What Do You Really Need?
Is opposing consumerism lacking gratitude?
I was in Walmart yesterday, and I saw this:
It’s a regular sized drip coffee maker retailing for $12.87. That’s really cheap! How good or well made is it? Who knows—we use my parents’ retired Braun coffeemaker that has to be from the 1980s, and it still works great. And we’ll probably use it until it breaks. But part of me just wants to grab one of these…because. It’s so cheap, you almost can’t not buy it! It’s so little, in the scheme of things, it basically rounds down to zero!
And the first Friday of Lent was a good time to resist that impulse. I look through our stuff, or stuff I bought in high school or college at my parents’ house, and some of it I like, but some I go why did I want that? The trick is to ask that before you buy it.
At one time, I would have thought this was just an argument against consumerism. But it’s more than that. I remember getting into an argument with a libertarian once about all this stuff: consumerism, product quality, planned obsolescence. I basically said, we’re laboring under this surfeit of cheaply made junk, and our stuff is probably too cheap and too plentiful. Maybe a little touch of privation would give us more gratitude and respect for our stuff.
And he replied, one, that it was difficult to make that judgment about any particular purchase by any particular person. But also that maybe I was the one lacking in gratitude or perspective. A coffee maker for 12 bucks, or whatever other cheap stuff is available in every big-box store or one click away on Amazon, is a marvel of engineering, logistics, trade—which is to say, a marvel of human ingenuity. In acting like this unprecedented abundance is a problem, we aren’t just taking it for granted. We don’t know what we’re asking for. I.e., be careful what you wish for. That doesn’t mean you need to buy lots of stuff you don’t need. It means you only have the right to make that judgment for yourself.
I do think too much stuff is a problem. But it is difficult to translate that into any sort of public policy. It’s probably better to think of it this way: a little bit of self-denial, in Lent or any time, is not about making yourself miserable. It’s a way to un-numb your sense of gratitude, to not take for granted everything we enjoy at the tip of our fingers. Consuming doesn’t make us happy; a sense of appreciation and contentment make us happy. And if you never take a break or a pause, you can lose those feelings. There’s a little bit of truth in the thing Calvin’s dad from Calvin and Hobbes says: doing something you don’t like builds character.
On the other hand, though, it’s strange that we can live and eat and consume like kings from centuries ago could never even imagine, and yet so many things that really matter are very expensive or out of reach. Healthcare. Housing. College. Marriage. Friendship. Containerized shipping and free trade and the computer revolution haven’t made the things that matter most more in reach.