Читать книгу A Life Less Throwaway - Tara Button - Страница 9
ОглавлениеHow to resist a world that’s trying to make us broke and lonely
Our relationship with ‘stuff’ may sit squarely at the centre of this book, but I should be clear from the outset that the purpose of it isn’t to make you obsess over material things. In fact, it’s to help you do the opposite. I want to give you the tools to understand what you need and don’t need, and how to make the objects in your life work for you in the long term.
THE BENEFITS OF MINDFUL CURATION
We only have a limited amount of money, headspace and time to spend as we frolic on this planet and we can very easily waste a huge amount of each on meaningless stuff. Mindful curation helps us to free up all three, so that we can spend them enjoying the things we find most meaningful.
Being more mindful about what we buy protects us from impulse spending and gives us more resilience to advertising and marketing manipulation. So we find that we start saving money over time. Crucially, though, it doesn’t feel as though we’re making a sacrifice. Savings come naturally out of a better understanding of what we need and what best serves us, which is usually much less than the average person buys.
When we practise mindful curation, we’re also releasing ourselves from the trivial, the bland and the shoddy, and living a life where the objects around us perfectly match our needs, pull their weight, reflect our values and put a smile on our face. This frees up our time and energy for the things that matter most, like family, friends, pursuing our passions and finally finding out who wins Game of Thrones.
THE BENEFITS OF LONGER-LASTING PRODUCTS
Not all products are made equal, and I believe we’ve left longevity out of our decision-making for far too long. The commercial world does everything it can to tempt us away from longevity, but that only serves its ever-hungry self, not us, the people who have to deal with the broken zips, rattling washing machines and rips in the crotches of our jeans.
When I started to buy for the long term, I found myself thinking far more deeply about what I wanted out of my life in the future. This meant that the possessions I ‘curated’ automatically started to reflect the deeper and more stable elements of my character, values and personal style. This has brought a lovely natural harmony to my home, creating an atmosphere in which I feel refreshed and calm because it is authentically ‘me’.
My home had previously been a stressful one. Every time I’d walked through my little kingdom and seen the toaster that wouldn’t pop, the wonky flat-pack drawers, dried-up biros and dodgy dishwasher, I’d feel anxiety rise up. Once I started surrounding myself with objects I could trust, my home became a much more relaxing and nurturing place to be.
Another delightful side effect of buying fewer things and not replacing your items so regularly is that you can afford to buy higher-quality, better-crafted products, so your quality of life can actually feel higher.
IS IT MINIMALISM?
Mindful curation definitely has its roots in the minimalist movement. However, while minimalism tends to be quite clear on what we should cut out of our lives (as much as possible), it can leave us hanging when it comes to deciding what to bring into them and how to bypass the pressures to buy more than we need.
With mindful curation, we aren’t trying to reduce our possessions down to a magic number of objects or compete to see who can live with the least. Instead, we’re finding out much more about ourselves and our values and using that knowledge as a shield against clutter and the tricks and temptations of marketers. So with mindful curation we’ll end up owning exactly the right amount for us – no more and no less – and this will be different for everyone.
MINDFUL CURATION VS MINDLESS CONSUMPTION
‘The best things in life aren’t things.’
Art Buchwald, satirist
Mindful curation is a simple idea, but it can be challenging at first because there are so many forces trying to get us to think in the opposite way – the way of ‘mindless consumption’.
Mindless consumption sounds free-spirited and potentially quite fun. It’s the unwritten hashtag for every photo uploaded by the ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’, the hidden subtitle on every ‘haul video’.
The danger of mindless consumption though is that it makes us morbidly materialistic, meaning that a huge amount of our attention is focused on our wealth, our stuff and our status. And materialistic people have been shown to be (deep breath) less generous, less agreeable, less healthy, less likely to help others, less satisfied with their lives, less satisfied with their jobs, less caring about the environment, more likely to gamble, more likely to be in debt, lonelier, worse at keeping friends and less close to the friends they do have. Oh, and materialistic kids do less well at school.1
In short – it’s really bad!
Yet advertisers, the government, our friends, and even our kids surround us with messages and put constant pressure on us to focus on materialistic things. On top of this, on average we see more than 5,000 marketing messages a day.2
Unsurprisingly, this takes its toll. Research shows that briefly subjecting someone to photos of luxury objects or even just words such as ‘status’ or ‘expensive’ can trigger a more depressed mood, feelings of wanting to outdo others and less willingness to socialise.3
Tim Kasser, who has been studying the effects of materialism for almost two decades, describes the impact as a ‘see-saw effect’. When we see ourselves as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘people’ (which is easily triggered through marketing messaging) we focus more on materialistic urges, such as our status and competitiveness. This causes an upswing of negative materialistic thoughts and a downswing of positive urges towards community, connection, generosity, trust and cooperation – all the things that have been proven to make our lives more fulfilling and happy.
So, when your grandad says that people were nicer in the ‘good old days’, in this aspect, it’s true. Our materialistic tendencies have increased so much in the last few decades that our sense of community, our trust in others and our ability to be happy have been gravely reduced.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT NOW?
I’m not going to spend too much time pressing this point, because I think we all know that mindless consumerism is pushing our poor planet to a crisis point. We need to save it, and dropping the ball isn’t really an option. We live on the ball, and we don’t have another one to move to.
But it isn’t just the planet that should concern us. The trend towards materialism is also increasingly taking its toll on our day-to-day lives because it tricks us into losing the personal connections that make us happy.
A study of 2,500 consumers over six years concluded that no matter how much money you had to spend, materialism was linked to an increase in loneliness and loneliness in turn increased materialism.4 In the Seventies and Eighties, only 11–20 per cent of Americans reported that they often felt lonely; in 2010 that figure rose to between 40 and 45 per cent.5 The Mental Health Foundation in the UK also reported in 2010 that 46 per cent of us felt that society was getting lonelier.6
Relying on social media for connection is like trying to live off multivitamins – they might be a nice add-on, but they don’t feed us in the way we need. Research has shown that increasing your friends on Facebook has no effect on your well-being at all, but increasing your ‘real world’ friends from ten to twenty people results in a significant life-altering improvement – the equivalent of a 50 per cent pay rise.7
How does materialism make us lonelier? The messages we see in ads and social media channels perpetuate a myth that having things or looking a certain way makes us worthy of love and admiration. It’s very natural to want to feel special and appreciated, so we start to focus on our looks and achievements and buy high-status items that others will admire. However, any admiration or connection we gain is on a shallow level, and because it isn’t based on anything authentic, it leaves us feeling disconnected and unsatisfied. So we try even harder to get the love we need by showing the world our possessions, our status and our achievements, never guessing that the constant focus on the self means that the connection to others isn’t going to happen.
Sadly, materialism and narcissism are on the rise. A study published in 2012 tracked the values of graduates since 1966 and found that the importance given to status, money and narcissistic life goals like ‘being famous’ had risen significantly, whereas the importance given to finding meaning and purpose in life and a desire to help others had fallen.8 In addition, a study of students over the last thirty years has found that college kids today are about 40 per cent lower in empathy than the students of twenty or thirty years ago.9
We have become ‘all about me’ rather than ‘all about we’. The irony is that self-focused people hurt themselves more than anyone else. I don’t feel that it is a coincidence that the use of antidepressants has gone up 400 per cent in the USA10 and doubled in Britain in the last decade.11
To add insult to injury, marketers know how much we crave the connections that are the cornerstone of our happiness, so their adverts are full of family bonding and friends having great times – all to sell us goods that in reality are driving us apart.
IS OUR STUFF GETTING IN THE WAY OF WHAT’S IMPORTANT?
In March 2010, a group of five Pacific Islanders who had lived all their lives with practically no possessions were flown to the UK to be part of a TV programme where they looked at British life.12 As they walked around their hosts’ houses and explored London, they were surprised by all the ‘useless extra things’ they saw, saddened that busy commuters wouldn’t stop and talk to them, and shocked at seeing homeless people. This would ‘never be allowed to happen’ in their community.
The tribesmen’s simple lives meant that they hadn’t lost sight of what was important: love, respect and enjoying each other’s company. When they first arrived, they were all given their own room in their host’s big house. Later, when they stayed at a more modest place and all four of them were put together in a small bedroom, they declared themselves happier because now they were ‘able to talk to each other’.
It’s easy to romanticise the ‘noble savage’ life. There are of course many downsides, including lack of healthcare, gender equality and Ben & Jerry’s. But it is interesting to explore how our own society’s values might change if materialism was reduced.
In 2016, my fiancé, Howard, and I were invited to be on a TV show running an experiment to try and discover this very thing. The idea was that all our possessions, including our clothes, would be taken away from us.
‘No bloody way,’ Howard said before I was halfway through explaining the idea. Howard is not a naked person. Not ever. Not even with himself. So Life Stripped Bare went on to be made without us.13
Six people were stripped bare. Literally. Crouching-beneath-your-window-sill-so-the-neighbours-don’t-see-your-dangly-bits bare. All their stuff was locked away and each day they were able to choose one possession that they most wanted to have back in in their lives. Then (to get as much flesh wobbling as possible), they had to run half a mile up the road to a shed to get it back.
One of the volunteers, Heidi, a 29-year-old pink-haired fashion designer with thirty-one bikinis, sobbed as the removal vans arrived in her trendy area of London. ‘I feel my stuff defines me,’ she said. ‘I want people to like me, think I’m cool, think I’m nice, and if I don’t have my hipster coat, if I don’t have my nails painted or my rings on, I don’t think they will like me …’
On Day 2, after a gruelling night on the floor, she reflected, ‘Yesterday I was crying because I wanted everything. Today I just want my mattress.’
In fact she got more than that. Out on the street, two passing girls stopped to help her carry the mattress back to her house and they bonded over the funny situation.
Almost in tears, Heidi said to camera, ‘Now I’ve got some friends, I honestly feel I’ve got everything … When you have nothing, people make the whole world of difference.’
I’d like to turn this on its head and say, ‘When you’ve got people, there’s nothing much else you need in the world.’
All the participants of Life Stripped Bare found that once their basic comfort levels were met, they became less and less bothered about picking up new items from the shed. We can be happy with very little, yet due to materialism, the average home has 300,000 items in it …
So how can we reverse this trend? Let’s start with some exercises to break free of materialism.
exercise
PERSUADE YOURSELF OF THE IMPORTANCE OF NON-MATERIAL ACTIONS
You may think you don’t need persuading that there’s more to life than materialism, especially after reading this chapter, but write an e-mail to yourself about it anyway. This may seem a bit twee, but has been proven by professor and clinical psychologist Natasha Lekes to have a tangible impact on your happiness.14 I’ll even start you off:
Dear me,
This feels odd, but I’m going to tell you about why I think having good relationships, helping the world to be a better place and growing as a person are so important …
exercise
SIGN UP FOR BUYMEONCE MANTRAS
Sign yourself up for free daily mantras at BuyMeOnce.com. These short phrases will help your subconscious make good choices for you and you’ll be less swayed by materialistic messaging. Here are three to get you going:
• ‘I am good enough.’
• ‘I have everything I need to be happy.’
• ‘I am grateful for all I have.’
exercise
SIMPLE WAYS TO COMBAT MATERIALISM EVERY DAY
• Remind yourself on waking that this life is amazing but also short – smile and say thank you for the day.
• Find time each day to focus on your own personal growth and self-worth. (You’ll find ideas in this book.)
• Find people who share your passions and build a sense of community with them.
• Block materialistic messages as much as possible (more on this later).
• Practise meditation and mindfulness – there’s a wealth of material out there to get you started.
• Feeling close to nature has been shown to decrease materialism, so get out as much as possible, even if you just go into your back garden or a public park. Nature documentaries can also be a lovely way to escape from seeing ‘stuff’.
