About Post-scarcity notes: As the staff of The Public Interest Network advocate for a cleaner, greener, healthier world, from time to time we’ll share observations on the larger challenge facing our network and our society: How do we shift the dominant paradigm — the very way in which we see and make sense of the world — from disposable to sustainable, from “never enough” to “enough,” from “making a living” to “living.” The views expressed in this space relate to our work, but do not necessarily represent the position of the network or its organizations.
Why do humans, everywhere, consume so much when we have the opportunity? Are we born with insatiable appetites for material goods, or has modern consumer culture manipulated us into thinking that we never can have enough? In short, is it nature or nurture (of a sort)?
If the answer is “nature,” then it seems like a tall order to convince our fellow humans to recognize society’s material abundance and step off the consumption merry-go-round. If the answer is “nurture,” we (only!) have to convince (or compel) manufacturers and marketers to quit advertising and influencing us.
That’s one of the reasons I recently read “Stuff: Humanity’s Epic Journey from Naked Ape to Nonstop Shopper” by Chip Colwell. Colwell’s short answer to my question is that both nature and nurture are to blame: humans consume a lot because that’s who we are, and because advertising preys on our inherent nature, goading us into consuming ever more.
Colwell’s long answer starts at the beginning of human history, when humans started using crude tools – the first material goods. Trained as an archeologist, Colwell argues that using tools is in our nature. Many animals use tools: insects, mollusks, crustaceans, fish, octopuses, birds, and mammals have all been observed using tools to access food, attract mates, build homes, and defend against predators. Early humans, who started using tools more than 3 million years ago, were able to make more tools than other animals because we had greater physical abilities; we had more working memory of how we created or used a tool, which enabled us to repeat the process; and we also could combine learning with reason, allowing us to use one tool to make another.
Having tools changed us: Tools allowed us to access more energy from our food, and natural selection led us to develop bigger brains (which need a lot of calories). Some tools depended on cooperation, so we lived and worked together in larger groups, which facilitated longer childhoods and developmental periods. This led to more tools and more cooperation: bigger settlements, specialized tools for specialized jobs within the community, better tools for building sturdier homes (which are themselves a tool) in which we stored and protected all the tools we had acquired, etc.
This relative abundance and security gave people the freedom to look for meaning beyond survival. Multiple lineages of early humans created art, starting 400,000 years ago, based on an “animal instinct for beauty, the desire for self-expression, and the invention of symbolic thinking.” We started making tools for their meaning – their beauty, say, or their demonstration of a religious belief. Over time, we imbued more and more objects with meaning: clothing, cultural objects, heirlooms, a wider variety of religious objects, and so forth.
Perhaps ironically for those of us who now get rid of possessions in a quest to make room for more meaning in our lives, Colwell argues that our deep desire for meaning led our ancestors to want more stuff: “The appeal and necessity of these meanings held such sway that humans want them constantly to affirm our place in the world, to make us who we are.”
Here, Colwell transitions to the “nurture” part of his argument. He explains how technological advances (i.e., more and better tools that made the Industrial Revolution possible) resulted in the production of more stuff than we actually wanted to consume. In response, producers turned to manufacturing desire: Industrialists fostered “a society of consumers who valued not things that lasted but the chance to buy more things.”
Miswanting
Starting as early as the 1890s, industrialists and inventors began to market the idea that their products would lead people to a better life. Producers sought to convince consumers they were dissatisfied with their lives, a fundamental element of marketing even today. In response, consumers end up “miswanting,” incorrectly believing that new products will bring us what we truly want: meaning. Producers promise their products will give it to us – that the right items will finally express our identities, indicate which group we belong to, and make us happy. To ensure that we will always have the opportunity and need to buy more items, manufacturers have developed multiple forms of planned obsolescence, whether through changing styles or technological advances.
Combine millions of years of evolution with a century of marketing, Colwell concludes, and you get “a constant, insatiable desire for more stuff,” even though we know “it ultimately won’t make us happy or better people. A desire that is a collective suicide, death by uninhabitable planet via stuff. And yet, we can’t seem to stop ourselves.”
Here’s the first – and depressing – conclusion I came to from Colwell’s history: We are innately drawn to tools and tangible goods, and therefore we can be convinced to always consume more, even when it isn’t in our best interests.
Desire for meaning
My second, and happier, takeaway is this: We also have an incredibly deep desire for meaning. After all, it’s what our ancestors sought as soon as they took the first step away from scarcity. They looked for meaning in items–but also in religion, through belonging to a group, and via other avenues.
A century of mass marketing has warped and limited our vision for how to find meaning by diverting so much of our meaning-making attention and energy to stuff. There are other ways to find meaning and to affirm our places in the world; we’ve just forgotten so many of them.
Perhaps it’s time for a marketing campaign on behalf of meaning. I’m envisioning advertisements that urge us to meet our neighbors, make or listen to music, create chalk art and find ways to express ourselves and engage with the world. What would your campaign for meaning look like?
Thanks to John Harris for his thoughtful discussion of this book and feedback on this piece.
