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Capitalism & Consumerism
When I was an economics undergrad, I heard a lot about ‘hedons’. A hedon is the theoretical measure of pleasure that people gain from consuming something. Hedons are impossible to measure in the real world, but in economic theory, they’re useful in explaining the theoretical underpinnings of the market. People buy things to increase their pleasure. This basis can be extended to explain all market transactions, pricing, production and consumption, supply and demand and all the other terms we use to talk about the economy.
The thinking derived from the hedon proven enormously useful in our world and has led to our current age of capitalism where most of the world’s countries have a ‘mixed’ economy of some sort (that is an economy that is mostly free market but has some element of central government intervention). This model has produced prosperity like the world has never seen before and which scarcely could have been imagined a century ago. Under this economic consensus, since 2000, the global poverty rate has been halved.
That said, there are some limits to the system that is built on the notion of the hedon that we should explore, and some situations where hedon-ic thinking which limit human flourishing rather than expanding it. You might have heard of some of these critiques.
In this post, we’re going to talk about capitalism & consumerism. How much does the ‘hedon’ based economic system help us, and where does it hinder us as consumers, workers and humans?
Consumerism is defined on the belief that follows from the hedonic economic theory above that greater levels of consumption will lead to greater well being. By now, I’m sure most readers are familiar with this idea and the main critiques of it: consumption produces a lot of waste, which is bad for the environment, consumption encourages us to work harder to get more money to buy more things rather than to spend our free time in leisure, and that consumption in itself leads to a shallow and short lived type of pleasure rather than deeper and sustainable happiness.
These critiques point to a gap in the economic theory upon which capitalism is built. This gap wasn’t just discovered recently. Political theorists and philosophers have known about it for some time. Many of them thought that the types of things that weren’t priced into capitalism would be provided for in ‘civil society’: families, churches, civic organizations, recreational sports teams and other leisure time pursuits. Once capitalism fulfilled our basic bodily needs and some of our pleasure, civil society would fill in the relationships, leisure and meaning that would take us the rest of the way.
We’re now seeing that participation in civil society is decreasing, which is a problem that some have chosen to deal with by withdrawing more from the cycle of work and consumption to spend more time building community and participate in activities they find meaningful.
I don’t know many people who will argue that rampant consumerism is truly a good thing, but a good number of my friends and family do pursue high-status, demanding careers that pay well and buy lots of expensive things (myself included to a large extent). In that case it may be best to articulate the benefits of some consumption in terms of a movement in reaction to consumerism.
Minimalism is one way proposed to escape the cycle of work and consumption that some find problematic. Minimalism poses that we should consciously reduce the things we buy and use to the most basic necessities that are useful to us and bring us joy (more on joy later). Often, this ethos is paired with a pulling back from the production side of the equation as well by working less.
In theory, this allows the minimalist to spend more time with their family, their community, and this is probably true in a lot of cases. One of my favorites is Mr. Money Mustache whose frugal lifestyle allowed him to quit his job in his early thirties and do zany experiments ever since, including growing zany facial hair.
However, most people prefer to live a normal life-style without paying so much attention to their consumption and without the self-righteousness that many minimalists seem to have adopted.
Indeed, taken to an extreme minimalism seems just as joyless as the mindless routine of pursuit of wealth and possessions engendered in consumerism.
Joy & meaning
OK, we talked about pleasure and its discontents and that there may be something ultimately unfulfilling about rampant consumption. There are people trying the opposite of rampant consumption, but it seems hard to deny that we need some stuff.
First of all, meaning sounds deep and mysterious, but it basically comes down to whether you feel your actions matter to other people that you care about. This can clearly come from family and civil society, which are (hopefully) groups of people that you care about and by being with them and helping them, you will derive some meaning. This meaning is completely unrecognized by the capitalist logic of ‘hedons’.
A lot of people also derive meaning from their work (though not as many as we would like (pew research link). This is where meaning and capitalism intersect. If you do something you enjoy and feel that you are helping your coworkers and customers in their lives by doing your job, you will feel this sense of meaning and purpose. You will also get money in exchange for it. If you can find this, that’s great, and I strongly recommend that you look for this. I have certainly had periods where I have felt this while working for Google and I feel this sense now in working with my private marketing clients.
OK, now Joy. Joy is another concept that is somehow less intuitive to modern humans than pleasure. I recommend this essay by Zadie Smithwhich explains the distinction much more clearly than I ever could.
Even more articulate on joy are a pair of shows on Netflix who show us there can indeed be joy in objects. The first is Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, where a delightful, tiny Japanese woman helps people declutter their homes by keeping only things that ‘Spark Joy’. Eventually, you see the people on the show understand the concept and keep only the things that they have imbued with special meaning and they find lasting peace in their newly tidy homes surrounded only by objects they love… at least until the camera crew leaves.
The other show that ‘sparks joy’ is the wonderful show Queer Eye, which abounds both with product placement and life-affirming human connection centered around beauty tips, clothes and home goods. What is it that makes this show about more than just conspicuous consumption? I think it’s about the thoughtfulness about using consumption selectively to bring out the qualities that accentuate what the make-overee likes about themselves and gives them the confidence to put other aspects of their lives in order.
It’s a bit like what Alain de Botton says in The Architecture of Happiness:
“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
In short, joy and meaning are more difficult to grab ahold of than pleasure, but they are more worth the effort. These feelings are imperfectly incentivized by capitalism, but probably the mixed economies that we live in are the closest we have gotten yet to making them available to more people. Meaning can be found in work, and joy can be found in consumption. Certainly we should look outside of our economic functions for these things as well. But, when we are building and selling products and services, it behooves us to thing of these deeper feelings both in our customers and in ourselves. It’s not always easy, but it is always worth it when we do.
What’s next
This post was a kind of manifestation of my internal struggle to make peace with my new job as an entrepreneur and marketer. It’s going to be the background and framework for the coming posts about encouraging flourishing in ourselves and our customers in our capitalist world.
Further reading:
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Mankiw’s Principles of Economics(just kidding, don’t read my college MicroEcon text book)
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