What you don’t have you don’t need it now.

How often have you bought something expensive only to want to replace it with something else –something even pricier– within a very short period of time? In short, you’re no longer satisfied with what you have. You want more. You want to maximise.

OOriginally people used to buy higher-priced quality items because they last longer than poorly-made, cheaper items. So the idea was that we’d spend more in the short term but less over the long term. Which is great because buying something that lasts longer it makes more economical and ecological sense. We never used to purchasing a replacement item solely because it was an “improved” model. Originally, we paid for quality items because they added some kind of value to our lives.

Now you may think all of the vendor’s products are so good, that you want to buy more than one model, so that you can choose which one to use based on your personal preference that particular day. A bit like the Thunderbirds — they had a fantastic selection of transport vehicles to choose from, didn’t they?

Usually you feel strangely compelled to buy something new because the new product is bigger, better, faster, more accurate, has more features, contains more memory, is smaller and lighter, stronger or more fashionable. Brands have become so strong today that we start to define our own identity by them; we associate with some brands and not others.

But where exactly did we go so wrong? We hardly even question anymore whether we really need the new item — we buy it because we can. We buy it because it’s fun. We also buy it because our government tells us that buying things is “good for the economy”.

Most people don’t even give so much as a second thought about throwing out something that still functions. These days, things become superceded or obsolete at crazy rate.

It’s true that most of us in Western civilisations experience a truly insatiable lust for more and more possessions. Indeed, it’s what motivates us to work so hard in the first place – to improve our standard of living.

So my main questions for today are: does all this consumerism really improve our quality of life? Are we really any happier when we own more stuff? Are we really any happier when we buy more stuff? I’ll get to that a bit later on…

First we have to ask ourselves the question: why do we consume so much anyway? Well if you’re a young reader, the way a consumer culture works is like this:

Venders must continually sell new products to stay competitive. If they stopped selling new things all the time, profits would go down and the board of directors (the ones that represent investors) wouldn’t be happy because all investors ever want is what’s called a maximum “Return on Investment” or ROI¹ with a minimum level of risk.

Investors (the ones that lend money to fund a project or new venture) are never happy with their current assets or their investment portfolios. Why? Well because the very term investment implies growth. For them, no growth = not happy. That’s just the way they are,  probably because they’re convinced that “more is better”.

My good friend who studied international business once told me that “business is like war”. I don’t know why I wrote that and put it here (perhaps because it helps put things into context with repsect to how much pressure there is to sell new things all the time).

One of the ways that product manufacturers can justify selling new stuff all the time is to convince you that the new product will make you happier than the old one. That way, the product manufaturer is happy, the consumer is happy and the investors are happy. Everyone is happy (except of course mother nature).

So. Product manufaturers usually try to sway you over with newer specifications, a new design, or both. New products are claimed to be more comfortable, offer better productivity, greater reliability, greater efficiency, or whatever else they can think of. It doesn’t really matter to them why you want to buy it, so long as you buy it in the long run… and the only reason they may care that you do buy something, is to improve their chances of understanding consumer psychology… so they have a greater chance of selling you something later on².

They then take this new product –what businesses refer to as a ‘widget’– to the marketing department. The marketing department analyses who the product is aimed at, the “target demographic”. If the company is smart, they already knew in advance who the target demographic is (otherwise they’re operating blind and investors start to get nervous because there is increased risk of them losing money).

Why do they need the marketing department? They need the marketing department so that when they advertise the new product, they can spend a minimum amount of money on a maximum amount of exposure. Once again, the return on investment has to be maximised. The design department then tries to make the product even cooler than it really is by making a new creative advertising campaign for it. If there’s one thing designers are good at, it’s making things look good. If the product designer gets all this right, the product becomes practically irresistable.

Now heres the clincher — when a product manufacturer tells you that they have something new to offer, something superior, you have no choice but to assume that what you currently own is ‘inferior’. What happens then is that you become unhappy with what already have. You want the newer product just to get your own sense of satisfaction back again. Note that there is little desire to own the replacement product until it is actually designed and manufactured. People may wish for flexible television screens, but because they don’t yet exist, people have no choice but to be happy with their current thin-screen televisions.

In other words, companies keep promising us that their products will make us happier and happier and happier or ever-more productive. But will they? Surely there must be a limit to how happy or productive we can be?

In my view, blatant consumerism harbours an insatiable lust for new products; it generates a relentless cycling of increasing dissatisfaction in the things that we already own and an increasing desire of the things that we want to replace them with. How can we be unhappy with last years’ model when one of the reasons we bought it in the first place was in order to make us happier? It’s exactly the same product! The only difference is that a new product has appeared and that we compare what we [might] have to what others [might] have.

So we’ve been brainwashed by decades of advertising that more and more and newer and newer possessions are the route to supreme happiness. But the scary part is that because we know that possessions alone do not in fact make us happier, we might even be making ourselves depressed (because retailers presume we are not content with what we’ve already got).

The sooner that you realise that consumerism is based on false promises (promises are often exaggerated), the sooner you come to expect that a new product can never make you truly content for very long,  the sooner you accept that your emotions are more complicated than the frequency with which you make purchases, the sooner you can steer clear of too much consumerism.

About 10 years ago, I read the result of a life satisfaction survey where they asked many employees working in all salary brackets what sort of income they would need to achieve true happiness (or something like that). To my surprise, according to the survey, almost everyone’s answer was that to be happy, they would need to double their current wage earnings. Interestingly, it didn’t matter if they were poor or already quite rich, people assumed that more money would undoubtedly translate into more happiness. People just weren’t happy with what they already earned. That alone should tell you something. What it means is that people struggle with satisfaction.

You may or may not know that I have previously lived in the Canary Islands, Spain for over eight years. Money is not so prevalent as it is in Australia. Most Tinerfeños³ as they are called simply don’t have as much money to play with. They have to be happy and make do with what they’ve got. This is really where I started to learn the basics of minimalism. When I was living there in 2009, the global economic crisis hit us very hard. Then the Icelandic volcano prevented millions of tourists from travelling to the Canary Islands. What I am saying is that I had to make do with very little money and yet I was not unhappy because of it.

One of the tactics that all Spanish tend to use is that they wait a week or a month before buying something. If it turns out that they still want it after that long, then they would go ahead with the purchase. Partly this was to spread major purchases out a bit. But it is also a technique that can be used to distinguish between something you really want and something that you could possibly do without.

The Spanish almost never impulse buy. Impulse buying is one of the worst things you can do for the environment. Why? Because often when you impulse buy something, you are getting something that you haven’t really thought about for very long and it’s more likely that you don’t really need it. Often things we are tempted to impulse-buy are not really funtional products, they tend to be more ‘ornamental’ in nature. How many times have you bought something on an whim and later come to regret it? I bet way most people have regretted more impulse buys than  the things they have waited months to save for.

So my advice to people is not to get too sucked in.  Don’t read catalogues or magazines — you can never miss something if you are not even aware of its existence! If you have to think twice about buying something, you probably don’t even really need it.  If you really and truly do need something, you will go looking for it, it won’t come looking for you.

Save your money for a rainy day. If you earn so much money that it seems to burn a hole in your pocket, consider giving some of it to charity.

By all means, keep using your things and enjoy using them. But wait until something accidentally breaks before ousting it out. Then try to repair it if possible. And when you can’t repair it any longer, consider replacing it only as the final option. At least sell the old item on ebay, give it to a charity or recycle it – don’t just throw it away in the bin or put it in the cupboard. Sometimes other people might be able to use it for spare parts even if you might not be able to.

Not only is this minimalism approach better for the environment, but you’ll get so much more satisfaction buying things which you actually need to, when you need to.

1. I am truly sorry if you had to learn that acronym from me.
2. For example, I sell insanely expensive cable housing for ultra-high-end bicycles.

   I care that you can stop better, and can ultimately spend less time fussing with bike cables. I care what my customers think about my product. I care what my customers think about my business philosophy. I care that cyclists want their bikes to look great and perform better.

   I have a vested interested in knowing who buys them and why, because I know that information offers me some kind of advantage and will eventually help me to sell more than if I didn’t know.

   But even I admit that the main reason I sell this product is so that I can put a few extra dollars back in my own pocket so that I can do more things that I enjoy in my spare time. Activities like travelling, street photography and writing this blog ultimately provide me with a benefit to selling more of my products. That’s my “return on investment”.

3. (Tenerifians in English)