As the US grows to 300 million this month, businessmen are praising the “accomplishment” and foaming at the mouth over the opportunities that a larger population offers. (Of course there are exceptions but alas, they don’t own businesses.) While these mindless fools are seeking growth, everyone else on the street are choking on their pollution, running out of drinkable water, starving local economies by giving their wallets to foreign companies, and consuming more still which feeds the problems caused by growth in the first place.
Consume less. Simple concept, really, but apparently too difficult for Americans to comprehend. So to start, stop thinking about the objects and start thinking about the outcome…
In conversations about sustainability, a huge amount of time is spent considering purchases and consumption. This past weekend at West Coast Green, the “vote with your dollar” mantra wove through nearly every talk. The question is not just about how much we need, but about how we think about what we need at all.
In our consumer experience, there are three things we value tremendously: choice, results and access. Each of these aspects feeds a cycle of spending, unpredictable satisfaction, and eventual disuse. Reducing over-consumption has to go beyond trying to make consumers want less, to giving their desire a new and more appealing target.
CHOICE: We feel a certain sense of power when we get to be selective. We want to be able to scan through hundreds of brands, and select a litany of special functions and features. Or at least we think we do. There are mounting arguments against this idea, suggesting that in fact our daily consumer decisions paralyze us and raise our blood pressure. But physiological effects aside, our purchasing patterns continue to indicate to manufacturers that the more choice a product offers, the more likely we are to buy it. iPod would be a rare example of a product with a singular offering that achieved phenomenal success, but even Apple has begun trying to hook new buyers with multi-functional models.
RESULTS: We have a perpetual tendency to conflate the outcome of an object’s utility with the object itself. A classic example recurs on Worldchanging: Sometimes, we need a hole in our wall, so we buy a drill. But we don’t need the drill, we need the hole. A system that offered the object on demand when we needed results would provide us with the hole but eliminate having a dusty drill sitting in our toolbox for 20 years.
ACCESS: We want our belongings at arm’s reach on a moment’s notice. There’s safety and reassurance in ownership; it’s the reason we buy the drill, and why we might even buy a shiny new model to replace the old one, despite the fact that they bore indistinguishable holes. It’s one thing to recognize that what we desire is an end result, but another entirely to release our longing to be surrounded by all the means that take us to these ends. It’s a deep shift that will lead us to long for an outcome, not an object.
(Read the rest.)
This is the paradox and if you read the rest of the linked post you’ll find out more about how some are “developing systems and infrastructure that can unsnarl” it. It’s a long and difficult process, but not impossible.
Why more is less:
The logic explaining why we are unhappy and uneasy in world of choices seems counter-intuitive, because choice is good, right? Well, not so fast. The argument goes something like this: The more options we have, the more information and effort we have to go into evaluating them, the more likely we are to be dissatisfied with the outcome. So far so good, but why this dissatisfaction?
1) Most people hate making trade-offs and will often avoid making choices until they absolutely have to, so having an abundance of choices reminds us of this dilemma: that life is about making choices, yet we must make them within the vacuum of uncertainty and an unknown future.
2) Most people are bad at dealing with uncertainty, estimating odds and often don’t calculate probabilities properly because we have incomplete information. So trump this up to certain cognitive flaws in our human decision-making apparatus.
3) Our expectations get raised after spending time weighting the tradeoffs and understanding the choices, so we get disappointed when the outcome is not as perfect as we expect. The irony is that the outcome is almost always better, i.e. a better fitting pair of jeans, but our perceptions don’t see this rationally or objectively. As we know from countless studies, not to mention certain wisdoms found in traditions like Buddhism, our satisfaction is often function of when expectations match our perceived reality. In economist language, dissatisfaction occurs when the transaction costs of making the decision exceed the actual benefit.
4) What is called adaptation. In a nutshell, we adapt to our circumstances. This happens within our hedonic system as well, i.e. our internal system that modulates things that feel good and bad. So things that feel good, feel less and less good over time. Just as things that feel bad, like the grating sound of construction work outside my window, feel less bad over time (although that’s debatable.) So the more we have, the more we get used to this stuff, the less special it feels.
(Read the rest.)
Why we thought otherwise in the first place:
As a free market economy–an artificial organism–the US will naturally flow through pathways of least resistance. This means exploiting the resources that are the easiest to utilize (hence our obsession with fossil fuels) and not caring for the consequences (like all the deaths that resulted from poisons released by industry) because the consequences are a problem to be dealt with when it arises. In other words, it’s easier to deal with fewer problems now than to deal with all of the problems that may happen in the future because of x solution.
(What bothers me most about this is that this is the behavior of non-sentient organisms. We can do better than that but we don’t. This is retarded.)
Possible counterpoints:
“Without a large population we will not see the kind of incredible innovation we enjoy today. It’s a simple matter of statistics: with the massive number of people, it is more likely that there will be many more ideas, variety, and creativity flowing throughout our society.”
It’s also more likely that there will be many more idiots running around. In addition, we have achieved a higher standard of living because of all the hard work our forefathers did. When they arrived in this great land they met new challenges, such as “how will we feed ourselves in this new environment” and “how do so few of us kill so many of these savages”. My point is that challenge breeds intelligence, and it was challenge that our founders certainly found. It was not their massive population (unless you consider ~5 million massive). From that number arose the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. In other words, we don’t need a lot of people to do a lot of cool things, especially now that each person is capable of doing a lot more than our ancestors thanks to our more advanced technology.
“With less choice we’ll get higher prices and crappier products. What about competition and even evolution of design?”
You missed the point. With this assumed growth margin (neoclassical economists–the ones running the World Bank–simply assume unlimited everything, even when this is clearly a stupid move) we have reached a level of abundance of choice that it is unsettling. It’s so disturbing that it infringes on our well-being. As the quoted articles cited, depression in the US has increased substantially in the past several years. Why would we be so depressed if most people have money and a marriage? Isn’t that your definition of success and happiness? It better not be. So it isn’t about better products, but better living.
Final thoughts:
We have been too slow to recognize the problems that started with the mistakes made by our simple-minded predecessors. And the problem remains: we’re still simple-minded. Yet we recognize this and are therefore able to change this fact. It’s just that we’re too late. While the near-future is going to be exciting, it’s not going to be the “look at this cool new phone!” kind of exciting but more like the “look at that huge hurricane headed for us!” kind. So in the end we’re going to come out on top because we will have overcame a lot of incredibly difficult challenges–except there’s a good chance we won’t overcome them at all.
If we stopped for just a minute and thought about what we’re doing and re-examine our assumptions (such as “growth is good” and “money and children are happiness incarnate”), we can preempt some disaster and survive for a little longer. Plus… I mean come on, we have the ability to challenge ourselves, to artificially increase our intelligence, and have a damn good time in the process (if you were a real American you’d love a good challenge). Changing your lifestyle to reflect the More is Less philosophy is such a challenge. We’ll get stronger, avoid disaster, and have fun doing it. So what will you choose, simple-minded fool?
