;A WORLD WITHOUT CONSUMERISM

When the banking–and–housing crisis began in the United States last year and then when the economic downturn started in the end of the year and into 2009, I began thinking about the role I play when I am a consumer, about the process and experience of consuming stuff and about the sickness of consumerism. It wasn’t the first time. Over the years, I had entertained such thoughts before especially when I was researching and presenting the Wealth Creation Training. But only fleetingly. With the recent turn of events, I have been thinking about it in a much more often.

We all consume stuff because we have our Maslovian “lower needs” for surviving, being safe, social, and having a sense of importance in ourselves. And we need “true satisfiers” for these needs—the things that actually gratify the requirements for life, health, and well-being. That’s what the lower needs are all about. And as I’ve written many times, when you gratify the lower “animal” needs, the needs go away.

But this is where we humans have such a fabulous way of messing up mother nature, distorting human nature, and creating perversions of our possible natures. Whenever we try to reach a “higher need” through a lower need and endow the lower need with the meanings of the higher self-actualization needs —we begin the psycho-processes. We psycho-eat, psycho-spend, psycho-sex, psycho-drive, psycho-consume, etc. We use these basic gratisfiers of eating, spending, sexing, driving our cars, and consuming for the higher psychological needs of meaning, significance, order, power, beauty, etc.

Consuming is natural. It’s a requirement for life. Being a consumer is inevitable as long as we are fragile human beings in bodies that are dependent on so many things (food, water, sun, rest, sleep, safety, boundaries, companionship, personal significance). But consumerism is not natural, not required, and not inevitable. We could create a world without consumerism.

Consumerism is consuming stuff for the sake of consuming because we have over-valued the process of consuming. The more stuff you can consume, the wealthier you are; the more important you are; the more hip you are; the more .... (you fill in the blank). Consumerism confuses the higher needs with the lower and ultimately treats us as nothing more than an insatiable animal. You know that consumerism has you if you have to consume more and more stuff; if “shop until you drop” is your mantra, if you have to rent a storage unit to store more and more of your stuff because you don’t have room for it at home. Consumerism has you if you keep replacing your current stuff just because it is not as cool, new, different, or unique.

Consumerism has you if you define yourself by your stuff—by your clothes, cars, home, furnishings, toys, etc.

For some, imagining a world without consumerism strains the brain. I presented this to one person a few weeks ago and she said, “Well, why would you want to work then? Why earn money if it is not for all that stuff?” And another person who overheard our conversation said, “You’re too idealistic; it wouldn’t work. The economy couldn’t work, it is based on consumerism. Plus, it would change everything about business.”

“I agree that it would be a radical change, maybe a revolutionary change. Yet the highest expressions of human nature, of self-actualization, is the being dimension. It is to be—to find and be what one is within and therefore to express one’s talents and gifts. Trying to live by getting and consuming is not our highest and best.”

After more accusations of being too idealistic, I suggested that it is consumerism that is not only filling up our garbage dumps with stuff that won’t fully dissolve for a thousand years, but worse, it is using up and wasting so much of human mind, emotion, energy, speech, and actions on the low level of mere consumption. A world without consumerism would focus us not only on recycling, intelligent stewardship of the earth’s resources, but also on creating lasting products. That would get us beyond the planned obsolescence of building things to quickly wear out and to be thrown away.

So what would we do and how would we live in a world without consumerism? We could focus on the higher needs, the being-values —truth, justice, equality, contribution, meaningfulness, music, beauty, order, and so on.

Last week at Starbucks I had a conversation about the economic turndown. A small group of business people all agreed that the so-called “stimulus package” that the US congress passed is not really a stimulus package, but a spending package and one that will probably create more dependency on government. Most of the conversation revolved around how to stimulate more commerce. Most agreed that the market needed to be as free as possible and most know that 80 percent of all new jobs come from small businesses, not major corporations.

After debating the pros and cons depend buying and selling, I decided to play devil’s advocate and really stir things up.

“I think we are attempting to solve the wrong problem. The so-called solutions that we have been offering is actually creating the very problem in the first place. Are we not assuming that we need more commerce, more buying-and-selling? What if that’s the problem? What if consumerism itself is the problem? What would an economy be like, how would business operate if we didn’t make ‘consuming more and more stuff’ our objective?”

The way our world works right now is that we engage in “business” to create products and services. We do this to create value to people’s lives. And when sales slow down, we invent new reasons and motivations which we promote through marketing and advertisement so that people will buy more of our stuff. When we reach that limit, then we add some new feature to the product or service, re-package it as “new and improved” and set out to market the “new” product and service. And when that reaches a limit, we try to innovate some other improvement or difference. All of this is designed to get more and more people to buy more and more stuff.

Often in this consumerism we consume more and more stuff simply because it has been packaged and marketed as “new, improved, and different.” And how often do we buy stuff, consume services, and purchase entertainment simply for the sake of the consumption? How often do we make consuming the goal itself? We feel blah, or bored or restless so out to the Mall or the downtown shopping area and shop for no other reason than just to shop. Have you ever done that? Or, what about the consuming we do impulsively? We go into a store for one thing and because of the packaging or the display, we end up buying things and mostly just because it was there and it somehow appealed to something in us.

Five or more years ago in Sydney, I was walking in the city to the place of a training and a pretty lady with a microphone stopped me. Her camera man was next to her and she suddenly approached and asked, “Can I ask you a question.” I was daydreaming about some NLP pattern (!) and accidently said “yes.”

“What do you think about retail therapy? Do you believe in it? How often do you engage in retail therapy?”

Shaken from my reverie, the word “therapy” cued me to think about the healing of wounded hearts, so I went into a therapeutic mode of mind. But then there was that strange word, “retail.” And in that moment, on that sidewalk, in the early morning, I just couldn’t connect the two. “Retail therapy?” I was searching my data banks— Gestalt, cognitive, behavioral, Ericksonian . . . but retail? Is that a guy’s name? Is retail like reframing?”

I supposed that I looked lost, so the lady said, “You know, shopping.” Talk about a shock. So out of my mouth came what I was thinking: “Shopping? Shopping? Are you kidding? What does shopping have to do therapy?”

“It makes you feel better! That’s why!” She said with a huff and in a tone dismissing me. Guess I just didn’t fit her world. And to propose a world without consumerism, well, that woiuld have given her the need for some real therapy!