Eating S**t (and liking it, too)

The purchasing of consumer goods is often an enjoyable experience. This doesn't just apply to those of us that do it excessively. There's a universal trait of pleasure that results from choice and subsequently from the creation of a consumer identity. So, looking at these two notions a little closer:

Choice denotes freedom and autonomy. As individuals with unique tastes and outlooks we select what appeals to us or what suits our circumstances best. I might buy a can of peeled tomatoes if my favourite meal is a pasta dish with a tomato-based sauce. You might buy lentils because you're a vegetarian and you need some supplementary iron in your diet. Theoretically, these choices are solely ours to make, but this is something of an illusion. If I want a can of chopped, peeled whole tomatoes that weighs in at 500g, I can't buy it because no local supermarket stocks it. To a degree, this is fair enough; we can't ask for exactly what we want. The point remains, however, that the freedom associated with choice is not as pure as it sometimes feels like it is.

Consumer identity is built upon this structured freedom of choice. The clothes you choose to wear, the technological devices through which you communicate and interact with multimedia, the food you eat and your preferred form of transport are parts of who you are because they compose your day-to-day experiences and shape your interaction with other people. You express yourself through a plethora of small fragments of meaning.

This is pretty suggestive of a possible reason for brand loyalty and compulsive shopping. Both seem to be somewhat desperate acts. Brand loyalty resounds as something peculiarly religious. It's the worship of something non-physical, often on irrational grounds. Just as a Catholic Christian takes his or her religion to be a critical component of his or her identity, so the disciples of brand names of consumer products integrate the brand into a sense of who they are. Compulsive shopping is similar in its apparent search for 'something to fill the hole'. The notion of consumer activity being used as some sort of substitute for filling up the 'emptiness inside' is almost cliched, but perhaps this is not without cause. This kind of behaviour frames consumerism as a sort of religion for late capitalist societies.

Most religions offer some form of transcendence, which I personally believe is an important part of human existence. When I talk of transcendence, I'm referring to the sensation of somewhat losing a sense of oneself, of gaining an awareness of being part of something larger or something eternal. Modern means of reaching such a state seem to be found in the use of some illicit drugs, religious experiences, and love. Unfortunately, the inherently material nature of consumerism doesn't provide the means for transcendence. Those who attempt to 'fill the hole' this way tend to remain disappointed, because they're unconsciously trying to correct a spiritual problem with a material solution.

I can't pretend to have the answer to this problem, so I'll look instead at some of the goods we buy that are of questionable value. One of the principal techniques of therapists for shopaholics is to try to instil a sense of distinction between want and need. Here are a couple of things that I think I can reason into the former category:


Portable DVD players. I work part-time in sales in consumer electronics, and some of the things I sell I admittedly struggle to believe in. This is one such thing. Now that discipline is pretty much admonished as a method of parenting, one of the only ways to shut the kids up while they're pestering you in the back seat is to put a 7-10 inch LCD screen in front of their faces. Power the thing through your cigarette lighter to suck up the car battery extra fast, and let Billy's favourite movie teach him the things that he should be learning from you. Nothing like some high-powered electronic media to further weaken the ties of the nuclear family.

Global positioning systems. A street directory costs as little as a twentieth the amount. The time it takes to power up these things and get them to communicate with satellites dwarfs the time it takes to work out where to go from a map book. OK, sympathy must be extended to those that can't read a map to save themselves, and in those cases, maybe the lower-end models make a worthwhile purchase. I can better understand the purchase of one of the more basic units, but the higher-end ones have all sorts of useless crap tacked on to them, like bluetooth, a massive amount of hard drive space and synchronisation with your MP3 player. These things are a prime example of the way that technological developments sometimes strip us of our independence; why do it yourself when your GPS can do it for you?

Four-wheel drives. They guzzle fuel, they make for terrible parking, they're dangerous to other motorists and they're not as safe for the passengers as some would believe. They make a nice status symbol for anyone with an overpowering inferiority complex. They have no use in suburbia. If you live rurally, or regularly drive off the beaten track, as is the case in the photo, you've got more of a case for needing one. Still, whatever the state of the oil crisis, you can rest assured that it isn't really that bad if city folk are still driving these things around.

Wants, not needs. The real problem is, this stuff keeps our economy going. How do we escape it without fiscal devastation? That's something for a radical economist to answer.

Next post I want to look at emo culture.