The problem of consumer culture
I was recently commissioned to write an article about consumer culture for a Sysav campaign. The campaign encourages people to say no to unnecessary things, with a particular focus on gift giving. This blog post is an English translation of the piece I wrote for them. I hope those of you who don’t read Swedish can enjoy this instead.
In consumer culture we instinctively look to consumption to solve problems. Even problems of excess can seemingly be solved by more consumption. Overweight? Buy a gym membership or a diet plan. Too much stuff? Buy a storage solution. We also use consumption to signal who we are and what we believe in. And our relationships with others are often cemented through consumption. We mark occasions that are important to each other by the buying of things. Birthdays, weddings, new homes and new family members are celebrated by the giving of gifts. I show you that I miss you by buying you a souvenir from my holiday. I thank you for inviting me to your home by bringing flowers or wine.
However, we are beginning to understand that our levels of consumption are extremely problematic for our environment. Our oceans are choked by plastic. Unwanted clothes overwhelm the systems that should handle them and are dumped in landfill. Our water, land and air are polluted or used up to make things that we barely want, let alone need. And carbon emissions are rising. A 2018 report from the IPCC, suggests that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming: extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice.
Our excessive consumption is also problematic on a personal level. Consumer culture promises that our problems will be solved via consumption but it turns out that the problems we have are often not so easily fixed. Years of advertising filled with unrealistic beauty and body standards have been internalised so we feel constantly dissatisfied, with our bodies, our homes, and ourselves. Consumer culture is built on this dissatisfaction and the feeling that we need more and more to be happy. But consumer culture’s dirty little secret is that more stuff can never fill the hole of dissatisfaction that it has created in us. In fact, the on-going cycle of consumption actually makes us feel worse. The success of Mari Kondo’s recent hit television series suggests that many of us are overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in our homes. All of which needs to be managed, tidied and taken care of. That storage system didn’t really solve the problem after all!
Most of us understand on a cognitive level that our consumption patterns need to change, that we ought to be buying less, and buying more sustainably. Yet we have internalised the norms of consumer culture and those are hard to change. The norms of society do not control us directly but they do teach us how to control ourselves by instructing us what to value and what to desire. External control is easy to defy but desires, which we feel come from inside us, are much harder to resist. Consumption is embedded in us, in our relationships, in the ways that we make sense of the world. How do we unlearn what we have learned for our whole lives? How do we do relationships and life when we change the rules?
In their book Vi är vad vi köper * [We are what we buy], Jakob Östberg and Katarina Graffman suggest that the first step to resisting the norms of consumer culture is to make them explicit. Make the unwritten rules visible so that you can question whether you really need to follow them.
This is a question of being critical. It’s thinking about why we do the things we have always done in the ways that we have always done them, and wondering what would happen if we reversed things or mixed them up. When we think about the expectations, rules or norms fulfilled by buying something, we essentially write these unwritten rules. Once we understand the rules, we can sometimes see how silly they are. Do you really show someone you care about them by buying them something they neither need nor want? Imagine the consequences of not buying a particular item. How would you feel? What would other people think? What exactly would change if you didn’t buy it? The answers are not straightforward and might be different depending on our particular life situations. But, just by reading this, you are already on your way to exposing the hidden norms of consumer culture.
The next step is to break the rules and experiment with new behaviours. Try doing things differently and see how you feel and what reactions you get. Perhaps you could make a gift instead of buying one or give an experiential gift instead of a physical one. Many of us are time-poor and might appreciate the gift of time spent together at lunch, a movie or a spa, more than a physical gift. There are social risks involved in challenging norms and your new ways of doing things might not always be appreciated by everyone. For example, you risk of being considered mean or unkind when you come to a party without a gift. But you can mitigate these risks by explaining clearly why you are breaking the rules.
Psychologists** have shown that people who want to change their behaviour, but worry about being socially accepted, can be helped by learning that social norms are, in fact, flexible. When you explain to people what you are doing, and why, you help them to question the rules themselves. It might feel tough to be the odd one out but remember that you are in a powerful position. You are a leader demonstrating a different way of being. You have the potential to inspire other people to reflect on their own behaviours and perhaps to change their lives too.
References
* Graffman, K. and Östberg, J. (2018) “Vi är vad vi köper : konsumtionskulturen är här för att stanna”. Mondial.
** Miller, D.T. and Prentice, D.A. (2016) “Changing Norms to Change Behavior”. Annual Review of Psychology67:339–61.
Cover image: @sharonmccutcheon
