I haven’t ever really gotten into video games post-Atari, but I used to joke that eBay was my favourite video game. There’s something game-like about searching through its huge market for treasures, finding things that seem like good deals, and adding those things to my Watchlist. Then eBay gamifies it even more, sending notifications to say, ‘oh, you’re running out of time,’ and I quickly decide whether or not the item is really what I want (usually not). It’s pretty fun.
But sometimes I’ll be in a certain mood, or have a story that I ‘need’ something more urgently, or the deal just seems so compelling from a ‘level of discount’ perspective and I go and snipe the auction, only to realize once the item arrives that it was not actually necessary at all. Like when I bought a dress shirt (designer! only $20!), thinking, I’d really like to wear more dress shirts and blazers, only to come back into reality and realise that I live in Portland and mostly only am seen by people other than my family on dog walks or Zoom calls, neither of which necessitate the wearing of items that require professional dry cleaning, ironing, or for that matter, even frequent washing.
But eBay is not the only vector of my aspirational shopping. I fantasized for a while about a reMarkable tablet before buying the second generation when it came out, only to have it end up in a drawer. I own socks that are still attached to their little plastic sock hanger.
There are many things I honestly thought I needed (NEEDED!) that barely saw use once they arrived at my doorstep.
And another interesting thing about me, I guess, is that in fact if I buy something that I like a little less, something less special, like items from Portland’s infamous Goodwill bins, I will often use them much more than the great deals on fancy things I’ve found elsewhere, because I don’t want to ‘use up’ the nice things. I have a gallery of ‘nice things’ and an actual experience of items that are good enough.
I have a general policy about buying most things used, or sometimes new from individuals who never used the items, as a way of living without directly encouraging sweatshops and the overproduction of discretionary items (food is an exception, and let’s face it, I still use Amazon to buy some things). But this policy doesn’t really protect me from my own games, the idea that some additional item will enhance my life in some way, that there are rational reasons for purchasing something that fundamentally implies that right now things really aren’t good enough.
I don’t think I am alone here.
We are producing so many things, so much of which is bound for landfills, so much of which comes with this idea that material goods can ease our discomfort, so much of which we really just don’t need.
I notice that there’s a sense of security I am seeking with this kind of behaviour, being able to have new versions of things that are still functional, having clothing options, keeping backup supplies of things we ‘might need’, or buying groceries that are good deals but don’t get used before the best-by dates (accelerated by my proclivity to shop at Grocery Outlet, or grossout as it is known in my household).
Then there are these moments where Marie Kondo shows up and is like “what if you only keep things that spark joy?” And then we purge all the extra stuff, leaving so much room for additional things to refill our home, because homes in North America are really built for stuff more than for people.
Enough already
Let’s start thinking about what is enough. Let’s start thinking about what it means to have everything we need.
To do this, we can consider some basic questions:
- What matters?
- What would the world be like if everyone had what we think is enough for ourselves?
- What is sustainable?
- What if there’s no security? What if no money or possessions can protect us?
Everywhere around us, we are being sold the idea of needing more. We need new clothes, appliances, cars, phones, things long before our old ones wear out. If we have abundance, we can satisfy our whims to travel or to eat out at restaurants or just buy things because shopping is pleasurable. We can have treatments to make us more beautiful.
So often I hear the idea that spending money on yourself equates to caring for yourself, that when things are challenging, just ‘do something nice for yourself,’ suggesting you can buy your own self love.
Scarcity isn’t a mindset
It’s no fun to live in a state where basic needs can’t be met because of our lack of resources. I’ve been in a situation where I ran out of money. I depended on public assistance to eat, and even couldn’t get to work or interviews for work without scrounging for change for the transit fare. This experience was transformational because it happened at a time when I had been beginning to invest in practices of self-growth and collective practice. I experienced the fear of what would happen as I ran out of money and the awe at realizing I was OK because other people cared about me and were willing to help me get through a rough time.
Without community support, the panic response and elevated stress of survival mode lead to degraded decision-making and mental and emotional exhaustion. Children living in this situation have lifelong effects. 10-15% of people worldwide and in the US live in this state.
People live with the effects of our overconsumption globally: pollution, war, climate-related famine, and other kinds of stress-inducing situations to contend with, much of which is made invisible to affluent people whose neighbourhoods are situated away from landfills, Superfund sites, and areas of direct conflict. In my own neighbourhood, for example, there are nearby encampments that are regularly cleared out, making it seem as though public spaces are “really” owned by only people who also can purchase land around them.
Let’s stop celebrating the idea of abundance.
Having everything we need feels different than abundance. Abundance can be infinite. Access to more wealth and privilege expands one’s idea of what abundance might be. Having what we need is more definable, collective, and possible.
This is not a communist polemic. I don’t think everyone has to have the same things. I am skeptical of the blunt ideas of equality or fairness, which tend to disregard the beauty of difference. I don’t think we can have a world where everyone has what they need through a state-enforced program.
As a reflective practice, though, I think it’s very helpful to feel into what enough looks like. To start to notice when wanting more is more an addiction than an genuine longing or need.
How I spend my time and money have consequences. Most purchasable items involve some level of complicity in systems of extraction and dominance. I can’t extricate myself from this but I can participate less and operate with more awareness.
When I buy something new, I wonder, what am I actually trying to obtain with this purchase? Am I imagining I will be more attractive, have more peace of mind, more fun, more sense of being accepted? This applies to the little purchases as well as the big ones. What’s more, a lot of my purchases are just things I need because I bought some other thing I need, when the need itself was always an illusion.
But what about them?
There are always people with more wealth and more conspicuous consumption around to use as a fake barometer of our own behaviour.
It’s not useful to police or to call out people who are, by virtue of factors including luck and effort, able to own property or properties, to accumulate wealth, to travel as tourists, to buy expensive items, to eat at restaurants that charge hundreds of dollars per meal, or take advantage of other kinds of ‘luxuries.’
And, it’s fair to say that most luxuries come at a cost to others. It’s fair to say that most means of acquiring wealth come with some exploitation of others. It’s fair to say that Western people’s ideas of enough or abundance are pretty weird, and that we’re often imagining something for ourselves that would be inconceivable to a large percentage of the world, if we hadn’t invented social media and streaming media to let everyone know about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
How can we open a discussion about what enough looks like, that doesn’t lead to pointing fingers, resentments, or ignoring blind spots or areas of conflict?
What can I do to be honest with myself about the ways my earning and spending money impact others?
Money doesn’t care about us
Money is a stand-in for many relationships in our culture. We measure love in the cost of gifts (two months salary, for example). We pay people to do care work, such as child care, elder care, and health care. We hire and fire caregivers, making care something we think is a result of spending rather than relationship. Les and less do we invest in reciprocal caring.
We feel isolated though we have more people around us than ever in human history. We have to pay others to listen to us, to take care of our kids, to make us food. And when we pay people to do things that are associated with care, we necessarily make care transactional, we don’t feel like we have to care in return. Think of the day care centres who tried charging extra to mitigate the tendency of parents arriving late, making staff work longer than they were meant to, only to find that it made the problem worse. “I’m paying for this service so now I deserve to get what I paid for,” completely divorcing themselves from the human consequences.
My sense of why many paid forms of community are strange is something like, ‘you can’t pay someone to be your friend,’ but even that truism is being tested now, whether by paying actual people to perform friendship, or with new forms of technology or drugs that are supposed to replace the need for actual humans to care for us.
Delusional currency
We see money as a sign of our worth. And we see other people’s worth in terms of money. But we’re fond of stories that upend this paradigm. “Greed is good,” goes the Gordon Gekko memetic mantra, but in the end of Wall Street, Gekko has fallen. We are in this weird shame cycle of wanting money, power, recognition while recognising we’d be much happier investing in our communities, relationships, health, and skill-development.
In one study, when participants watched a video of a child talking a test, those who were told the child comes from a wealthy family rated the child as smarter, more capable, and the test more challenging than when the same video is shown to people who’ve been told the child comes from a low-income family. We truly believe people with money are better, despite the widespread evidence that wealth and power often lead to less empathy and more bias and irrational thinking.
When the conversation about what it might look like to live without the aim of making a lot of money, many people I’ve talked to seem to regard the whole idea as fanciful and misguided. Some are dismissive entirely, some retort with some version of the ‘do good to do well’ concept of finding ways to be “good” and still make a lot of money. It’s not money itself that is the problem, of course, but every argument in favour of wealth accumulation I’ve heard involves bypass and contortion. Yes, it may be that my accumulation comes at others’ expense, but I’ll do good things with the money, or I will be able to stop doing terrible things and commit my time to collective good once I have enough money for my own security, or I don’t want to live with scarcity mindset.
Real scarcity mindset is a belief that money can offer meaning, acceptance, or security. We are most likely to live longer, have good health, and feel our life has meaning when we’re integrated in contexts of interdependence and care, where we feel loved and where we’re not vastly unequal in resources to those around us. When we think of money in terms of a practice of cooperation and collaboration, where we create value with other people, and can then pass along resources to those creating value for us, where we by and large know the people we’re creating value with and for as well as those who are creating value for us, we can understand money as simply a metaphor for our connection.
It’s the system, baby
It’s interesting that so many of the destructive materialisms we’re engaged with are subsidized by taxes and seen as beneficial to ‘our economy’.
Our current economic strategies rely on people buying stuff (or traveling, or eating junk, or pursuing wealth accumulation or whatever) in lieu of being satisfied, and anti-social patterns work in service of those strategies.
It’s economically advantageous, at least for corporations, to have people living apart from one another and needing to buy individual versions of everything, to pay for care, to be fined into prison. In theory, we’d have governments (meaning, a group that we’ve selected to ensure our collective wellbeing) looking to more of a holistic measure of economic benefit. This would involve holding corporations accountable for the economic costs growth strategies involve, such as environmental damage, heath care costs, even things like crime (though punishment is simply another corporate-benefit industry without accountability). We’ve stopped regarding government in this light especially in the US (or, for example, in more universally accepted as despotic regimes).
I have to suspect that people who have learned how to live with fewer financial resources and more community will be in a better position as things collapse, whether due to war, climate, or other scarcity-inducing situations. Whether that will be ‘enough’ is hard to say, but there’s no downside I can think of to learning to share resources, support each another, and recognise how deeply satisfied I can be with all my needs being met.
