The Great Disruption (27 page)

Again, though, the key to understanding this potential is to imagine the context—a crisis where the current way of doing things is finished and the only choice we have left is
how
we would like to change, not whether.

This means we need to start thinking now about what this new economy is going to look and feel like. I don't harbor any delusions that we're going to move to this in the next few years, but we are going to at some point, so the more we consider, debate, and experiment with the ideas involved, the better off we'll be when the time comes. If we choose the right actions now, we can be better off immediately while getting the system better prepared.

Part of this preparation is to take practical action. Actions like those described earlier—shifting the tax base from employment to materials and encouraging part-time work and less consumption. Such actions will reduce the severity of the later crisis as well as giving us valuable insights into what is effective, all while teaching the public and the business community what to expect in the future.

I won't go through any more of the theoretical design of this new economy. It has been well articulated elsewhere. However, while such research is incredibly important, this is not something we can leave to theoretical economists. If this is going to be a human-focused economy, we, the humans affected, need to engage with the ideas and start to define what we want going forward.

Of particular interest and focus should be what we can do today that starts us on the journey and delivers immediate benefits to our lives and our society. Are there such opportunities for personal and collective action, or is there nothing meaningful we can do until society as a whole moves?

The issue of personal vs. societywide action is an interesting question and goes to one of the key challenges that have always faced environmental campaigners. While it is appealing at a personal and social change level to get individuals to change their lightbulbs, lower their impact, and so on, there has always been this nagging doubt, for both those involved in the action and those advocating it, that it doesn't actually make any difference because the scale of the problem is so large and the personal action so small. Some even argue the psychological impacts are negative because it can “serve as a form of absolution that relieves people of the need to engage in the more radical political and lifestyle changes that are ultimately necessary.”
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The response in its defense is usually two-pronged. First, on a personal level, those acting are empowered by their contribution—that action changes belief faster than the other way around. Second, advocates argue that it sends a signal to the market and to government that there is a desire for change.

Whatever the arguments about the benefits, no one argues that these personal measures have much direct environmental impact on a global scale.

The interesting question in our context, therefore, is whether actions toward a new economy carry the same risk. Will they involve personal sacrifice for negligible real benefit?

So with that historical context and these types of questions in mind, let's consider in some more detail what this new, steady-state economy will look and feel like. How will it be different with respect to the big global issues like poverty? What will it mean day-to-day for those who already have their basic needs met? Are there actions individuals can take now, and what would be the personal impact of doing so?

I can't cover all the issues involved, so I've chosen four to consider as examples as we think about the future: consumerism and shopping; poverty and inequity; business and investment; and, finally, work and communities. So let's dive into our future and see what it feels like.

CHAPTER 16

Yes, There Is Life After Shopping

We'll start with what is arguably the central plank of the global economy. Let's go shopping.

As discussed the data now confirms what many of us have been feeling for a while. Once our basic needs are met, more possessions and more money, for which there's a price to pay in stress, time, and work, actually don't make us any happier or give us more satisfying lives. This is probably the most dangerous and threatening idea in this book. More than terrorism, more than war, and more than communism ever did, this idea strikes at the heart of modern global capitalism. What would happen if we all stopped shopping?

Of course, there's more to the issue of a quantitative economic growth than shopping, but shopping goes to the core of the problem, the solution, and the implications of a steady-state economy for global society. It also takes us out of economic theory and into the implications of all of this in our personal lives.

It goes to the essence of the issue because the global economy is built on a single assumption that is starting to look pretty shaky: that we are motivated to work hard and create more personal wealth to buy more stuff because it will improve the quality of our lives and those of our children.

If this assumption is false, and the data and common sense now say it is, the global economy could face a major crisis just with a change of public mood. This could be the aikido of political revolutions—a small, well-placed move that uses the energy of the attacker to change the whole system.

It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of this potential. This consumption-based economic system has most of the world tied into it, and even those people who aren't aspire to join. It depends on the cycle being whole, and if any part is withdrawn, the system could fall over.

If a trend emerged where people realized that buying more stuff wasn't improving their lives and was instead locking them into a cycle of time-poor lives, unsatisfying work, and endless debt, they might stop. Of course not completely, but buying significantly less would have a far-reaching impact.

This would soon roll out across the system with dramatic consequences. If we stop buying so much stuff, we won't need to work so much to make the money to buy it. We could pay off debt and tear up our credit cards, undermining the business model of most retail banks. If we don't need the money and we don't enjoy our work, we might be less motivated to work as much. If we then don't work so much, we're going to have a lot more time. Ask your friends how many of them could manage to spend 10 percent less on stuff if instead they had an
extra
five weeks' holiday leave every year? Yes, the extra holiday may have to be spent socializing rather than jet-setting but this would still be preferred by most.

The impacts roll on. If we stop buying so much stuff, the growth model of the developing world collapses. The growth we have seen in China and elsewhere is based on a simple idea—make stuff for rich people using cheap labor while stuffing up your local and global environment. With a globalized economy, the impacts quickly spread. If Americans stop buying so much stuff, the Chinese won't be manufacturing it and my own country, Australia, won't be selling mineral resources to China to make all that stuff. If the Chinese aren't selling so much stuff to the United States, they won't have their surpluses to buy U.S. Treasury bonds that finance the U.S. economy. So it would flow on around the world.

The consequences aren't just economic, however, and this is where it gets interesting. If we don't get happiness from buying more material possessions, we'll have to get it from somewhere else. Without the distraction of the emotional drug of materialism, we would look to places like relationships, friendships, and family. We might be more inclined to get involved in our community. Who knows, we might even look inside to discover the source of the unhappiness that shopping was covering up!

If we are less motivated to work for money, we might be choosier whom we work for and what work we do. After all, if meaning isn't coming from stuff, then perhaps it could come from the work we do. It's not hard to imagine what that would mean for companies seeking to attract and retain the best talent—they would find the company's social purpose key to attracting good people. This may make it difficult to recruit people to market chocolate bars!

This may seem far-fetched if you consider it while standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City. I did just this with Rick Humphries, my good friend and a lifelong environmentalist who now works on biodiversity protection for the resource company Rio Tinto. On a visit to the United States, we were on our way home from an evening out and stood there at midnight, looking around at the frenzy of consumerism and marketing going on around us. People going shopping at midnight, flashing signs everywhere screaming at our senses to buy, buy, buy before it's bye bye bye. Rick and I looked at each other and had the same reaction. Sustainability? We're stuffed!

Little did we know that elsewhere in Manhattan, Colin Beavan was pondering the same issue. He was living every day in this citadel of shopping and consumption and wondering what he could do about it.

Colin got it into his head in November 2006 that he would try to live for a year, with his wife, Michelle Conlin, their two-year-old child, and their four-year-old dog, with no net environmental impact. He would reduce his negative impact of waste, CO
2
emissions, and excessive consumption and expand his positive impact through environmental restoration, donations of time and money to environmental groups, and so on, until his family's net contribution to the problem was zero. After convincing his “caffeine-loving, retail-obsessed, TV-addicted” wife to join in, he started to investigate what it would take. He did so not as a moralizing crusade or as some kind of ascetic sacrifice, but as a personal experiment to find out how hard it would be and what impact it would have on him and his family's life. And so No Impact Man was born.

After their first trial week, Colin wrote:

We got the glimpse of a life with an entirely different rhythm. We began to think that, by depriving us of our Madison Avenue addictions, the no impact experiment might actually make us happier. It was only a seven-day experiment, but it convinced us that living no impact can be done, it can be done pleasantly, and that we could conceivably end up happier rather than sadder—which is why, God help us, we're in it for a year.
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A year later and the experience was being turned into a book and then a film, and the blog had attracted 1.8 million visitors. With stories in the
New York Times
and
Time
magazine and TV appearances on shows like
Good Morning America
and
Nightline
, there was clearly something deeper going on than one man's fascination with personal impact.

There is now an emerging movement on this issue and a serious social and consumer trend emerging. Long perceived to be an issue at the margins and relevant only to a fringe part of the market, the issue of changing consumer preferences and a desire for both lower-impact products and fewer products is now firmly entering the mainstream. This has ranged from attacks by religious leaders such as the pope on consumerism to media fascination with efforts to consume less, like Colin and Michelle's, to responses by marketers to this as a consumer trend. There is even advice available on how to market your products to a category called “anticonsumers”!
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This is occurring naturally as people question their lives and the deception of consumption-driven happiness projected to them every day by marketers. Given that it is already under way, there is no question this anticonsumerism trend will grow exponentially as the Great Disruption gathers momentum. As the world starts to feel increasingly unstable and insecure, the public will come to accept that the cause is an economy built on material consumption and their shopping is where it starts. It will then be a natural development for people to start to focus on shopping and consumerism both at the macro policy level and, more significant, at the personal shopping level.

This is how such trends start. Following a long, slow-building phase, observed as an interesting curiosity by the mainstream, they're then triggered to mass scale by either their own critical mass or an outside event. With the Great Disruption and an economy in decline, people will be forced to experiment and be creative. If, like No Impact Man Colin, they find out their lives have improved anyway, such trends could spread exponentially.

“Shop less, live more” may well become the defining economic and political mantra of the coming decades.

Of course it will build over time; it won't be that we all suddenly wake up and literally stop shopping. Mind you, there have been some who've done just this, giving us important personal lessons and significant insights into public attitudes.

One such example was the participants in the Compact—a group of ten friends in San Francisco who all agreed to buy nothing new for twelve months (food, drink, health, and safety necessities excluded). The idea was in large part a general response to excessive consumerism and advertising pressure, but the group was also motivated by the absurd post-9/11 push that shopping had now become “Americans' patriotic duty.”
3

The concept took off, and groups sprang up around the world. From Australia to France and Iceland to Hong Kong, thousands signed up to participate in this twelve-month shopping-free zone. The experience led to fascinating personal insights for the people involved and an extensive media profile—a small but interesting indicator of the depth of interest and public hunger for a new way.

One of the co-founders, John Perry, told the U.K.
Guardian
newspaper about his reflections on the year: “The real revelation is that it isn't that hard. We all have so much stuff, we could probably live for years without replacing anything. It makes you change the way you look at and appreciate the things you have. We're definitely going to continue.”

With the media profile they even faced a backlash. The
Guardian
story
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continued: “Compact members found themselves attacked by conservatives as ‘un-American' and guilty of ‘economic terrorism.' One San Francisco shop even offered ‘break the Compact' discounts.”

While there are important personal insights from people involved in such experiments, the key thing to observe here is not their actual activity, but the fascination of others with it. The backlash against consumerism is, in my view, having watched trends emerge in this area for thirty-five years, a sleeper trend—something to watch carefully as an indicator of what is coming. When it bursts into the mainstream, the implications for the global economy will be profound.

This behavior and people's response to it have a strong and established theoretical underpinning. The research into human happiness and life satisfaction in recent years shows clear and consistent results. Data gathered by people like Professor Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania is being confirmed by others around the world and give us proof of what is actually common sense. We know how to become happier. Get out of poverty, and then focus on community connections, family, love, and active, meaningful lives. All things that are cheap, are easy to access, and, unlike oil and coal, are globally well distributed!

As we covered in the last chapter, the research data that confirms this have been thoroughly tested. And the results are consistent between countries and cultures and within countries over time—as an individual country gets richer, its citizens' lives do not improve.

So given that shopping doesn't make us happy, yet most of us make various levels of compromise in life to get more money to buy more stuff, what do we do to break the cycle? How do individuals take action now, assuming they don't want to go down the path of No Impact Man or the Compact?

Shopping less, working less, and finding new sources of happiness and satisfaction is easy to say but harder to do. This is not made any easier with messages blasted at us all day every day to buy, buy, buy so we'll be happier, sexier, healthier, and all-around more popular and loved. But we can't blame it all on marketing. After many decades in this pointless pursuit, given that we all keep doing it, we can safely assume that most of us are deeply addicted. Therefore, it will be important to accept that we
all
have the problem (vs. making it into a moralizing crusade against shopping) and also that we're going to need some help to give it up.

The good news is that help is at hand. People have been thinking about this and have even formed self-help groups, like the Compact, training manuals, and a humorous gospel choir. Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping have toured the United States and the United Kingdom, preaching their anticonsumerism message for over a decade, singing outside shopping malls and exorcising cash registers!
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On a more practical, everyday level, the lessons of initiatives like No Impact Man and the Compact, combined with the research by Seligman, NEF, and others, are that we can all buy less stuff and feel better for it. Not a morally superior, “save the world” kind of feel good, but a practical, enjoy your life, have more fun, deeper kind of feel good. It's interesting in this context to read the tips section at www.noimpactproject.org, the nonprofit set up to promote the ideas behind Colin Beavan's year of no impact. The categories are
more fun, clearer conscience, more money, more time, and better health
. Doesn't exactly sound like much sacrifice involved, does it. There are countless “how to” tips out there. Good places to start include www.noimpactproject.org/change and the Compact's site, sfcompact.blogspot.com.