Juliet Schor Learning Diderot's Lesson: Stopping the Upward Creep of Desire In the eighteenth century, the French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote an essay entitled "Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown." Diderot's regrets were prompted by a gift of a beautiful scarlet dressing gown. Delighted with his new acquisition, Diderot quickly discarded his old gown. But in a short time, his pleasure turned sour as he began to sense that the surroundings within which the gown was worn did not properly reflect the garment's elegance. He grew dissatisfied with his study, with its threadbare tapestry, the desk, his chairs, and even the room's bookshelves. One by one, the familiar but well-worn furnishings of the study were replaced. In the end, Diderot found himself seated uncomfortably in the stylish formality of his new surroundings, regretting the work of this "imperious scarlet robe [that] forced everything else to conform with its own elegant tone." Today consumer researchers call such striving for conformity the "Diderot effect." And, while Diderot effects can be constraining (some people foresee the problem and @efuse the initial upgrading), in a world of growing income the pressures to enter and follow the cycle are overwhelming. The purchase of a new home is the impetus for replacing old furniture; a new jacket makes little sense without the right skirt to match; an upgrade in china can't really be enjoyed without a corresponding upgrade in glassware. This need for unity and conformity in our lifestyle choices is part of what keeps the consumer escalator moving ever upward. And escalator is the operative metaphor: when the acquisition of each item on a wish list adds another item, and more, to our "must-have" list, the pressure to upgrade our stock of stuff is relentlessly unidirectional, always ascending. To avoid the pitfalls of Diderot, and the new consumerism more generally, requires a new consumer consciousness and behavior. In this chapter, I outline nine principles to help individuals, and the nation, get off the consumer escalator. They are intended as remedies to the problems I have discussed throughout the book: too little saving, a harried lifestyle, a deteriorating environment, the growth of competitive spending, and a lack of consumer control. I anchor my principles in the values of social equity and solidarity, environmental sustainability, financial security, and the need for more family and free time. Principle 1: Controlling Desire The,first step in avoiding the Diderot effect is to become conscious of the process and the insidious ways it ensnares us. The second step is to rein in desire. Simple livers do it by creating more time and mental space in their lives, by simplifying and concentrating on what really matters to them. Religious leaders, knowing the weakness of the human will in resisting ever-present temptation, advise us to avoid "occasions of sin." Downshifters stay away from malls and upscale shops, knowing that such exposure inevitably creates desire. They stop reading catalogs that come in the mail, chucking them directly into the recycle bin; consciously do less socializing with their shopaholic friends; and learn generally to recognize those first consumption stirrings so as to cut them off before they gain a full head of steam. Another strategy is to emphasize product durability rather than novelty. If the things you buy last long enough for you to become emotionally attached to it will be easier to avoid buying new things. To succeed at this, you need to search for products that will continue to serve you well, both because they will not go out of fashion and because they are physically durable. Are the manufacturers stable in case repairs are necessary? Is the fabric long-lasting? Will it age well as you age, becoming over time a comfortable and comforting friend, like Diderot's well-worn furnishings? Similarly, it is important to think through the long-term consequences of all significant purchases. If you buy the digital tape deck, will you be led into replacing your tape library with new versions that more fully exploit the capabilities of the new system? If you upgrade the computer, how much of your old software will be usable? If you buy your child a starter set for a Brio train, are you willing to pay for all those expensive add-on pieces? If you start a new sport, ask yourself how much you'll eventually pay out for equipment, lessons, and fees. (And why has it become so imperative to take expensive lessons when picking up a new sport? Maybe a program of relaxation might improve your tennis game more than paying for time with the club pro.) Doing without a contemplated purchase for a certain time may be a good test of whether in fact you need it. Will you really be different from almost everyone else and use that exercise machine for more than the first few months? Martha Evans, a former accountant, describes her own version of the consumer escalator. "There was a point where I was making a little more money at work, and I was very excited that it was coming. And then it came, and I could hear myself doing this mental tick-tick-tick: I can get this, this, this, and this, this, this. I'm sure it had to do with clothing, with maybe a trip, probably with some household improvements. I really need a kitchen, luxury things that I didn't have." But before too long, Martha learned to control these thoughts. "I would go through a mental exercise where I would say, 'I simply have to stop,wanting this, because I know that if I get this, that that's not going to be the end of it.' I could tell where I was getting carried away wanting things, and there was not going to be any end to this wanting." Principle 2: Creating a New Consumer Symbolism: Making Exclusivity Uncool Integral to the upward creep is the upscale itself. The new consumerism has taught affluent Americans to covet, and then, buy, the Jil Sander suit, the Stickley chair, the SubZero fridge, and the Coach briefcase (with a Montblanc and Filofax to go inside). When they display these products, they project taste, individuality, and exclusivity. But isn't it odd that we must have the things certain others have to establish our credentials as a distinctive person-to avoid being seen as just like everybody else? Some consumer symbols have become fair game for public scrutiny. Politicians and the media have attacked heroin chic and the anorexic images prevalent in fashion photography. But the symbolism of exclusivity and luxury is still off-limits. No one challenges the New York Times for devoting its second page to ads for extraordinarily expensive items affordable to only the top few percent of society. There is as yet no social stigma associated with owning or displaying exclusive products. Indeed, it is rarely even noticed that companies advertise these commodities to a mass consumer audience, large numbers of whom cannot afford them and will go into debt, sacrifice everyday needs, or turn to crime in order to obtain them. When we stop to think about-it, what message are we sending here? That being middle-class isn't good enough? That it's okay to wreck -your personal or family finances to confirm your social acceptability? That if you are a low-wage earner, you are condemned to a life of inadequacy? What if public attitudes to status consumption started changing, so that people saw as tacky attempts to buy their way into a personal image of exclusivity? What if a pattern of upscale purchasing became not something to aspire to but something "uncool" in its inegalitarianism? What if wearing the $2,500 Jil Sander suit was no longer looked upon as power dressing but as overkill? What if, when we looked at a pair of Air Jordans, we thought, not of a magnificent basketball player, but of the company's deliberate strategy to hook poor inner-city kids into an expensive fashion cycle? What if more people began thinking like Jennifer Lawson's son, who thinks new clothing is socially ostentatious? Awareness is the first step in breaking down these associations and immunizing ourselves against symbolic spending triggers. As marketers know full well, these symbols are powerful precisely because they reside partly in the realm of the unconscious. The see-want-borrow-and-buy sequence often does not survive the bright light of day. Denial also helps us live with our ambivalent (sometimes guilty) feelings about consuming exclusively or striving for distinction. If there's something you really want but don't actually need, there's a good chance that a recurring symbolic fantasy is attached to it. A faster computer? The dream of getting more work done. A remodeled kitchen? The hope of eating proper family dinners. A luxury car? Making VP. Laying bare the fantasy illuminates the often tenuous link between the product and the dream, thereby reducing the power of the object. When identity and consumption are linked, getting too deliberate spoils the symbolism. After doing the cosmetics research, I found myself unable to buy designer-brand cosmetics, not only because I knew I was wasting my money but also because it made me feel foolish. Not that these symbolic meanings are easy to break down. They are woven deeply into the fabric of our everyday lives. We have profound, if often unrecognized, emotional connections to commodities. On the other hand, Americans will not gain control over their spending habits until they begin to confront that symbolism head on. As the number of prestigious products grows, the financial pressures on people increase. Less and less of what we have remains mere background-things valued for their function, for what having them to use adds to our daily lives, rather than for what they convey about us as quality human beings. The classic pantheon of house, car, and wardrobe has been joined by all manner of new status symbols: stoves come in restaurant quality to signal the requisite level of commitment to good cooking (for the really upscale, there's the $10,000+ Aga, the model favored by the queen of England); wooden swing sets become an aesthetic (class) item that status-conscious association trustees are ready to go to court over; water (once a free, abundantly available noncommodity) has become classed into brand names, with a select few becoming status symbols; and a recent ad suggests that if no one has mentioned the distinctiveness of your garage door lately, it's time to have it redone. It is only by becoming aware of the thousand and one little ways that consumption is coi-inected to distinction and status that we can begin to break down those barriers and consume in less socially exclusive (and expensive) ways. Principle 3: Controlling Ourselves:Voluntary Restraints on Competitive Consumption Imagine the following. A community group in your town organizes parents to sign a pledge agreeing to spend no more than $50 on athletic shoes for their children. The staff at your child's day-care center requests a $75 limit on spending for birthday parties. The local school board rallies community support behind a switch to school uniforms. The PTA gets 8o percent of parents to agree to limit their children's television watching to no more than one hour per day. Do you wish someone in your community or at your children's school would take the lead in these or similar efforts? I think millions of American parents do. Television, shoes, clothes, birthday parties, athletic uniforms-these are areas where many parents feel pressured into allowing their children to consume at a level beyond what they think is best, want to spend, or can comfortably afford. In contrast to the fashionable ideology that a "free market" is the best response to society's needs because it allows the freest expression of the public will, in these examples the self-control of a group of people leads to a better outcome for everyone. Voluntary restrictions on individual liberty can make sense. Giving up your right to spend $100 on athletic shoes may make you-and your child-better off. The foregoing examples are the obvious, and easy, ones, in part because they involve adult spending on children. But if the argument of this book is correct-that America suffers from too much competitive consumption-there should be plenty of other areas where collective restrictions would work. What about adults spending on themselves? Situations in which people spend together come readily to mind. Everyone agrees that it's reasonable to put limits on the office Christmas gift exchange. Why not do the same for holiday spending within families? While some families already explicitly set limits, many do not but would appreciate the chance to reduce the value of both what they spend and receive. Voluntary agreements to limit the amounts spent almost certainly make people better off on other occasions as well: weddings, birthdays, baby showers. So too with various types of clubs. How many book club members would prefer to put new hardbacks off-limits and confine their choices to paperbacks? Isn't it better when a wine-tasting group operates with spending guidelines? Other areas of social spending are also ripe for collective restraints. Do you have a group of friends with whom you regularly get together? What about keeping expenditures for an evening below a certain level? Try second- rather than first-run movies, or patronizing only restaurants where the entr6es are below a certain price. Sometimes these customs evolve natura ' Ily, particularly when only a few people are involved and they know each other's financial situations. But at other times, restraint falls and spending can gradually escalate. It can be embarrassing to raise the issue; we fear we may be signaling that we are petty, cheap, or in an inferior economic position. If it were customary to be explicit about spending limits, the pressure on the individual would be lifted. Frugality could become a socially acceptable consideration. The most difficult type of situation arises when private spending supports a previously developed social need for the product. I would prefer not to get a cell phone, an answering machine, or a homebased fax. But as these products become universal, I can be seen as refusing to contribute my share to the new scheme of things if I resist adding them to my own stock of stuff. I believe there are now many middle-class Americans who would welcome a deceleration or even a decline in the consumption standards of their reference groups. They don't want to give up their friends. They don't want to risk being seen as not "one of us." But they would like more financial leeway. Would you prefer that your associates not replace their cars too frequently? Or that your friends not remodel their kitchens, so you don't become ashamed of your own? Would you like to travel in circles in which it is normal not to have a house with a downstairs bathroom for guests? Do you wish that your neighbors dressed their children in hand-me-downs or with patches on the knees of their jeans? Do you wish you didn't feel like your child needs the latest computer software at home? In these kinds of examples cell phones, clothing standards, kitchen remodeling-explicit collective agreements are less workable. But more subtle shifts in the culture of consumption can achieve similar results. Steering the dinner party conversation around to these questions might get your friends thinking. Devoting your annual Christmas letter to issues of "stabilizing" consumption might start a conversation among your correspondents. Organizing a clothing swap among your friends is a perfect opportunity for an initial discussion about spending on clothes. Getting the PTA to organize forums about lifestyles and values allows the community to work through the issues together. In the past, collective limitations on spending were much more powerful. In traditional societies, various spending taboos and invocations of the "evil eye" restrained competitive consumption. In Europe and North America, dress, housing, and other types of consumption have been restricted. And throughout history, religious ideology has served as an additional brake: nearly all the world's religions have stressed the sacredness of simplicity and moderation. Coveting our neighbor's belongings was so important a no-no that it qualified as one of the Ten Commandments; when in the movie Wall Street the antagonist announces that "greed is good," he is talking about one of the seven deadly sins. But by the early twentieth century, these restraints had been largely lifted. The notion of sufficiency, which long had regulated consumption, was discarded in the face of the promise of mass prosperity. Spending, even spending to excess, was extolled as good for the ego, if not for the soul. Consumerism became the new, therapeutic belief system. Religious, folk, and legal impediments to consumption declined markedly. Most insidious of all, aggressive spending was made patriotic. It spread the wealth, we were told, creating 'obs for the unemployed as well as profits for American industry. The movies contributed to the shift in values. An inclination to spend too much was cast as an attractive trait. If it was a fault, it was the fault of an open, honest, generous person; frugality was portrayed as the proclivity of a small, pinched personality. The result, at the century's end, is that almost half the population of the world's richest country say that they have just enough income to get by. The hallmark of the kinds of controls I have been talking about is that they are mainly voluntary. If people don't welcome them, they won't work. They also need to be instituted collectively. While individuals can buck the system, few of us are so inclined. Because consuming is a social act, so too is consuming differently. This is one lesson we can learn from the Pacific Northwest, where simple living is going mainstream. Feeling like a part of a trend is a lot more comfortable than being an oddball. The social support possible in places like Seattle makes a world of difference. While the Northwest may have a culture and history more conducive to downshifting than, say, the culture of New York City, the initiatives I am suggesting are possible anywhere. Within the space of a few short years, millions of Americans joined a movement to turn off their televisions for a week in April. Pledging to limit purchases of athletic shoes, or Christmas gift giving, or birthday party competitions is equally possible. Principle 4: Learning to Share: Both a Borrower and a Lender Be The latest trend in lawn mowers is big and expensive-the riding mower. Here the dynamics are pretty clear. You saw your neighbor roll out his last summer. He first got the idea from his cousin, who was crowing about it. Of course, you really need the riding mower. You wouldn't have bought it otherwise, right? The question is " do you really need it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week? Or could you be satisfied just having it when you want to mow? Instead of joining the stampede for expensive riding mowers, what if you and a dozen of the families on the street got together and bought a couple of mowers for everyone's use? Call it a product "library." Set up on the model of the public library, it gives people the functional benefits of products without having to purchase them privately. How about a toy exchange? Your children could get the variety in toys they need, and you wouldn't have to be continually buying new ones. Or an athletic equipment library: you could try out cross-country skiing for a season before investing in your own skis. Lending libraries make sense for products that are not in use all the time (mowers, snow blowers, boats, athletic equipment) and for relatively inexpensive products that may be of limited usefulness to the individual but do not wear out quickly (books, toys, videos, CDs, clothes). The specifics of the library would vary with the product. With expensive items like mowers, a common fund would purchase the products. Members of the program would be responsible for keeping the mower in good shape and returnIng it on time (or be fined). Reservations could be required for popular times. Mowers could be kept in private garages, to make access easy. For smaller products, like toys, donations may be sufficient to get the program going. Why not just rely on rentals or secondhand shops for these products? For some products, rental and secondhand markets do work. But for others, a lending library approach is better. Because people pay into the common fund and are part owners, they take better care of the products. This is especially important for expensive equipment, such as mowers, snow blowers, boats, and some athletic equipment. Plus, there's the added savings of forgoing the rental chain's profit. For inexpensive products such as toys or CDs, an exchange (housed for convenience at the local library, the town hall,or another public building) allows frequent trading, avoids the cumbersome steps of selling and buying, and allows you to use popular items again and again. The fact that such initiatives have been very limited suggests they need a jump-start. Public libraries, which have already branched out into videos and CDs, might begin by extending the repertoire of products they provide. Local governments could provide technical assistance for neighborhood groups to get going. In low-income communities, government monies could justifiably be used for the initial purchase of some products. Would lending libraries for products other than books actually work? They would naturally be susceptible to the tensions that can come with cooperative efforts, such as squabbling and freeloading. Moreover, Americans tend to be highly possessive, preferring to own above all else. But the success of libraries suggests that this mentality does not extend to all commodities and that cooperative efforts can succeed. Lending libraries would help people save money, use fewer environmental resources, and free up closet and garage space. They may also increase neighborliness-sharing a mower with your neighbors is likely to lead to other kinds of social interaction. They're at least worth a try. Principle 5: Deconstruct the Commercial System: Becoming an Educated Consumer The next time you watch TV, try an experiment. Instead of zapping the commercials, or watching them mindlessly, try to deconstruct them. Watch the jeep drive out to the edge of the Grand Canyon. What do you see? A chance to get closer to nature? Freedom and individuality? Or a gas-guzzling commodity that fills the air with smog, helps turn wilderness into cement, and is a leading cause of accidental death? As the Swoosh swooshes by, consider whether Nike really stands for women's power, independence, and hipness, as it wants us to believe. Or is the $2 million a day it spends promoting women in sports a sham in light of the $1.6o a day it gives its female Vietnamese workers? As you look closely at the ad, ask yourself whether you really want to join a fashion trend that hooks lower-income youth into products that their parents cannot possibly afford. Or would you rather join an international community of people who are urging us to "Just Do It"-"It" being a boycott of Nike? When De Beers's diamond ads come on, with the beautiful musical backdrop of violins, think hard about what the imperative of a "carat or more" ("so rare it will be worn by fewer than i percent of women") really means. If you, along with the rest of the 99 percent, haven't yet received one from your spouse, are you really unloved? And if you do wear that dazzling rock, how is it making your friends feel? Once you've learned to "read" a commercial, to anesthetize yourself to its subtle messages, move on to other aspects of the commercial system. Investigate the commodities that you buy and use. Learn what they didn't teach you in school. And figure out what you did learn. Even in the days before schools became adjunct marketing arms of corporations (with Channel One and force-feeding of commercials, educational materials produced by corporations, and school buses covered with ads), students were absorbing an apparently upscale consumer attitude. Indeed, one of the ironic results of our educational system is that the people with the highest degrees are the most susceptible to paying extra for designer names, status, and restige. As chapter 4 detailed, they shop more, are more influenced by their reference groups, and feel more pressure to keep up. Perhaps that's because school has taught us more about how to want things than about how to choose wisely. But what if that started to change? What if we became interested in new kinds of consumer education, learning about a product's "total package" and not just the price and the fancy features? To become good consumers, we need to know more about how products are produced and what tax the manufacturing process levies on the planet, as well as about the health, safety, and environmental impacts of a product and its true long-term costs. We need to get beyond the seductive but superficial appearance of the commodities on the airwaves and the shelves. Americans love the Gap. We load up on Gap jeans, pocket-Ts, and accessories and aspire to the Gap look. In many circles, BabyGap gets as many oohs and aahs at a shower as frilly embroidered dresses did in in earlier era. Even that bastion of conservative dress, the New York Stock Exchange, donned khakis for its first-ever casual Friday. How many of us stop to consider, before buying these fashionable products, where and how they are made? We prefer not to think about the fact that they are produced by women (and even children) slaving away for nearly nothing in sweatshops where unions are often outlawed and workplace control is Draconian. The Nike employees who make the products we just "have to have" cannot even properly feed themselves,, much less buy the shoes they produce. The globalization of the world economy has produced, in industry after industry, a proliferation of low-wage sweatshops, far out of view of the final consumer. Clothes, shoes, toys, knickknacks, furniture-you name it, sweatshops are fueling our consumer boom. These issues have attracted some public attention, and some companies are making efforts to police conditions in the sweatshops with which they contract. They are more interested in PR, however, than lasting change. The companies' rationalization that, no matter how low the wages the workers are better off than they would be having no job at all, is just not the point. What the employees need, and deserve, is a job and a paycheck that supports them. Companies and consumers alike need to wean themselves off low wages and cheap production costs. The ways in which consumption degrades the environment is another area we need to educate ourselves about. Americans know very little about the ecological impacts of their lifestyles beyond the obvious (cars are bad, recycling is good, excessive packaging is bad). We are oblivious to some of our most damaging consumer habits: air conditioning, jet travel, meat, household toxins, and the sheer volume of resources consumed each day (120 pounds). We are unaware that even seemingly innocuous products like coffee (new growing methods are reducing species diversity) and hamburgers (cattle grazing is causing desertification, and pesticides for corn feed are damaging human reproductive systems) have significant impacts. A necessary first step toward becoming an educated consumer is to learn about the impact your consumption has on the environment. Only then can you make responsible and informed choices. To become educated, you cannot rely solely on the information that manufacturers provide. As I am writing this, a jury has found Dow Corning guilty of withholding information about the adverse health effects of breast implants. The tobacco and asbestos companies have done the same thing. In other industries (chemical, pharmaceutical, bioengineering, agribusiness, furniture and automobiles, to name only a few), health and safety studies are sometimes faulty, incomplete, or nonexistent. With the exception of a few federally mandated measures (gas mileage, energy use information on appliances), environmental impacts are rarely revealed to the consumer. Companies do not want to uncover or publicize negative information about the products they sell. How can consumers get the facts without time-consuming searches through literature that is often too technical for the layperson? Historically, consumers have become informed by creating consumer organizations and movements. By banding together and putting public pressure on manufacturers and retailers, consumer organizations help protect people from dangerous products, unscrupulous selling practices, and insufficient information. But the few familiar examples (Ralph Nader's fight for auto safety in the 196os, Consumers Union's Consumer Reports) point up how rare independent consumer organizations are today. Most of the product information we have is sponsored indirectly by the manufacturers, through magazines that review products (autos, computers, home furnishings, fashion) but are supported by industry ad revenues. Americans also need to learn how not to spend-how to budget, plan their finances, be patient, and save. Most American households don't have a family budget, and those who do tend not to follow them. The saving ethic has become so alien that many of us think of it in terms only of paying less than full price-as getting a good deal." Financial management is neglected by the U.S. education system. My Dutch students were shocked to find that their American counterparts are not taught in school how to save. While we've got the energy for a raging controversy about sex education, we have paid almost no attention to the ignorance of our youth when it comes to practicing "safe spending." All schools should offer a basic course in money and spending. In addition to straightforward material such as the economics of compound interest and how to evaluate the longterm consequences of different savings patterns, young people also need to be taught about basic monthly expenses, how to make and stick to a budget, how to calculate what it takes to rent an apartment, and the true costs of owning a car. They need to learn long-term planning, how to prepare for education expenses, homeownership, and the costs of raising children. They need to be exposed to basic facts about the finances of retirement, life insurance, and disability. We must also teach our kids to be savvy consumers, forewarning them especially about the risks of credit cards. They must know that when they buy on credit, they may end up paying two, three, or four times the sticker price. They need to be able to figure out, in the store, how much more. Other important lessons include learning to arm themselves against the temptations of easy money, delaying gratification, and-because young people have been shown to be particularly vulnerable to the pitches of ad men-deconstructing the powerful symbolism that the commercial culture throws at them every day. For the generations of adults who missed this course, remedial education is in order. Many of us, and especially women, entered adulthood knowing little or nothing about the value of money or how to manage it. We failed to realize that our understanding about how and when to use money can make or break our lives. We need to become conscious of the financial costs of the work-and-spend lifestyle: job-related expenses, beyond the obvious costs of child care and transportation; of the ways in which time and money substitute for each other; and of how stress and exhaustion almost inevitably lead to spending pressures. Principle 6: Avoid "Retail Therapy": Spending Is Addictive Millions of Americans use consuming as a way to fight the blues, to savor a happy moment, to reward themselves, to enhance selfesteem, or to escape from boredom. Indeed, consumerism is so pervasive that "retail therapy" is a response to 'ust about any mood state or psychological problem. But it carries considerable risk. As with consumption of drugs, alcohol, and food, millions of Americans are experiencing spending control problems. Some have developed a psychological disorder called "compulsive buying tendency." While reports of onlomania, or buying mania, can be found in psychiatric texts in the early part of the century, experts believe its prevalence has increased markedly in recent years, although no hard numbers exist. Conforming to the stereotype, the paradigmatic case of compulsive buying tendency is a thirty-six-year-old educated woman whose problem developed in her late teens. (Not a likely reader of this book, by the way, because books are at the bottom of the acquisition chain, and even if she bought it, she probably wouldn't read it: it's the act of acquiring that matters.) Compulsives prefer clothes, and after clothes, shoes, jewelry, and makeup-classic appearanceor identity-related items. By the time the typical sufferer comes in for help, she is using half her household income to pay the bills and a variety of,severe personal problems have surfaced. No one knows exactly how many Americans suffer from compulsive buying tendency. Ronald Faber of the University of Minnesota classified between 1.8 percent and 6 percent of his sample (or up to fifteen million) as suffering or at serious risk. Using the same test on a group of mostly college students in Arizona, Allison Magee estimated 15-16 percent. (We know the tendency is greater among youth.) On the other hand, clinically defined compulsives may not be fundamentally different from "normal" consumers. They're just the extreme cases. Millions of ordinary people also exhibit high "generalized urges to buy." Indeed, an innocuous form of compulsive buying appears to afflict one-quarter of us. This should probably come as no surprise in a country where 41 percent of the population age 22-61 (and nearly half of all young adults) say that shopping makes me feel good." The downshifter Patty Fuller fit the innocuous buyer profile. Because her buying was well within the limits of her substantial income, she never faced financial difficulties. "I used to go mall shopping," she says. "My husband called it 'medicinal spending.' It used to take up a lot of my time. Everybody knew I was a shopaholic. It was the joke, when Patty comes to visit, you take her shopping. I loved it. It was my hobby." Like the clinical cases, Patty could lose interest in what she bought. Sometimes she'd buy clothes she never wore. Or I'd wear them once. I gave a lot of stuff away to friends, just take it, take it. And I'd buy gifts for relatives and friends." Eventually the combination of overwork and shopping led her to a radical change of lifestyle. "I don't go into malls anymore." And she doesn't give Christmas gifts. "Because it just doesn't feel right anymore. When you sit down and think about the meaning of life, it's 'ust not mainstream America, it's not what we purport in this country." How to avoid even the appearance of a problem? First, analyze your personal habits. People who score high on the compulsive spending scale also score high on the see-want-borrow-and-buy sequence. They are more oriented to fantasy and daydreaming. They are more materialist. And they tend to believe that consuming is a mark of social status. Figure out what kind of consumer you are. Second, avoid excessive exposure to tempting situations. New York, the nation's fashion capital, is known as a breeding ground for compulsive buyers. (Of course, with the country turning into one enormous shopping'arcade, open twenty-four hours a day, avoidance is getting harder.) Finally, avoid impulse buying. It"s a common habit, and not just for potato chips and Twinkies. Try locking up the plastic for six months and use only cash so that the costs of purchases will seem real. Don't use cards over the phone or on the Internet; send a check instead. If you desperately want something, force yourself to sleep on it for a night, or, if it's a major item, a week. Buy only from lists thoughtfully constructed before going to stores. Make yourself wait for things so that you appreciate them. Participate in Buy'Nothing Day, the annual day-after-Thanksgiving ritual of zero shopping that is fast becoming an international movement. Take the money you would have spent and put it in the bank. Or better yet, commit yourself to an automatic withdrawal savings plan-the method that, for most people, is the only way to ensure that saving actually happens. Then make sure your best friend has done the same. Of course, the vast majority of us are not in danger of becoming compulsive consumers with a stash of cubic zirconia necklaces in the basement. (Television shopping is a magnet for problem overconsumers.) Nor are we likely to receive, as Patty Fuller did, a cautionary newspaper clipping from her mother-in-law with the headline "Woman Loses Husband While Shopping in the Mall." But we can all learn from the experiences of compulsive buyers. Spending can be addictive. It can absorb your consciousness, become a substitute for other activities, and start to take over your life. Principle 7: Decommercialize the Rituals Even for the most determined among us, holidays and life rituals represent a formidable challenge to frugality. In an era when bar and bat mitzvahs cost as much as weddings, and weddings require practically a trust fund to manage, control can seem out of reach. Even families who want something simple and shun ostentation find themselves almost inexplicably shelling out thousands, or tens of thousands. There's a built-in upward creep to the process that catering managers put'to work for themselves. Large numbers of Americans express support for downscaling and decommercializing our ritual celebrations. A recent poll conducted by the Center for a New American Dream found that 39 percent of Americans would "welcome lower holiday spending and less emphasis on gift giving a lot. " But many find it hard to do on an individual basis. When John and Louise Mattson tried to limit their family's Christmas giving, john's stressed-out sister resisted, despite the fact that the overtime she worked to buy her gifts was making her sick. Arguments ensued, and in the end John and Louise dropped the idea and went along, against their better 'udgment. Like many, the Mattsons feel that Christmas has become unacceptably commercialized, an orgy of shopping and spending. Even Halloween, once a simple holiday, now gobbles up $2.5 billion in soft drink, candy, costume, decoration, and beer spending. Many Americans yearn for holidays that feel authentic and true to earlier, noncommercial traditions. But what they, and many Americans, don't realize is the extent to which many of our most cherished holiday traditions have been commercialized for quite some time. And therein lies much of the difficulty of creating another way. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was invented by an ad man for Montgomery Ward. Even Thanksgiving, arguably our most authentic holiday, was moved a week earlier by Franklin Roosevelt in I939 at the urging of a department store owner hoping to lengthen the shopping season. The first step in downsizing a holiday is to recognize the ways in which commercial interests have shaped our rituals and habits. Once you realize that large inventories of toys for children are a recent phenomenon, or that our ancestors didn't wrap gifts, it's easier to do things differently. Diamond engagement rings are not a time-honored tradition but a product of recent vintage, brought to us by-who else-the diamond manufacturer. So too the knowledge that bridal registries were not the usual practice of the turn-of-the-century rich; they're also relatively new. Bride magazines, wedding consultants, wear-it-once dresses-new, new, new. When you know how weddings used to be celebrated, it's easier to close Bride magazinc and be satisfied with an inexpensive affair. Learning the histories of holidays and then sharing the information with friends and family may help to take away some of the imperative of costly "traditions." Various simple-living groups and manuals suggest alternative, noncommercial ways to celebrate the holidays. They propose spending limits on gifts, limiting the number of gifts, spending time together as an alternative to gifts, making rather than buying tree ornaments, and giving gifts of time and labor. Reorienting celebrations around home-prepared food rather than store-bought commodities is one way to get back to authentic holiday experiences, because food and drink have been at the center of most historical traditions. Such a shift is likely to bring more creative satisfaction, less stress on the pocketbook, and more social togetherness. (Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday-just food and family.) But, of course, such a change takes more time. To figure that one out, read on. Principle 8: Making Time: Is Work-and-Spend Working? As most people who have thought seriously about how to reduce their spending know, spending less requires time. It requires not only shopping more carefully or doing research, but acknowledging that the cheaper way to do something is usually more time-consuming. What's true in cooking (preparing dried beans, baking homemade bread, making a cake from scratch) is also true in general: cheaper transport is usually slower, making a Halloween costume takes more time, and ordering by mail (to avoid shopping) incurs shipping costs. While there are certainly exceptions, the principle is that you pay for convenience. People who work in stressful, time-consuming jobs know the drill well. It's hard to reduce spending because they need to "buy" time-by getting others to do their housework, gardening, food preparation, chauffeuring, even shopping. And then they need to earn the paycheck to pay for all those services. For some of us, spending less requires breaking out of this harried, convenience-oriented lifestyle. It requires taking control of our lives on a daily basis, so that shifting to a more time-intensive but cheaper (and incidentally, more ecologically sound) lifestyle is possible. Of course, that is not easy to do. Most jobs do not offer "downward flexibility" in hours, allowing the employee to work a little less, with a little loss in pay. Many, particularly the better-remunerated ones5 are all-or-nothing propositions. At Telecom, 85 percent of all respondents said that reducing hours in their job would be either impossible or fairly difficult. However, it can be done. Millions of downshifters are finding ways. If you find yourself working long hours but spending everything you make, if you are stressed out and not even enjoying the consumer goodies you do have, then the work-and-spend cycle is not working for you. Start thinking seriously about a change that may entail earning less but will give you back control of your time and your life. Principle 9: The Need for a Coordinated Intervention A central argument of this book has been that competitive consumption creates a "prisoner's dilemma"-both prisoners would be better off if neither one talked, but only the one who talks first gets a good deal from the prosecutor. The well-being of everyone could be improved if there were a way to harmonize individual behavior and minimize the competitive incentives. If the joneses could be induced not to upgrade their car or house or whatever, then the Smiths wouldn't have to either, and both would be happier. But central to the prisoner's dilemm a is the inability of the two prisoners to bring about the best outcome because they are not allowed to confer and devise a common position. One way to make that happen is with a central coordinating entity-like the government. The traditional route has been taxation. Consider the sport utility vehicle. As it has become the latest status symbol, individuals feel pressure to acquire one. While some people truly benefit from owning such a vehicle, others who never go camping or hunting or embark on off-road journeys end up on the bandwagon because that's what the with-it people are now buying. And it's not all image. Who wants to be in the car-sized Corolla that a Land Cruiser just plowed into? Who wants to be the only parent in the class who can't accommodate the kids after the soccer game? For an individual, it's sometimes hard to escape the logic. But for the public, the trend is a definite negative. If large vehicles were taxed more heavily than lighter, energy-efficient cars (instead of the other way around), the competitive spiral leading to the acquisition of more and more Land Cruisers, Explorers, and Suburbans might slow down. If individuals were forced to be accountable for the effect of their vehicles on others' safety, they might be less likely to choose the five-thousand-pound gorilla. The roads would be safer, the environment cleaner, and many families" bank accounts larger. Lest luxury taxes sound intrusive, unfair, or even un-American, remember that we already do a tremendous amount of "social engi- neering specific commodities through subsidizing and taxing specific commodities, including items designated as luxuries. In my state, a piece of clothing that costs above $I75 incurs sales tax, but less expensive items do not. There is also an extensive network of subsidies for tobacco and sugar farmers, energy conservation, military production, homeownership, child care, charitable giving, and the like. Consider also that higher taxes on some items could be counterbalanced by lower levies on others. If you bought the small, energy-efficient car, the sales tax could be waived altogether. When insurance companies raised the liability insurance rates for owners of sport utility vehicles, they implied that the rates on cars that do not do so much damage in collisions would be lowered. The principle would be that the high-end, status versions of certain commodities would pay a high tax, the midrange models would pay midrange taxes, and low-end versions would be exempt. Property taxes could also be progressively structured, so that if you opt for a living room, family room, library, and glassed-in porch to go with the seven bedrooms and bathrooms in your new dream house, you'll face a higher tax rate than a family whose house is of median square footage. Consumption taxes are a start. But mitigating the factors that give rise to competitive spending in the first place is also important. That starts with reversing thirty years of growing Inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. It's not surprising that the upper middle class has become "the one to watch" (as NBC touts about itself): its members receive almost half of the nation's annual income and use it to create a compelling consumer lifestyle. What if tax and other government policies improved the distribution of income so that wealth and income were more fairly shared? The gap between aspirations and incomes would narrow, and people might choose to work less, borrow less and slow down their daily lives. (Government policies can also affect these choices.) They'd also have to worry less about protecting their possessions, since fewer individuals would steal the things the culture tells them they must have to be whole. Competitive spending pressures would ease-a rarely recognized side benefit of a more equal distribution of income. A final area is advertising. Ad expenditures have skyrocketed in recent years and now stand at more than $2,000 per family. These expenditures are fully subsidized by taxpayers: advertising costs are deductible from corporate profits. If this write-off were revoked, it's likely there would be fewer ads, which nearly everyone but Madison Avenue probably agrees would be a good thing. (Sixty-five percent of the public already agree with such an idea, and 8o percent believe that prime-time advertising should be limited.) It's time to get this giveaway on the congressional docket. Filling the Void The message children used to get from their bedtime stories was that money doesn't buy happiness. Though the new governess for our children, Miss Television, has a more modern message, an accumulating body of economic literature supports the old notion. Being poor, or devoid of possessions, does greatly impair one's well-being, but beyond a certain point, having more stuff doesn't seem to help. A fivefold increase in japan's average income made its citizens no better off in terms of happiness. The postwar threefold increase in American incomes had the same result. On average, we're long past the point where additional income, or'consumption, yields much psychic benefit. In large part, it is this evidence that makes me feel comfortable advocating the changes I do. Our history shows that the extra spendina won't be missed. On the other hand, a serious turning away from consumerism, as an ideology and a way of life, raises a whole set of issues that scholarly research has not really ad dressed. While it may be true that reorienting our emotional lives away from the symbolism of products would be liberating (I for one would welcome less pressure about the fabric I choose for my couch, or whether I'm keeping up technologically), such a shift would probably leave a void. James Twitchell overstates the case when he asserts that "getting and spending is what gives our lives order and meaning." But he does have a point. If we aren't flipping through catalogs or daydreaming about the perfect living room, what will we be doing? The cynical answer is: watching television. Perhaps. But then again, television yields relatively low satisfaction and is often used by adults as a way to unwind after a stressful and exhausting day at work. It is often background, or company, a sort of white noise and light show. (Even now, 39 percent of the population say they watch too much TV.) If we had more time off from working and could plan more satisfying recreation, we might well spend less time in front of the tube. The experiences of downshifters suggest there are plenty of satisfying ways to fill the void. They have the time to do the things the rest of us keep putting off, such as gardening, cooking, writing books, mountain biking, quilting, opening bed and breakfasts, socializing, playing music, joining book clubs, exercising, learning a language, taking care of their children, and spending lots of time volunteering. Yes, yes, I know what you're thinking. Some of these activities, like gardening, can be terribly expensive. But remember, you don't need to be fully outfitted by Smith and Hawken, and maybe you could even get a garden tool library started. There really are cheap ways to do most things. Besides, with all the money you're saving, you can afford to splurge on something you really love. Another option is civic reengagement. Many of the people I interviewed have connected up with others who are also trying to live differently. There is now an expanding movement for new, less consumerist lifestyles, fueled by organizations such as the Center for a New American Dream , the New Road Map Foundation, the Northwest Earth Institute, the Cultural Environment Movement, the Center for the Study of Commercialism, Unplug, TV Turn-Off -Week, and the Media Foundation (see the resources listing at the end of the book). These groups are addressing the environmental, cultural, and social effects of the old American dream and trying to devise a new one. They organize discussion groups, public forums, newsletters, and community events. They are eager for new recruits. I remain optimistic that we can fill the void. It can hardly be possible that the dumbing-down of America has proceeded so far that it's either consumerism or nothing. We remain a creative, resourceful, and caring nation. There's still time left to find our way out of the mall. From Juliet Schor, The Overspent American, Basic Books, 1998.