Can we afford ‘the good life’?

During work on her recent ABC TV series Stuff about humanity’s love affair with material objects, Wendy Harmer interviewed a family who had lost everything in a bushfire.

It put a lot of things in perspective. Having no choice but to give up everything they owned, they were now pickier about what items they would bring into their lives as they began rebuilding.

“One thing they were really regretful about was that they’d been keeping all this crockery and cutlery for a special occasion and then the house burnt down and they never got to use it,” Harmer told Insights.

“So that is what I did, I went and liberated the contents of my crystal cabinet. So now I use my precious stuff everyday.”

A self confessed “chucker” who moved around a lot in her early years, Wendy Harmer is not a “stuff person” and carries most of what is important to her around in her head.

Even though she has accumulated less than the average person, she still looked around after completing the series and realised that she probably never needed to go shopping again.

“Having been a journalist for a long time and a stand-up comedian, I’ve become a trained observer. What I wanted to say with the series is, ‘Look what you are doing when you’re buying this stuff; look what is going on’.

“That is often what I’ve done; to stand back and just tell people what they are up to because modern life can be so fast that people can easily sleep walk through it without any idea.”

She was careful not to suggest that objects are in themselves bad or unnatural.

In fact, she hopes to draw attention to the long history of positive effects objects have had in our lives; building relationships, linking people to their pasts and communicating who they are.

During the series, Buddhists, prisoners, a woman in an iron lung, environmentalists, economists, retirees and growing families reflect on what they’ve accumulated and what it means to them.

Some, including her father, have trouble moving things on because they believe one day, these things might come in handy.

But for others purchasing can become a more of an addiction.

Ross Gittins, economics columnist and author of Gittinomics: Living the Good Life Without Money Stress, Overwork and Joyless Consumption, has used his book to chronicle this addiction, taking a “bottom up” view of economics that prioritises people, how they use money and what they use it for.

He says we are out of balance — doing less of what we find satisfying partially because we don’t know what we want, or what is good for us, but also because personally satisfying activities don’t usually yield a profit or carry a deadline.

Gittins and Harmer are two voices trying to bring economics back to the people and wrestling the topic away from being the sole domain of economists; hoping that if people understand why they feel the compulsion to buy they may have a better chance at resisting the urge.

“We all know that the earth can’t sustain our levels of consumer habits but what’s the best way to educate people?” said Harmer.

“Yelling at them isn’t going to help. Calling them greedy and selfish and show off is not going to help. I don’t think we can curb our desire for stuff unless we understand it in the first place.”

Over-consuming

Perhaps the strongest evidence that we’ve gone too far with materialism is how much people stand out when they decide not to conform.

“We know all about over-consumption but I think we still look at people who turn their back on it and go, ‘Wow. That is really, really strange and odd,’” said Harmer.

Gittins puts it another way in Gittinomics: “One assumption of economics so basic it’s rarely mentioned is: more is better. It’s an understandable mistake. But in our ever-more-frantic world, the beginning of wisdom is to understand that less is sometimes more.”

The way economics has evolved from a method of helping people maximise their satisfaction and happiness into the mindless pursuit of consumption, worries him.

He believes consumerism has become the “supreme objective of our lives”.

“Our devotion to consumption is so great at present that households’ spending exceeds their income — our saving is negative.”

While materialism is nothing new and we are all materialists to some extent, Gittins says we are living through a heightened period of materialism where “politicians stress the primacy of economic growth above all things, economists are on top in the world of policy advice and business people are particularly aggressive and convinced of their moral authority.”

It’s an “Age of Materialism” and, far from being victims in the ordeal, it is partially our own fault.

“I’ve no doubt that, had most workers preferred shorter hours to higher real wages — greater buying power — that’s the way we would’ve gone,” Gittins says.

“We opted for the money, not the leisure. Why? Because — with a fair bit of help from all the advertising and marketing to which we’re subjected — we’ve acquired an addiction to material goods. Much of this involves the self-defeating struggle to achieve social status — or at least avoid losing it — through our conspicuous consumption.”

How much is enough?

Ross Gittins says the bench mark for most is financial comfort — having a bit more income than fits our needs.

“Since Australians’ real income per person has risen by more than half in the past 20 years, you’d expect most of us would finally have attained that goal,” he says.

“According to opinion polls, however, almost two-thirds of Australians believe that they can’t afford to buy everything they really need.”

This, he says, is because people are convinced that money is for buying and because they have ever-expanding wish lists of things they would purchase if only they had the money.

“The first half of the noughties will be remembered as the time when Australians finally gave up the practice of saving. But I have a feeling it won’t be a milestone we’ll look back on with any joy.

“Consider this. In 1975, the nation’s households saved 16 per cent of their after-tax income. Today, they’re saving minus three per cent.”

Self discipline has become difficult in the era of credit cards, where finances are transferable by the press of a button and removed from the physical notes we’ve painfully peel off in the past.

“The fundamental problem with increased consumption, of course, is the speed with which humans adapt to their improved circumstances, which means the buzz we get from acquiring something never lasts as long as we expect it to — a lesson many of us never learn.”

Can money buy happiness?

Gittins believes that it does — but with ever-decreasing effectiveness. He says that material comfort can have a positive effect on people’s lives but it is not the strongest factor.

He cites Professor Bob Cummins from Deakin University’s study on the subject, which shows that people in the lowest income group (under $15,000 a year in household income) had an average satisfaction level of 72 per cent, whereas those in the highest group (more than $150,000 a year) had a level of 79 per cent.

“There’s an undeniable gradient, but it is remarkably gentle. As soon as incomes rise, it takes progressively bigger increases to ‘buy’ an extra percentage point of satisfaction.”

He says that is because yesterday’s luxuries quickly become today’s necessities.

“Most of us remain convinced that a ‘little more money’ would make us happier — even if it never has before.”

University of Colorado psychology professor Dr Leaf Van Boven and Professor Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University have shown that not all purchases are unsatisfactory.

One trend in particular stands out: people are more likely to gain satisfaction through buying services than goods and experiential purchases are more satisfying than material purchases.

Material objects may last longer, but experiential purchases are open to later reflection and reinterpretation.

Even things that seemed bad at the time can look amusing or important on reflection. They develop our identities. They also aid social interaction with others — objects make for dull conversation topics.

“The point is not that (material goods) are necessarily bad for us or that we should give them up entirely,” says Gittins.

“It’s that they yield only the briefest surge of good feeling. Every wealthy nation produces more and more of these short cuts, forms of instant pleasure that require a minimum of effort on our part. And that is what’s wrong with them: they’re too easy.

“They are passive rather than active. We seem to have been built in such a way that things requiring more effort yield more satisfaction. It’s the old story: you get out what you put in.”

False promise

Gittins believes the urge to spend more on larger houses, another or a better car, air conditioning, to have less children but to spend more on them, to focus on what we can’t afford rather than what we have afforded is due to a faulty definition of the necessities of life.

“If the truth is that we’re pouring much of our extra income into stuff we don’t really need and oftentimes doesn’t do us any good, how come we usually see the process so differently?

“Because we’re hooked on the false promise of materialism: the next dollar we spend will be the one that finally makes us happy.”

This false promise is also dangerous because it leads us to sacrifice the activities that do lead to wellbeing.

People can’t afford as much leisure time because they have to work to buy more things they think they need. Or, put more simply: we trade our free time for a higher material living standard.

“The moral of this story is not that we should all take a vow of poverty. Rather, we should stop complaining and acknowledge the price we’ve chosen to pay to be the proud owners of an ever-increasing quantity of ‘stuff’ — or, if we are genuinely unhappy with the present balance of our lives, we should take steps within our power to calm things down a bit.”

Gittins recommends more investment in things that do make us happy: simple pleasures, more time with the kids, close relationships with others, activities that aid self development, working in a job we like no matter what the pay and contributing to something greater than ourselves.

He thinks we should voluntarily lag behind in the status race and question whether the next promotion offered is actually a good thing.

It’s a principle that can also be applied to the item being considered on a shelf. Is it a good thing? What will it really be used for?

“Stuff holds memories, we use it to share, we use it to make relationships,” said Wendy Harmer.

“It is absolutely within us, intrinsic. We are people who have things and anyone who comes along and says that it is a habit that can be unlearned quickly doesn’t really understand human beings.

“People can change by learning to love the things they have, learning to invest the things that they have with meaning and memory — loving their things.”

Lyndal Irons