder to fund our ever-growing material desires.

Does more stuff actually add more quality to our lives? To an extent, probably. But not to the extremes that we pursue it. Much of the stuff that we buy isn’t to aid in fulfilling a deep desire, or help us pursue something that we’re passionate about. Rather, it’s often a purchase made because of the influence of advertisers, as temporary ego boost, or to use as a status symbol.

Would replacing my reliable Civic with a brand-new ride increase the quality of my life? I’d be on a high for a little while, and the bells and whistles would undoubtedly be cool, but I would conclude that it really would not add more value to my life, so long as my Honda keeps running efficiently and reliably. I don’t have any deep desire that would be fulfilled by having a sweet ride.

I think I’ll keep my trusty Civic and instead continue saving money little by little to fund things like travel opportunities in the future. A trip to the UK would easily provide me personally with more lasting value than trying to appease materialistic impulses.

I don’t want to come across like I’m denouncing the ownership of physical goods altogether. Ever since coming home bruised and beaten after my first time on a snowboard, I knew I would enjoy having a board of my own. At some point in the future, I think I could make that purchase completely on my own accord. Likewise, if a person thoroughly enjoys and derives plenty of satisfaction from owning a sports-car, there’s nothing wrong with that (my vehicle example was about me personally, not a universal criticism of new-car purchases).

What I am trying to illustrate is this; if we act on impulse, let our ego affect how we spend, and succumb to outside influences, our financial habits likely aren’t congruent with who we are. That’s how we can spend years and years chasing money and stuff and yet become more and more unsatisfied as we acquire additional prizes.

Think about how many hundreds of billions of dollars Americans spend every year in a futile pursuit of consumer happiness. How much better off we would be if we dropped the influences of materialism and instead managed our money with 100% consciousness?

I think we would astound ourselves.

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For most of mankind’s existence, scarcity was the norm (for billions, it tragically still is). People spent their entire waking existence working just to meet basic needs. Forget about TVs and iPods and suburbia, people were lucky if they had a consistent supply of nutritious food. Clearly, this is no longer the case for all but the very poorest regions of the world.

Largely because of the advances brought about during the Industrial Revolutions, wealthier societies could easily produce goods in excess of what the population actually needed. And thus consumerism, which good old trusty Wikipedia defines as “the equation of personal happiness with the consumption and the purchase of material possessions”, was enabled.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and consumerism has grown into a completely pervasive, self-perpetuating way of life throughout Western society. ‘The equation of personal happiness with material goods’? I don’t think it sounds like a terribly effective way to seek happiness, so why are we so crazy over stuff?

I think our fairly narrow and hollow way of identifying success has something to do with it.

If a guy (let’s call him Paul) has a powerful, high-income job, a big house, a brand new Lexus, and a wife and two kids, we might instinctively label this person a success. We’re conditioned to believe that Paul’s economic standards are a key measure of success, but we aren’t taught anything about happiness. We probably just assume that success = happiness.

What if Paul is absolutely miserable in his situation though? What if his job defies his values, his deep ambitions have long since been shelved, and his work is so overly demanding that his family feels neglected. Still a successful person? Paul knows that he fits the typical American description of one, which makes his unhappiness all the more perplexing and depressing.

To drown out the gaping hole of emptiness inside him, Paul will probably work even harder at the job he doesn’t care about. He’ll make more money, get a temporary high from buying a bigger house, a fancier car, and an upgraded wardrobe, and shower his kids with material support since he never sees them.

All the while, he’s clinging to a belief that if he keeps at it, maybe, just maybe, he’ll find the happiness that has eluded him for so long. Like someone who gets drunk or high to temporarily escape reality, making and spending more money provides people like Paul with a temporary high that must continuously be topped.

We could actually slow down and acknowledge that which gnaws at us from the inside. We could reexamine our values and think about the dreams that once gave us reason to jump out of bed excited. We could reconnect with what we’ve neglected. Or we could take a route that many do, and attempt to drown out part of us that feels discontent by continuing to pursue a consumerist definition of “success”.

Obviously Paul’s case is a extreme one, albeit not all that rare. I’m sure most of us employ similar reasoning at least on occasion; I’m certainly no enlightened Zen master who lives a life of minimalism. I sometimes find myself assuming that I will be generally happier when I have more possessions or the monetary means to acquire them. I pretty much have everything I need right now to be genuinely happy, and I have to remind myself of that. I definitely won’t suppress my wants, but I’m trying to better realize that I shouldn’t associate higher material well-being with more happiness or true success.

The corporate world spends billions upon billions of dollars propagating a way of life similar to that I just described. When the McDonald’s golden arches are more widely recognized around the world than the Christian cross, or when many of our elected leaders are nothing more than middlemen corrupted by lobbyists, you know we’ve granted the corporate world enormous amounts of clout. To ensure that we keep doing so, market researchers invest untold amounts of time and money studying how they can effectively make consumers feel inferior or incomplete without their product or service.

Even from a strictly economic perspective, consumerism is reinforced by many as a quality way to live. Working harder and harder to buy more and more things increases the GDP of our country, which of course is automatically a good thing, right? Just ignore the fact that we probably aren’t any happier than we were 50 years ago, despite our economic “progress.”

Consumerist culture has us striving for someday. “I’ll be happier when I have ____ or I’ll be set if I made just $x,xxx more.” It’s a never-ending, delusional cycle that almost never leads to fulfillment.

There’s much more to say about this topic, and I’ll continue in the next installment of this mini-series. Stay tuned.