“The Day the World Stops Shopping: How ending consumerism gives us a better life and a greener world” is a fascinating book (and thought experiment). Currently, it is our civic duty to buy, buy, buy. Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. However, more and more people believe that a simpler life awaits us, if not through some great awakening, then because civilisation will collapse beneath its own weight.
Market failure
The consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all of these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction. Economists refer to them as “externalities,” as they are accounted for outside the chains of supply and demand. Climate change is the ultimate externality: a cost of consumption that was left off the books until it threatened the future of civilisation. British economist Nicholas Stern dubbed it “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”
Full impact costing
If the value of the rare earth minerals found in our digital devices included the cost of the land and waterways ruined to mine them, then your phone would be made to be repaired or updated, not discarded and replaced every two years.
The journey
The book is a journey through some very interesting concepts such as hunting/gathering by the Ju|’hoansi, affluence without abundance, the simple life, the technosphere, slower-churn companie (Levis), Ecuador, one-planet living, time famine, Sunday closing, light pollution and light policy, light bombs, GDP, Finland, inequality driving consumerism, demarketing (Patagonia), materialism, ecological civilisation, bike lanes, slow flow, disaccumulation, commons, community, planned obsolescence vs building to last, socket saturation, gadgetization, sharing economy, wabi-sabi, kintsugi, Fairphone, Blade Runner, Star Wars, Renaissance Italy and the second-hand apparel market, circularity, deep economy, no-growth business, gamanzuyoi, simple comfort, sakoku, innovation, Japan, New Citizenship, Dagenham, makerspace, siesta, wealth, indulgence, Jevons paradox, sufficiency behaviour, wildlife, voluntary simplicity, anti-consumption, happiness, essential elements of the self, authenticity, cyber shopping, virtual reality, cornucopia, GVP, the ageing population, aiyosha, the nonconsumer, the world’s first post-luxury economy, deep-time, and more. It opened my eyes to some very cool concepts-
The statistics
- We spend $250 billion each year on digital gadgets, $140 billion on personal care products, $75 billion on jewellery and watches, $60 billion on household appliances, $30 billion on luggage.
- Today, pets have their own consumer goods, ranging from beds and toys to clothing and “pet tech” products—a market worth more than $16 billion in the US alone.
- The apparel trade as a whole is valued at $1.3 trillion. If Fashion Nation were an actual country, it would have the world’s fifteenth-largest economy and employ a global workforce roughly equal to the population of the United States.
- If everyone on Earth lived like the average American, we would need five Earths’ worth of resources to sustain our lifestyle.
- We are using up the planet at a rate 1.7 times faster than it can regenerate.
- According to the Global Footprint Network, humankind is now consuming an average of 2.7 global hectares per person. The average American’s ecological footprint is 8 global hectares.
- We’d need a little more than two planets if we all lived like the average Chinese, roughly two and a half if we were all Spanish, British or New Zealander; three if we lived on Planet Italy, Planet Germany or Planet Netherlands; three and a half to live like they do in Russia, Finland or Norway; and four or more to enjoy the way of life in Sweden, South Korea, Australia or Canada. And if we lived on Planet Ecuador, we would need just one Earth—the one that actually exists.
- On a typical April day, fifty-five of the one hundred most polluted cities have air quality ranging from “very unhealthy” to “hazardous” due to particle pollution.
- Spread evenly, the wealth produced by the global economy each year could pay everyone on Earth about $12,000.
- Anyone passing through the Clapham Common subway station in London will typically walk past 65 advertisements on their way from the train to the street or the street to the train. For a daily commuter, that’s 130 ads a day, 650 a working week,
- The lightbulb that has brightened the garage at Fire Department Station 6 in Livermore, California, for the past 120 years will never burn out.
- In a world in which billions of people already have enough apparel, the only way to keep them buying is to generate unnecessary demand. The way to create unnecessary demand is to accelerate fashion trends.
- European countries, such as the UK and the Netherlands, once considered room temperatures of 13 to 15 degrees normal. In the US, the standard for winter comfort rose from 18 degrees in 1923 to 24.6 degrees in 1986.
Glimmers of hope
- In 2019, New Zealand became the first country to officially drop GDP as its main measure of economic success, while Scotland and Iceland have declared that they plan to track citizens’ well-being as their principal metric.
- France has made planned obsolescence illegal.
The reward
The reward for living with less is meant to be a plenitude of leisure time. A simpler life leads to a still simpler one and a simpler one after that, until we gradually relearn how to live in such a way that, even if we discover how to make our resources infinite, we might find we don’t want to consume every last thing. Like many others, you may discover that living with less is one secret to a happier life.
