Six months before we started downsizing, we began to scale up. Our cute 1,300-square-foot house with curling clapboards, a bedroom and a bathroom, a torn-screen porch, and a gravel-floored cellar prone to flooding will become 1,800 newly sided feet of floor space incorporating a large living room and library, master bedroom, guest room, two offices, two baths, insulated porch/mudroom, wine cellar, and many, many built-in cabinets, shelves, and closets.
The renovation will add $25,000 to the mortgage and $1,000 to the property tax bill. An additional $5,000 or so will come out of pocket for the furniture, lighting, art, and accessories the new rooms will require to be filled. After that, they will need perpetually to be heated, dusted, vacuumed, painted, and repaired.
All we wanted was productivity in work and tranquility in love, an end to the fight. Perhaps we should have sought counseling. Perhaps, if we’d known about him, we could have engaged Ron Alford of Disaster Masters Inc., provider of crisis intervention services for people suffering from what he calls “disposaphobia.” If we had had a name for the disorder, maybe we could have found a less radical therapy.
Instead, we came up with a home remedy, which, alas, was a homeopathic one. For the problem of having too much, we self-medicated with the American cure-all:more.
JANUARY 30
“This is cozy,” I say, as we snuggle under two down quilts on a 30-below-zero night. “It’s like a studio apartment.” Paul opens his eyes. “I mean, we only have guests about four weekends a year,” I continue. “And I use the winter office for two months.”
In preparation for rebuilding the walls and sanding the floors upstairs, we have packed Paul’s things into dozens of boxes and mashed them into a corner. Two truckloads of detritus went to the recycler and the dump and a derelict sofa to some newlywed friends with three large dogs. While our house is under construction, we are living in the former living room on what’s left of our furniture, with our clothes in Hefty bags beneath the bed. A bookshelf separates the living space from my workspace, and Paul has set up shop in the hallway.
Paul cocks his head thoughtfully, gazes across the expanse of floor. What we are calling the “new living room” is still a warehouse of lumber and Sheetrock, though elegantly lit by $2,600 worth of tall, argon-filled, low-emissivity insulated-glass Andersen casement windows. “So remind me,” he says, as much to himself as to me. “Whyare we building all this?”
Only a month of Not Buying It has made our old space feel almost sufficient.
Visiting a young country full of ancient emptiness, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that its inhabitants had humble tastes. They rejected the “sumptuous depravity and splendid corruption” of the aristocrats on the other side of the Atlantic. Still, they had a penchant for “physical gratifications,” among which he named a bigger house with a few more rooms.
Could Tocqueville have predicted the average new American home would grow 150 to 200 square feet every few years, from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004, with many measuring four or more times that size? Could he have foreseen the empty spaces filling with Georgian split levels and neoclassical haciendas? Did I, a woman of birdlike domestic-consumer appetites, imagine I would be feeding the collective obesity of the American home with a two-person living and storage space weighing in at over 4,000 square feet—all so one of those persons could have a room of his own?
“I want space,” people say when intimacy strains. Did my beloved and I believe that given enough two-by-fours we could build a wall between ourselves and the stresses and disappointments of the partnered life? From design sketches to window trim, the renovation is likely to take five years of our labor. We have been fighting about it since before the foundation was dug.
I pull the quilt up around my neck as the cold air blows through the still half-insulated new living room. “You could have rented a self-storage unit,” I suggest. “There’s one on Route 14, you know, right next to the Knights of Columbus.”
“Self-storage,” Paul snorts. “Store this.”
As we move into a year of defining our needs and monitoring our desires, the house-in-progress gives cautionary new meaning to the termself-storage. “[F]or our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them,” wrote Thoreau. “And the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves.”
February
Consumer Psychology
FEBRUARY 3
Shit, I’ve lost my SmartWool socks. They’re not in my drawers or Paul’s drawers. Not in the laundry basket or under the bed. My socks are lost. So am I.
I discovered SmartWool while buying new boots at the Ski Rack in Burlington two years ago. Over my silk sock liners, I’d pulled on the thick, pilling purple polyester $3 tubes that had served me for a decade. The salesman, whose tanned face and snowpack abs told me he was a Super-G racer when not selling shoes, looked away. He seemed embarrassed, as if catching his mother wriggling into a girdle.
Then I asked to see the Rossignol X-ium Classic cross-country racing boots, which run about $250. He became confused. How could this purple-polyester customer be interested in these high-end silver boots? (Answer: by not fitting into any other boots). He became attentive, almost respectful; he explained the X-iums’ technology, the plastic liners that are heated up and cooled to the contours of the wearer’s feet. “You want them as tight as possible,” he said. “You’ll want a thinner sock. A realathletic sock.” On the wordathletic, I thought I heard a note of skepticism as he looked me over again.
I mustered my self-respect. Naturally I will want a thinner sock, I thought. I willneed a thinner sock. We athletes, the kind who buy $250 boots, do not wear purple polyester tube socks.
And that was when I met SmartWool. The salesman took a pair off the rack. They were a cool gray, not exactly thin, but lean; they were hardworking but efficient, sleek but muscular—yes, these were some trulyathletic socks. I skimmed the user’s manual hanging on a plastic tab from the sock’s edge. It told me how SmartWool wicks moisture away from the skin, keeping it dry and warm in winter, dry and cool in summer. SmartWool, said the testimonials at the end of the care instructions, delivers consistent “high performance.”
They cost $15, about $12 more than I’d ever paid for socks. I did not hesitate. Along with the boots, I bought two pairs of SmartWools, brought them home, put them on, and went skiing. I couldn’t wait.
Within days I developed an unwholesome relationship with the new socks. The old ones were rolled in a ball at the back of the drawer, not to be withdrawn until spring, when I needed something to protect my feet while staining the upstairs floors. Pimply as a teenager’s face, purple as the Sixties, the old socks became more than expendable. They were despicable.
Which brings me to the current crisis.
I am barreling through the house, throwing small pieces of furniture out of my way and myself onto larger pieces of furniture, crying out in exasperation. “I can’t find my SmartWool socks! Where are my SmartWool socks?!”
Paul tries to help. “Are they in your boots?”
I ignore him.
He presses on. “Maybe they’re in the laundry. Did you look in my drawer?”
I turn on him. “Did you do something with my SmartWool socks? Areyou wearing my socks?”
He ignores, then reassures me. “Don’t worry. You’ll find them later.”
When this doesn’t work, he hectors. “Come on. Just put on some socks and let’s get out of here. Look at that perfect snow!”
I am immovable.
He threatens. “Okay, I’m going without you.” But he doesn’t.
I am as bummed as he is. I mean, how can I look at the perfect snow? Its perfection only renders me, in my sockless state, even more imperfect. Without my socks, how can I ski? How can I expect high performance, or any performance at all? I sit on a pile of flung clothes and sulk.
If you ask a neoclassical capitalist economist, the free market is the epitome of Intellige
nt Design. Yes, investors fall prey to occasional paroxysms of panic or irrational exuberance. The indicators sometimes behave weirdly and must be interpreted by the oracles at the Conference Board. Interest rates or currency supply want a little nudging by central bankers now and then, and prices and wages may ask for a little bullying by legislators and regulators. But these are adjustments around the edges. For the most part, Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand guides itself.
Inside this rational system, claim these economists, the consumer—Homo economicus—is also rational. He is well informed and good at balancing his current needs and desires against those in the long term, then deciding where to put his money.Homo economicus lives in the economy, not in, say, a San Fernando Valley suburb or a neighborhood of Delhi. That is, he is abstracted from the social: he is not exactly a person, but a consumer, and as such he is motivated by one thing, self-interest. Neoclassical, or utilitarian, economists argue that all these individual self-interests, working together and in conflict, keep prices low and wages reasonable, demand in balance with supply, and the economy prospering, enhancing everyone’s lives. It may be a system based on greed, but, many theorists say, greed is natural. The system works, they say.
Back at our house, the day is waning. Paul stares at me. He is out of ideas, out of time, out of what could have been a glorious ski. He slouches into the kitchen and makes the motions of starting supper. I follow him and flop down at the table.
“I don’t know what could have happened to those socks,” I mumble, redundantly. “Why can’t I find them?”
Paul closes the refrigerator and turns to me. His face is blank, then sympathetic. Now he offers consolation: the one obvious shortcoming in SmartWool’s perfectly consistent high performance. “If they’re so smart,” he says, “why can’t they find themselves?”
The same question might be asked about me.
And here’s another question:you call this rational?
FEBRUARY 5
Ann, one of my dearest friends and political comrades, and a feminist intellectual and New School University professor, calls to tell me about a lecture on consumer desire she heard this week, in which the speaker mentioned the Apple Computer logo. “There’s a bite taken out of the apple,” she quotes the lecturer. “Something you are missing, something the computer will supply.”
“Or something you’ve tasted, that you want more of,” I add.
Ann tells me a tale of two tablecloths. Someone cleaning up after a party at her house mistakenly threw them out. Like me at the loss of my socks, Ann was inconsolable. “Oh, Judy, they were the perfect thing,” she moans, just the right colors, the right size, and washable! “A triumph.” Greatly increasing the pleasure and value of the tablecloths, though, was “the hunt,” the time and perseverance invested in their capture. Ann had traipsed from store to store. Nothing was quite right. She pored over the catalogues. Then, finally, under a heap of teacups and saucers, so to speak, she found them, in the Anthropologie catalogue.
Not only wanting the thing but getting it—the excitement of the hunt—“is pumped up and socially mandated,” says Ann, describing the engagement and pleasure that economists call “transactional utility.” A long, hard chase does not necessarily mean a lower price. Indeed, wrote the German philosopher Georg Simmel, “we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them.” The tablecloths were expensive. Ann describes Anthropologie, in which items chintzy and classy, cheap and costly are displayed in a meticulous hodgepodge, “like a yard sale.”
“Only you don’t have to drive to rural Illinois,” I say. Instead, Anthropologie “finds” the kitschy, cool collectibles for you, ships them to your mailbox, and charges you for the feeling of having discovered them yourself. The job of consumer capitalism is to make things both resistant to possession and irresistible, both distant and attainable.
Ann sighs. “Consumer culture is a machine for dissatisfaction,” she says. “You could get a facelift, you could find the perfect dress, you could be beautiful, you could be youthful. I have to admit,” she continues, “it has been deeply instilled in me. It all depends on people having a lot of yearning. That excitement is offered in lieu of.”
In aNew Yorker cartoon, a woman stands at a department store counter and inquires of the salesperson, “What would you suggest to fill the dark, empty spaces in my soul?”
FEBRUARY 7
Saturday is chore day. Paul and I drive to the recycling center a mile outside Hardwick, then back to the food co-op and the supermarket. Our basket is full of basics: bread, milk, onions, rice, kale, biodegradable dish soap. Even if we wanted to, we’d be hard put to buy anything fancier here.
Our little town is one of the few spots between the shining seas where commercial temptations are few. The ads in theHardwick Gazette stick to the goods and services that can be bought around here: asphalt roofing, front-end alignments, Reiki. In keeping with local small-britches mores, merchants keep their pitches modest, almost self-effacing. The Village Laundramat offers a “FREE Wash with Our Frequent Washer Club!” The ad for the nearby community college resembles a carpet retailer’s: “Convenient. Affordable. And so many options.” And on Main Street in Hardwick the owners of the Chinese takeout Wok ’n’ House (a branch of Wok ’n’ Roll, in nearby Morrisville) draw attention to the restaurant’s one indisputable attraction: it is usually open. The electronic advertising that Paul and I hear is no more tempting. On public radio, the sponsors sell intangibles, if not incomprehensibles. One underwriter is “promoting the enhancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” Another (courageously?) “believe[s] in early defibrillation.”
Purchasable entertainment hereabouts is sparse. The nearest decent restaurant or “art” cinema is thirty miles down the winding Route 14. The former hasn’t changed its menu in a decade, and by the time we arrive here from New York we have usually seen whatever is playing at the latter. That leaves the local video rental, which has a fairly good, but thin, selection (and how many times can you watchRun, Lola, Run ?).
With the nearest mall sixty miles away, our only “emporium” is Willey’s, a huge, old-style general store in Greensboro, which sells everything you need. Everything, that is, if what you need is ammunition, steel-toed boots, birdseed, or muffin tins in any of five sizes. They also carry a knockoff SmartWool sock.
Still, Hardwick has its hot consumer products. Its most conspicuous consumption is of new vehicles, each of which enables the driver to traverse a distance in a different kind of weather over a different terrain, preferably while burning maximum amounts of fuel and creating maximum amounts of odor and noise. You can purchase a straight-off-the-conveyer-belt mega-pickup truck, a 90-mile-an-hour state-of-the-art snowmobile, a terrain-shredding all-terrain vehicle, a Jet-Ski (an aquatic snowmobile/ATV), or most recently, an ultralight, a kind of motorized hang glider.
A similar new-product hunger is fed by weapons that enable a person to kill a different kind of animal at a different distance using different skills in different seasons. There are shotguns for birds and small game; traps for slightly larger, wilier game; rifles in a range of calibers for coyote, deer, and bear; along with muzzle loaders and high-tech bows and arrows, and hundreds of rods, reels, lines, depth finders, and fish finders for every piscine species. In Vermont, you are also allowed to shoot fish.
Why do people buy all these things? Hardwick’s Economic Man, living in seclusion, would surely want something to transport him from here to there, as well as something with which to kill something to eat. But he probably would not feel the urge to trade in the 2005 Yamaha RX Warrior snowmobile with the 145-horsepower Genesis Extreme engine for the 2006 Yamaha Apex RTX with the 150-hp Genesis engine or to clutter his hut with another 30-30 rifle boasting a slightly better scope.
Classical economics, which assumes he does live in seclusion (inside the marketplace), advances the tautology that he wants more because it is human nature to want more. In the depths of the Great Depression, John Ma
ynard Keynes posited a widespread “pent-up demand” for consumer goods that was being suppressed by worries of joblessness. Once unleashed into the marketplace, consumer demand would end the country’s woes, Keynes promised. Some help might be needed to transform a deeply rooted cultural ethos of thrift to one of gratification. To help the process along, he recommended widely available consumer credit.
But once people fulfilled what he called the “essential” needs, Keynes didn’t worry that they would stop buying and stall the economy again. The “second-class wants” would never abate; indeed, they were likely to be “insatiable, for the higher the general level [of wealth] the higher still they are.” At the turn of the 19th century, Thomas Malthus had defined the good life as a piece of meat and a glass of wine at dinner. What Keynes was counting on was the escalation of these simple pleasures to a fillet of Japanese kobe beef and a 1949 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Or a 2005 snowmobile to a 2006—all charged on the credit card. Consumer credit resolves a fundamental dilemma of capitalism: how to pay workers as little as possible while making sure they can buy as much as possible.
If you step back, it would be hard to describe an $8,000 snowmobile on the credit card of a person earning $35,000 as rational (though judging from the chat around Brochu’s garage, it is highly informed). As for self-interested, this goes without saying; the purchase of a snowmobile or a high-tech firearm cannot be construed as altruism. But that begs the question of what this interest is. The deer is self-interested, too, after all, and she’s not purchasing a 9-millimeter rifle to make it a fair fight.
Not Buying It Page 3