Utilitarian economics does not go far in explaining consumer behavior. Consumer psychology has its limits, too. You can find twenty-seven libraries full of market research on why the guy buys the Yamaha instead of the Ski-Doo. What it doesn’t clarify is why he wants either of them.
FEBRUARY 12
Paul and I drive north through a swirling snow to hear the story writer and poet Grace Paley read to benefit the tiny Glover Public Library. Every writer in the state has made the trek, in twos and threes arriving inside the plain town hall and stomping the snow from their boots into puddles on the wooden floor. Here, too, are a good part of Glover’s populace, many of whom, including the librarian, are current or veteran members of the political theater troupe Bread & Puppet. The event is redolent of B&P, whose ramshackle farmhouse, barn, and museum of giant props and puppets are just up the hill. A folding table is stacked with homemade brownies, carrot cake, cookies, and vegetarian samosas; on a stool by the door is a tall, papier-mâché hat for donations.
Grace, getting tinier and wilder of hair as she ages, is both incongruously Jewish here in the Northeast Kingdom and precisely in place among Glover’shaimisher peaceniks. She reads some poems and two stories about her father, and several poems by her husband, Bob Nichols. After the satisfying reading, I drink some chamomile tea out of a paper cup and eat a brownie. I drop $5 in the papier-mâché hat. As we leave, Paul adds $20.
Why do we put this much money in the hat? Is it just because we are generous individuals? Why does the guy buy the $8,000 snow machine? Because he is selfish and greedy?
Neither, say sociologists and anthropologists. Our personal tastes and personalities explain only a small part of why we buy. All exchange, from gift-giving to barter to money-based commodity purchases, issocial, they stress. People generally behave in ways that are rewarded and avoid doing what is punished in their societies. Why does the guy want the Yamaha? For the same reason every seven-year-old wants a Hello Kitty lunchbox one year and a SpongeBob Square Pants lunchbox another year:Because everybody else has one, Mom! The phenomenon is called emulation.
Emulation can stoke desire for goods or indifference to them, purchase of a snowmobile or donation to a library—or any other attitude or behavior. A person isn’t even greedy or generous in isolation, for what is called greed in one culture may be parsimony in another; generosity here is profligacy there. This goes not just for cultures, but also for subcultures. I look inside the tall hat—it’s full of bills. We poets and puppeteers don’t tend to have snowmobiles.
As a group, even if we may have similar values to some snowmobilers’, we inhabit what sociologists call different taste cultures. Still, like the snowmobilers, we library donors are emulating someone.
FEBRUARY 14, VALENTINE’S DAY
At the convenience store and Texaco station on the corner of Routes 14 and 15, the red-foil-covered chocolate roses are selling well. A man in line in front of me buys two. The clerk approves. “Aren’t those pretty?” she says, ringing them up. “I got six for my mom.” I pick up myNew York Times (a necessity) and leave the store thinking about a Valentine’s gift for Paul.
When I get home, I empty the matches from a small, thin matchbox and wrap it in iridescent purple paper. I glue an elongated, striped heart, also iridescent, onto one side and a striped red, green, and gold one onto the other. Then I gather up whatever old magazines I can find and cut a couple dozen tiny hearts of different sizes from them. I stuff these inside the box. The whole thing has taken about an hour, the same time I’d have spent driving to the bookstore and picking out a card.
When Paul gets home, he opens the box and the hearts tumble out. He kisses me.
Later in the evening, Linda, the bookseller in town, stops by for a beer on her way home. I show her the matchbook valentine on the kitchen table. “Cute!” she says. I’m proud of my matchbox, proud as I am of our Chevy S10 held together with welding compound and Bondo. I’m proud, moreover, of what these things are not:not the brand-spanking-new zillion-hp extended-cab Dodge Ram,not the foil-wrapped rose.
I’m not keeping up with the Joneses who drive the big trucks, but the Joneses who grow organic carrots and drive beaters like ours. My funky valentine could hold its own beside the papier-mâché hat in Glover, winning the admiration of the people—and the person—whose opinions matter most to me. In our little subculture, not consuming gives Paul and me cachet. Soonour Joneses may be keeping up, or down, with us.
FEBRUARY 20
Paul and I have been spending our days doing more or less what we have always done, minus shop. We work at our desks, go to the food co-op, engage in local politics, help friends with their projects (Charlie has started baking eight loaves of bread a week in the outdoor clay oven he built with Paul’s help last summer). For entertainment we visit friends, read, ski, and walk. Our Scrabble games improve. For surprise and spiritual uplift, we look around at deer, fox, and owl, snowdrifts and stars.
In this way Not Buying It has thrust us back to the nineteenth century, when amusements were non-mechanized, non-electronic, and non-mass, enlivened not by speed or special effects, but by direct human contact. We are not, however, purged of the desire for speed or special effects.
We’re taking a walk up our road, Bridgman Hill. The mountains are mauve, the air dry and sharp. “You know, I’d really like to get DSL,” Paul says. He’s not sure he can get it here, but he wants it in the city.
“Is that a necessity?” I ask.
“It’s for work,” he answers. I know his complaints about his current Internet setup, which he rehearses now: the pokey modem, the minutes—hours!—wasted waiting for his e-mail to appear on the screen, the documents lost, the frustration of getting bumped offline in the middle of a download. Neither of us knows how DSL works, but he reasons that his getting it is not going to sully the New York cityscape. “Whatever the infrastructure is, it’s already in place.”
I get irked. So the infrastructure for DSL is in place, I say. Once he gets it in New York, won’t he want it in Hardwick? And if he wants it here, doesn’t he think other people will simultaneously be wanting it, and doesn’t he think other infrastructure will show up—a cell tower, a paved road—on Bridgman Hill once everyone starts wanting, and having, and…I’m working up a bit of a rant. Paul turns silent, his standard defense against such harangues. I forge on. No matter how slow his Internet connection is, it’s a hell of a lot faster than the U.S. Postal Service was, which was fast enough until FedEx and faxes and e-mail demoted it to “snail mail.” DSL doesn’t reduce work time, I conclude. It contributes to speedup. “You’ll just end up working more.”
“I’m not going to work more,” Paul says. “I’ll go skiing or play tennis. I’ll read, I’ll make maple syrup. I’ll clean my room.” A saccharine smile. “I’ll spend more time withyou, honey.”
Having no impact except to smudge the infrastructure-free landscape with discord, I walk on without responding. “Well, I don’t want DSL,” I say after a while. “I don’t think fast enough for high-speed Internet. I’m a 56-Kbps thinker.” Don’t worry about me. I’ll sit here in the dark.
Why am I arguing? I’m also frustrated taking twenty minutes to download every little video or PDF file. Am I trying to prove that Paul is behaving irrationally? That DSL is not necessary? That it isn’t useful? Must a thing be useful to be necessary?
I pull myself back from the World Wide Web to our beautiful hill, and this focuses me on our walk, and then on my own body. On the snowy road, my feet are warm, dry, and comfy. As it happens, I am wearing my SmartWool socks (they were in my drawer all along, nestled beside their purple sisters). SmartWool continues to realize the promise of its propaganda. The socks are soft, they don’t itch. They’re machine washable and fast-drying, durable and, yes, excellent wickers. In fact, I have come to adore SmartWool so much that I’ve purchased ski pants and a jacket made of a similar fabric, along with an entire wardrobe of Polartec, Coolmax, Capilene, and other similarly science fi
ctional–sounding natural-synthetic hybrids. These fabrics outperform the ones they’ve replaced—cotton, silk, ordinary wool—by fifty kilometers. They outperform me.
Now I see what worries me about Paul’s high-speed Internet access. Will the same thing happen to him as happened to me with SmartWool? As soon as I bought these socks, a perfectly adequate product (my purple polyester socks) became an inadequate product, and shortly thereafter a hateful product, by virtue solely of the appearance of the new product. The useful new thing became indispensable. My affection for it became anamour fou. SmartWool became what Saatchi + Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts calls a “lovemark,” a brand that inspires “loyalty beyond reason.”
Aka, a fetish.
When I’m back in the house, I look for Freud’s essay on the sexual fetish. The relevant passage concerns cases in which a person requires a fetish object—a shoe, for instance (or a sock?)—“if the sexual aim is to be attained.” The condition “becomes pathological,” says Freud, “when the longing for the fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actuallytakes the place of the normal aim.”
I replace the wordsexual with the wordathletic (sports having supplanted sex in the American erotic imagination anyway), and yikes, I am looking at myself in the mirror. The SmartWool socks became necessary to the attainment of my athletic aim. Then passion for the socks replaced the aim itself—I optednot to ski rather than ski without the product purchased to make skiing more enjoyable.
Ja, meine leibe,remarks Dr. Freud. This is the point at which “mere variations of the…instinct pass over into pathological aberrations.”
FEBRUARY 21
Am I sick? Are we all?
In spite of the plenitude of products, many of us are not happy. We are wealthy; even America’s poor are wealthy compared with the rest of the world, which shows that wealth is relative. “Men do not desire to be rich,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “but richer than other men.” And thanks to U.S. tax and corporate policy, some men and women are getting a whole lot richer than other men and women, and this, say critics, is driving quite a few of us crazy.
A century after Mill, as the postwar suburbs filled with houses and the houses filled with kitchen appliances and matched bedroom sets, the economist James Duesenberry observed the Smiths scrambling to “keep up with the Joneses.” If they didn’t look much further than the end of the block, Mr. and Mrs. Smith might even succeed. A half-century hence, thanks to a widening wealth gap and the media-enhanced visibility of the extravagantly fed, clothed, and sheltered, argues Cornell University economist and public policy professor Robert H. Frank, we feel obliged to keep up not with the Joneses but with the Zeta-Joneses or the Gateses. He calls what ails us “luxury fever.”
Most of us can only attempt emulation; it usually can’t be realized. Juliet Schor describes an “aspirational gap” leading to an “upward creep of desire,” a cycle of seeing, wanting, buying (with or without ready cash), then having to work more to pay for it (an average of nine weeks more per year than Europeans). Documentary filmmakers John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor have declared an epidemic, “affluenza,” which they define as a “painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”
Just this year Erzo F. P. Luttmer of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government studied people who move into better neighborhoods hoping for better schools, prettier surroundings—in short, happier lives. But whereas in the old community they may havebeen the Joneses, now they are the Smiths. Their spirits sink to the level of their new social position. Luttmer calls the effect “Neighbors as Negatives.”
One of the things I like about Hardwick is that my neighbors are not negatives. I have almost nobody to envy. No one has a lot of money, almost no one has a big house. I have few writers in my circle (writers are notorious enviers of other writers who are even marginally better paid, better reviewed, or better looking than they). Other potentially enviable accomplishments more plentiful in these parts do not concern me, since I don’t consider myself skilled enough even to be in the running. Gardening or skiing, for instance, I just enjoy.
So here I am, sailing along enviably free of envy and, out of the blue—out of the white—skulks the green-eyed beast. I’ve arranged with Lucy, a persevering, competent skier, and Grace, a former racer from a family of ski instructors and Olympic athletes, to take the afternoon off for a twenty-kilometer trek from Greensboro to Craftsbury. It’s snowing softly and the temperature is hovering around 32 degrees. Since these are almost impossible conditions to wax for, I put on my oldest pair of skis, some flat, white Trax no-wax touring skis (a $90 starter kit, complete with poles, if I remember), and my first pair of boots, which fit their bindings.
The day is magnificent. We have the trail to ourselves, except for the occasional chipmunk or white-winged crossbill. We push along at a sprightly but not tiring pace, moving mostly in silence. From time to time one of us alerts the others to the song of the crossbill or exclaims about how cute a chipmunk is. We keep congratulating ourselves for taking the afternoon off.
It is, in short, a near-perfect experience. With the emphasis onnear.
I progress smoothly for several kilometers. Then after a while I find myself falling slightly behind Grace and Lucy. Soon I can’t hear their voices, and when I call out to them, they don’t hear me. I feel a little abandoned and a little klutzy, though I am still having a good time.
A few more kilometers and I am starting to feel dissatisfied. Things aren’t working. My gators, the Gore-Tex chaps that strap under the shoe and extend up the shins to keep the snow out, are scrunching down and falling under my heels. My toes are pushing against the front of the old soft boots, the skins of which are beginning to flake off. My heels are sliding off the sides of the old-style bindings. Dissatisfaction with myself is attaching itself to my equipment.
Now I am mentally enumerating the sporting goods I will buy (next year) to improve the experience. I’ll get a pair of nylon snow pants, which will be light and windproof and tuck neatly into my boots. Then I won’t need gators. I’ll need new boots and bindings, too, so my heels don’t fall off the skis. The poles I have, racing poles with only a suggestion of a basket at the bottom, are punching through the deep snow. Put a pair of touring poles with wider baskets on the list. And while I’m at it, why not a pair of new backcountry skis, rather than making do with these old things?
I’m falling farther behind. From a distance I watch Grace’s muscular butt tighten with each strong kick. When I get my new boots and bindings and pants, I won’t be wobbling off the skis and stopping to shake off the clotted snow. I’ll get thinner and stronger, like Grace (who, by the way, is on twenty-year-old skis).
The snow is getting too deep and the weather too warm. I’m trudging. Snow is sticking to the bottoms of my skis and clumping between the bindings and the boots, feeling like tennis balls beneath my arches. How many more kilometers? The distance between me and Grace and Lucy is widening. I imagine they are still chatting happily about the snow, the sky, the chipmunks, the little chirping birdies.
I’m trying to be happy, too. But if only I had…I’d be keeping up with Grace and Lucy. If only I could buy…I’d be a better skier. Better skis, a better skier. If only I were more like Grace and Lucy, I’d be a happier person. If I had better skis and were a better skier, I’d be a happier person. I’d be like Grace and Lucy. A better person.
FEBRUARY 24
I receive in the mail a large, glossy textbook put out by the American Psychological Association.Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World is an anthology of academic articles on “acquisition-related disorders,” which, the writers argue, are marked by depression, anxiety, impulsivity, compulsivity, shame, guilt, perfectionism, narcissism, self-loathing, fear of intimacy, “cognitive narrowing,” and magical thinking. Like this list of c
ontradictory symptoms, the book is a strange hybrid. On the one hand, it recognizes the social and historical nature of our relationship to consumption (the materialistic world). On the other, as psychiatrists have done with shyness, shortness, mourning, indifference to sex, and other former eccentricities and unpleasant facts of life, this book declares overconsumption a medical disorder. The diagnosis carries with it a great boon to their profession and its allies in the pharmaceutical industry. Now, shopping can be treated by psychotherapy (and hopefully, reimbursed by insurance) or (like shyness, shortness, etc.) with drugs. Indeed, in 2003 a study published in theJournal of Clinical Psychiatry announced an “effective treatment” for “compulsive acquisition disorder”: the antidepressant Celexa.
The news may not be good for General Motors. But it has been good for Celexa’s U.S. licensee, Forest Laboratories. Thanks in no small part to the happy little pill, Forest last year achieved an 84 percent rise in profits and became a little darling among Big Pharma investors. Overconsumption may cause misery. But companies love misery.
FEBRUARY 26
Another ski-related trouble offers another clue about consumption.
Paul has meetings in Montpelier today. He gets up early and before leaving removes my skis from his car and puts them into mine, so I can go out when I’m finished working. Then he drives off with the wax kit in his car.
At two, I am ready to get up from my desk. I put on my ski clothes, warm up the car. Soon, I’m on my way to the Craftsbury Sports Center, widely regarded as the best place for cross-country skiing in the Northeast, and I’m psyched. Halfway there, this time with my good, waxable skis, it occurs to me that I didn’t see the wax kit in the back of the car. I pull to the side of the road, open the hatchback, riffle through the bag. I’m right. I get behind the wheel again. Traversing some of the most breathtaking landscape in the northeastern United States, I am locked in a windowless cell of anxiety.
Here’s what I’m worried about: I’m going to have to beg a few swipes of wax from the guy in the warming hut. “Can I borrow…” “May I have…” “You see, Paul drove away with…” “I’m doing this project and…” I devise various strategies, compose and rehearse appropriate lines. I don’t want to sound too demanding, but I don’t want to be too nonchalant, either. A note of apology might be appropriate, but abjectness is over the top. Basically, I want to ask for help in such a way as to prevent anyone from noticing I’m asking.
Not Buying It Page 4