Consumerism and Happiness

Can we have both?

Photo by Ph B on Unsplash

I watched the Netflix documentary Buy Now!: The Shopping Conspiracy, and it’s very good and very horrifying. The images of beaches clogged with our “donated” clothes and the simulations of cities covered in the plastic that we will create if we continue to consume at our current rates—well, they’re not great.

Therefore, I highly recommend you watch it! At the heart of the documentary is a simple message: we can’t keep doing this or we’ll (literally!) drown in our own crap. That said, the documentary also makes clear what we all know—tackling this problem will not be easy. We have become so reliant on single use plastic, especially—and plastic is somehow in everything, including clothing, the coating on the cardboard milk container we think is “better” than buying the plastic one, the lids of the containers we buy because they aren’t plastic, etc.

Meanwhile, very wily and very intelligent people have made it their business to sell us stuff. Their job is made even easier because shopping really does make us happy. I should know better, and yet I love nothing more than to have a budget, and to go into a store I love, and to spend that budget. I touch everything, and pick things up and put them down, and decide on one thing, and then I compare it to something else, and then I choose between them as if I’m Sophie from the film. And then I love to take what I bought home and to open the packages and admire what I bought. It feels great. For at least five minutes.

And of course it feels great! The designers of these systems know that, while I am really comparing two things I do not actually need, I am using the same mental muscles our ancestors evolved to prowl the savannah, finding berries. What joy must have been produced—what a gorgeous hit of dopamine—when they dug up a particularly large tuber or found a hive dripping with honey or a berry bush bursting with fruit.

Nowadays, we replicate this evolutionary tic in supermarkets and big box stores. Only our berries come in plastic, and we go home and wash them and put them in more plastic, and then we throw them away into a plastic trash bag, which we then take out to the curb and put in our plastic trash can.

I’m going to admit something here that I find both reprehensible and real in myself—I love to fill up a trash bag. Every time I take out the trash, and it’s really full, I have this bizarre sense of accomplishment. Like I did something great. I feel like the trash bag represents something—I have lived, it whispers, as if I’m a character in a DeLillo novel. This makes no sense and it’s gross and I don’t really believe it, with my conscious brain. But there it is, anyway, frolicking around my cerebrum.

I am a consumption monster, as my corporate overlords intended me to be.

In the days after watching this documentary, I was spiraling. How will I eat yogurt? I thought, as I googled “non-plastic yogurt brands” and then “how to make my own yogurt.” Yogurt, to me, is the apotheosis of why living without plastic seems impossible. I love yogurt! It is good for me! I am told to eat yogurt! But when I walk down the yogurt aisle I see that yogurt is one of the most plasticky plastic plastickers to plastic.

My friend Erin talked me down. She reminded me that it’s about baby steps and that nothing any individual does can compare to what the major corporations do, so I am not individually responsible for the environment. And she is right! Thanks, Erin.

In a more reasonable approach, I started thinking about the small steps I could make, and, as always, Dr. Laurie Santos came to the rescue. She’s a Yale professor and expert in positive psychology, and her free Coursera course will change your life. Her podcast is also excellent, and she recently redistributed this episode on loneliness and how to combat it.

Long story short, the episode is about how our brains trick us into thinking that we want to be efficient and not go to the store or wait in lines or interact with check-out clerks. So engineers (who are people trained to think about efficiency and, stereotypically, are introverts) invented ATMs and self-checkout lanes. The problem, as Dr. Santos explains, is that our brains think we need to be efficient and productive, but in reality our brains need interaction with other humans.

Couple this idea with the fact that Amazon took this as far as possible (as Buy Now! does a great job explaining), so that you can click one button and have something arrive directly to your door, with zero thought or interaction. So our lying brains tell us we’re being incredibly efficient, even as our savannah-trained primate brains get a little dopamine hit from finding what it thinks are the berries that will keep our clan from starving.

In reality, however, we’ve forgone the possibility for what Santos explains are happiness top-ups (interacting with other humans) AND we’ve put money into a system that is literally ruining the planet AND we’ve now got something we might not need that is plastic, wrapped in more plastic, to be delivered by someone who works for a company that would happily work them to death if doing so made a fifty cent profit for its shareholders. Wheee!

So this is my first baby step. No more Amazon deliveries! Instead, I am going to go for a happiness twofer—interacting with real humans even as I stick it to Bezos and his fucking superyacht, superyachts being the apotheosis of everything wrong with us as a species.

One major motivation behind this strategy is that going to actual stores is something I need to do because I’m still fucking weird after the pandemic. My little inner introvert LOVED not leaving the house. It especially loved not driving, and I got even weirder about driving. Especially because I call my newish Prius “The Screaming Mimi,” as it is covered in sensors that scream at me when I get near anything. It even slams on the brakes when I pull out of my driveway because of WEEDS (tiny weeds!) that I guess it thinks are children? And it does so while SCREAMING, and it’s giving me an apoplexy.

Anyway, I’ve been punted out of my post-pandemic torpor by the election (yay??) and I’ve been super social the last few weeks, and I realize this is another way to get those happiness top-up interactions. Instead of ordering shit the second I “need” it, I’m making lists. This means that a) I can figure out if really “need” something by letting it sit on the list for a bit before I purchase it and b) I can organize my list and I can go to actual stores, ideally run by local humans and not corporate megalords. I reframe these trips from onerous wastes of time to opportunities to engage with my local community and to stick it to The Man.

So I took my refrigerator’s water filter out of my Amazon cart and I put it on my Busy Beaver list. Busy Beaver¹ is a local-ish chain that is not Home Depot (which can fuck itself), and I can easily go to a Busy Beaver after I volunteer on Fridays. I love the Lawrenceville Busy Beaver because I always have a weird conversation with the clerks there, and there are always weird people there. Like me! I am weird. We are weird together. I am reminded that humanity is weird and delightful, and not what Instagram tells me people are, which is horrible.

Maybe I’ll start making yogurt next, who knows. But at least, in the meantime, I won’t have helped Bezos buy a throw pillow for his fucking superyacht (don’t get me started), I’ll have received a little happiness top up interaction, I’ll have supported a local-ish business that is NOT fucking Home Depot (which can, once again, fuck itself), and I’ll have consumed less by not auto-buying in the moment everything my monkey mind tells me I “need.”

All of that said… yes, I’ve also bought a water filter that is PLASTIC, but I do need it since we have lead in our water after they replaced our lead pipes (which is a mind fuck, right there), so we need the filters, but the plastic water filters are taking out the lead only to maybe put in microplastics, which might cause cancer, so there’s our second mind fuck in this single paragraph.

Ain’t life grand?

Please comment with any yogurt recipes, existential crises, or tips on how you’re using less plastic than I am. I love you all. Maybe I’ll catch you down at the Lawrenceville Busy Beaver, which I am pretending is a chain owned by nice lesbians. xo

1. Please don’t “well, actually” me that Busy Beaver is run by scientologists or cannibals or human traffickers, because I have to buy my water filters SOMEWHERE. Thank you.