Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Francesa y Alemana

Lengua Inglesa 1: TEXTS FOR SPEAKING TEST Buying less stuff (UNIT 1)

Five years ago, Kelly Sutton, a 22-year-old software engineer from Brooklyn, got rid of all
of his possessions except for his laptop, iPad, Amazon Kindle, two external hard drives, “a few”
clothes and sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. “I think cutting
5 down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation – cutting down on
physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts,” he said on his website
CultofLess.com. In the interim, Sutton’s website has disappeared from cyberspace, which
makes sense: after all, if you think about it, what is a website but yet another degrading thing,
a means of shackling us to this vain world of folly and delusion?
10 Just possibly, Britain has joined this new puritan movement. Consumers here spent 26%
of their total household budgets buying physical goods in the early part of the last decade. This
declined to about 21% by 2014. Indeed, this week, the Office for National Statistics reported
that the amount of material consumed in the UK has fallen from a peak of 889.9m tonnes in
2001 (15.1 tonnes per person) to 659.1m tonnes (10.3 tonnes per person) in 2013. Material
15 consumption was lowest in 2011, at 642.0m tonnes (10.1 tonnes per person).
Why is this happening? Certainly, the rise of digital media has allowed us to stop cluttering
our homes with DVD box sets, books and CDs. Another explanation involves the “peak curtains”
hypothesis. Essentially, it posits that we have got enough things in our homes, thanks very
much. It was set out earlier this year by Ikea’s head of sustainability, Steve Howard, at a
20 Guardian Sustainable Business debate. “If we look on a global basis, in the west we have
probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar,
peak stuff … peak home furnishings.”
Incredibly, the corollary of his argument was not that Ikea was finished. Rather, Howard
reckoned Ikea was on course to almost double sales by 2020. How? “We will be increasingly
25 building a circular Ikea, where you can repair and recycle products,” Howard said. Please no!
I’ve spent much of my life crying over a hot Ikea allen key with tears staining a Swedish-language
assembly document; now they want me to repair their flat-packed instruments of Beelzebub –
sorry, I mean, cool, minimalist Scandinavian stuff – too? Not even Dante could concoct a circle
of hell so cruel.
30 Howard’s argument trades on a mounting revulsion for acquiring physical consumer
goods – be they Billy bookcases, ostensibly must-have Nespresso machines or state-of-the-art
humidors. Why? “Materialism is making millions of us feel joyless, anxious and, even worse,
depressed,” argues the futurist and journalist James Wallman. In his 2013 book Stuffocation:
Living More with Less, Wallman strove to offer a cure to the disease the psychologist Oliver
35 James had called affluenza in his 2007 book of the same name. Affluenza was a virus James
reckoned was spreading virulently because it feeds on itself. When you try to make yourself feel
better by buying a car, for instance, you make yourself feel worse, which makes you want to
buy more things.
 2

40 One way Wallman suggested we could escape from that endless cycle of misery was to
focus on having nice experiences instead of on acquiring more stuff. He argued that
“experiences are more likely to lead to happiness”. That shift from consumption to what he
called “experientialism” is certainly a trend that thrives on social media. Think of it this way:
instead of putting pictures of your newly acquired Triumph Bonneville on Instagram for your
45 followers to like or diss, you post snaps of your walking tour through the Andes. What is the
significant difference between the two? “Experiences are more likely to make us happy because
we are less likely to get bored of them,” argued Wallman, who clearly has never waded for miles
hip-deep in Weston-super-Mare mud at low tide. “We’re more likely to see them with rose-
tinted glasses, more likely to think of them as part of who we are, and because they are more
50 likely to bring us closer to other people, and are harder to compare.”
Yet there is more to the reduction in the consumption of stuff than its replacement by the
experientialism Wallman trumpets. When Vivienne Westwood launched her autumn collection
in 2010, she suggested we should not buy new clothes for six months, which must have left her
sales people wringing their hands every bit as much as Steve Howard’s colleagues. Or maybe
55 not: “My message is: choose well and buy less,” she said then – as if to suggest you should buy
one Westwood dress rather than filling Primark trolleys regularly.
That sort of buy-less philosophy is echoed in the online shop Buy Me Once. It offers
Patagonia brand coats, leggings and shirts that come with a lifetime guarantee; Tweezerman
tweezers that you can send back to be sharpened and realigned; teddy bears that can be
60 returned and repaired in a bear hospital; and Le Creuset dutch ovens that carry lifetime
guarantees.
Only one problem: as with Westwood’s couture, the stuff on Buy Me Once isn’t
cheap, wrote Madeleine Somerville in the Guardian last month. “It would be ignorant to assume
that it’s pure evil that fuels the cycle of buying cheap crap that breaks: it’s not. For many, it’s
65 the fact that coming up with $15 to replace an item every year is far more feasible than coming
up with $100 to invest in something that will last a lifetime.” The buy-less philosophy as cure
for affluenza is itself a luxury product.