Enough already!

Understanding our irrational desire for more, more, more is the first step to a cure.

If you need evidence of the trend you need look no further than some recent movies. Possibly the most obvious example is Confessions of a Shopaholic. The title says it all. Then there was the Devil Wears Prada in which the main character gets hooked on the fashion industry’s endless craving for conspicuous consumption and novelty and then breaks free again. There was also last year’s Disney hit WALL-E, about a robot, one of many, left on earth to clean up the mess when humanity abandoned it. Not only did the earthlings have to leave because of all the junk that consumerism fostered, but for most of the movie they seem doomed to an endless existence of ugly consumption and pointless pleasure seeking.

And now a prominent writer has made a dramatic plea to humanity to say “enough” to consumerism. In Enough: Breaking free from the world of more, health writer for the London Times newspaper John Naish counsels readers to put an end to humanity’s apparently limitless craving for more of everything.

“Over the past decade,” writes Naish, “two facts have become increasingly obvious – that our ever-increasing consumption is wrecking the planet, and that continually chasing more stuff, more food and more entertainment no longer makes us any happier. Instead, levels of stress, obesity and dissatisfaction are spiralling.”

None of this, of course, is new. We all know that owning more things does not make us happier and that those who possess most are often sicker and more stressed than anyone else. But what is new is Naish’s attempt to identify the reasons why we continue to pursue happiness through materialism long after it has become clear that we are on the wrong path.

Naish refers to biological research to help identify the reasons for our apparently unlimited cravings for more. His logic is that the more we know about the irrational impulses that spur us on to ever more consumption, the more we will be likely to be able to resist them.“It’s our primitive brains,” he argues. “These marvellous machines got us down from the trees and around the world, through ice ages, famines, plagues and disasters, into our unprecedented era of abundance. But they never had to evolve an instinct that said, ‘enough’. Instead, our wiring constantly, subliminally urges us: ‘Want. More. Now.’”

Naish says that Western civilisation wisely reined in this urge for thousands of years with an array of cultural conventions, from Aristotle’s Golden Mean (neither too much, nor too little) to the Edwardian table-saying: “I have reached an elegant sufficiency and anything additional would be superfluous.” But he says that consumer society has invented a barrage of ways to stimulate our want-more brains’ acquisitive instincts.One by one he works his way through the latest findings that may shed some light on humanity’s irrational desire for endless consumption. He argues that Neolithic cave sites may partly explain why.

“Many contain millions of hand-axes – far more than cave-dwellers ever needed. Anthropologists believe that the best axes were not just prized tools, but precursors of Ferraris and Jimmy Choos. Owning Stone Age bling displayed your high reproductive value. Nowadays this status-chasing urge makes designer goods sorely alluring, even if they make no real difference to our luxury-glutted lives. Our hunter-gatherer brains seem wired to experience constant buyers’ urges, too. Brain scans by Emory University in Atlanta show how the reward-chemical dopamine is released when we spot a product and ponder its purchase. But only the anticipation, the hunt, releases dopamine. After the deal is sealed, the high may evaporate in minutes, leaving what shop-owners call ‘buyer’s remorse’.”

Another trend that Naish looks at is our gluttony for information. He points to surveys indicating that the vast majority of people say that they “can never have too much information. But more than half also said that they don’t have time to use the information they already have,” he says. “One way of trying to cope with this overload is to cram in more information-seeking. Most 20-somethings now watch TV while also being online.” Naish says that some psychology studies suggest that we should limit our news-watching to 30 minutes a day – or risk anxiety-related depression.

While our appetite for information has been growing, so has our appetite for food. Naish points to spiralling obesity levels in Western societies – a quarter of Western adults are obese and a third are overweight – and says it is expected that the majority of people will be overweight in the next 20 years. Research, he says, suggests that one reason for our ballooning waist lines is the haste with which we tend to eat meals. “It takes 20 minutes for your brain to realise that your stomach is full,” Naish says, “so taking time to chew undistractedly enables your mind to keep up with your galloping appetite.”

Apart from offering readers some information about the irrational nature of many of their urges to consume without control, Naish also offers some reasons why they should quit the habit. The main problem with over-consumption, he argues, is that we spend so much time working to earn enough money to feed our impulse to consume that we have little time left to spend on real needs, particularly on spending time with family and friends. As it is often pointed out, when people reach the point of death, they don’t tend to wish they had spent more time on their work – or on shopping for that matter – but they do wish they had spent more time with the people they love.

So how do consumers who want to reclaim their lives take the first steps? “I’d suggest that people jettison this culture’s deeply ingrained and generally unquestioned assumption that ‘more’ of anything is automatically better,” says Naish. “We should instead be becoming a ‘post-more’ society. We should work on ditching ‘more’ and working on our ability to feel gratitude and appreciation for all the amazing stuff we have. We’re constantly told we’re not cool enough, rich enough, glam enough, networked enough, attractive enough, etc. It’s proved an amazingly successful sales tactic – it’s like a toxic substance that turns rational brains into needy toddler-like grizzlers. We need to challenge it, loud and clear.”

Bill James is a Sydney freelance writer.

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