A Life Less Throwaway: The lost art of buying for life

One of the volunteers, Heidi, a 29-year-old pink-haired fashion designer with thirty-one bikinis, sobbed as the removal vans arrived in her trendy area of London. ‘I feel my stuff defines me,’ she said. ‘I want people to like me, think I’m cool, think I’m nice, and if I don’t have my hipster coat, if I don’t have my nails painted or my rings on, I don’t think they will like me …’

On Day 2, after a gruelling night on the floor, she reflected, ‘Yesterday I was crying because I wanted everything. Today I just want my mattress.’

In fact she got more than that. Out on the street, two passing girls stopped to help her carry the mattress back to her house and they bonded over the funny situation.

Almost in tears, Heidi said to camera, ‘Now I’ve got some friends, I honestly feel I’ve got everything … When you have nothing, people make the whole world of difference.’

I’d like to turn this on its head and say, ‘When you’ve got people, there’s nothing much else you need in the world.’

All the participants of Life Stripped Bare found that once their basic comfort levels were met, they became less and less bothered about picking up new items from the shed. We can be happy with very little, yet due to materialism, the average home has 300,000 items in it …

So how can we reverse this trend? Let’s start with some exercises to break free of materialism.

exercise

PERSUADE YOURSELF OF THE IMPORTANCE OF NON-MATERIAL ACTIONS

You may think you don’t need persuading that there’s more to life than materialism, especially after reading this chapter, but write an e-mail to yourself about it anyway. This may seem a bit twee, but has been proven by professor and clinical psychologist Natasha Lekes to have a tangible impact on your happiness.

I’ll even start you off:

Dear me,

This feels odd, but I’m going to tell you about why I think having good relationships, helping the world to be a better place and growing as a person are so important …

exercise

SIGN UP FOR BUYMEONCE MANTRAS

Sign yourself up for free daily mantras at BuyMeOnce.com. (http://www.BuyMeOnce.com) These short phrases will help your subconscious make good choices for you and you’ll be less swayed by materialistic messaging. Here are three to get you going:

• ‘I am good enough.’

• ‘I have everything I need to be happy.’

• ‘I am grateful for all I have.’

exercise

SIMPLE WAYS TO COMBAT MATERIALISM EVERY DAY

• Remind yourself on waking that this life is amazing but also short – smile and say thank you for the day.

• Find time each day to focus on your own personal growth and self-worth. (You’ll find ideas in this book.)

• Find people who share your passions and build a sense of community with them.

• Block materialistic messages as much as possible (more on this later).

• Practise meditation and mindfulness – there’s a wealth of material out there to get you started.

• Feeling close to nature has been shown to decrease materialism, so get out as much as possible, even if you just go into your back garden or a public park. Nature documentaries can also be a lovely way to escape from seeing ‘stuff’.

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Planned Obsolescence (#ulink_a3907804-0585-5e87-9e74-770f9694ee8a)

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Why they don’t make ’em like they used to (#ulink_a3907804-0585-5e87-9e74-770f9694ee8a)

‘Obsolescence’ is a horrible mouthful of a word that essentially means ‘when something becomes useless’. ‘Planned obsolescence’, therefore, is when people plan for products to become useless. Deliberately. Let that sink in for a second.

There are two main ways planned obsolescence happens. The first is physical, where companies design products to break before they need to. That is the subject of this chapter. The other is psychological obsolescence, where people are made to feel that they no longer want the possessions they already have. We’ll look at that in the next chapter.

But first I’m going to take you back to the Twenties and Thirties to discover how planned obsolescence came about. I’ll also share with you some of the shocking evidence of companies who have conspired against us to change the way we buy forever.

WHO PLANNED IT?

Planned obsolescence was born and brought up (to be very naughty) in America. ‘Obsolescence is the American way,’ boasted industrial designers Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens in their 1932 book Consumer Engineering. And certainly Americans took quickly to the idea of rampantly replacing their possessions, while Europeans still held on to theirs as long as possible. Some people at the time did raise concerns about the extra waste and damage to the environment, but their concerns were quickly brushed under the cheap new rugs that were being made. Sheldon and Arens justified their championing of obsolescence by pointing out that while Europe had used up many of its natural resources, ‘in America, we still have tree covered slopes to deforest and subterranean lakes of oil to tap …’

America also had a problem with overproduction. By the early Thirties, the States had got very good at making lots of things very quickly, but wasn’t too good at selling them. The stock market had crashed and the country was in the middle of what became known as the Great Depression, with millions jobless and around half of all children without decent shelter or food to eat. In these conditions we can’t blame people for clutching at ideas like planned obsolescence to solve the issues, even if we are now left to deal with the fallout.

In 1932 a Russian-American called Bernard London published a grand plan entitled ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’. After noticing that people held onto their products longer in a depression and this meant less money being spent on goods, he suggested that every product, from shoes to cars, houses to hats, be given a set lifespan. Once that lifespan was up, the items would be legally ‘dead’ and people would have to turn them in to the government to be destroyed or risk a fine. They would then of course have to buy them again new.

Mr London sold his idea as the saving grace of the US economy. ‘Miracles do happen,’ he said. ‘But they must be planned in order to occur.’

This particular miracle never came off. Maybe because the government realised that forcing people to hand over their possessions for incineration was a sure-fire way to get unelected.

What ended up happening was stealthier. Businessmen, politicians, manufacturers and the advertising industry colluded to change both products and minds, with the aim of turning citizens into consumers. In fact they had been colluding already.

The lightbulb conspiracy

It’s very hard to find a smoking gun when you go looking for evidence of people deliberately building things to break. Unsurprisingly, this is not something that companies will admit to doing if you call up their head office. The most famous proven case was the subject of a truly shocking documentary called The Light Bulb Conspiracy.

It’s famous because it’s one of the few times we’ve found actual written proof that this shady practice takes place.

By 1924, lightbulbs had been getting better in quality for some time; some were now lasting up to 2,500 hours. Then representatives of the biggest electric companies in the world, including Osram, Philips and General Electric, met in Geneva on the night before Christmas to hatch a very unChristmassy plan.

By the end of the meeting in a cramped back room, they had formed a secret group known as the Phoebus Cartel, and had all agreed to send their bulbs to Switzerland regularly to be tested to ensure they broke within 1,000 hours. They had even agreed to be fined for every hour they went over the limit.

What they were doing was on very dodgy legal ground and we know that not everyone was completely happy about it. Some engineers attempted to get around the 1,000-hour limit by designing bulbs of a higher voltage, but they were soon found out and scolded by the head of Philips:

‘[This bulb design] is a very dangerous practice and is having a most detrimental influence on the total turnover of the Phoebus Parties … After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long-life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life.’

They did not sink back into the ‘mire’. If you look at the graph below, showing how long bulbs last, you’ll see that there’s a steady decline until the cartel reached their goal and the average bulb expectancy ground out at around 1,025 hours.

Photo: Landesarchiv Berlin