A Life Less Throwaway. Tara Button
on how to find long-lasting homeware, see Chapter 13.)
Resist the lure of the latest technology
There is a sort of ‘natural’ obsolescence that occurs when a new object comes to market and is so good and useful that no one wants the old version. The iPod killed the CD, the CD killed the cassette and the cassette killed the record for everyone apart from hipsters. It’s like a technological survival of the fittest.
It’s not helpful or realistic to expect the world to stop inventing. Past innovations have meant that we live longer now, get to experience more things, travel more widely and have a broader understanding of the world and the people in it. Innovation may even lead to our salvation, with inventions such as Tesla’s solar roof tiles. But it’s also left us with a poisoned and polluted planet and allowed us to harm each other at an increasing rate and distance.
It’s worth questioning our upgrading impulses and thinking through the implications of it. Technology companies turn to psychological obsolescence to make us upgrade whether the new product is significantly better or not. There’s no real reason why Apple should launch new products every year, but mostly we accept this unquestioningly. Start to question it. This is vital, because the lifespans of these products are now shorter than ever, and electrical waste is growing at a scary rate. Eight per cent of our household waste is now electronic10 and 42 million tons of it was generated in 2014.11 Much of it still works perfectly. It’s estimated that if we sold the items instead of trashing them, people in the UK would make £220 million and people in the USA would make around $1 billion.12 It isn’t just that many of these products are toxic once they begin to rot in the ground, but also that they have valuable and rare materials still inside them. These are lost to us forever, buried underneath a town’s worth of carrot peelings, chicken bones and poopy nappies.
In one episode of the TV series What to Buy and Why,13 my engineer friend Tom Lawton goes to a trash heap and picks out a pair of earphones, a vacuum cleaner and a microscooter. Within a couple of minutes, he finds the problems and fixes them easily. The items are worth several hundred pounds.
If we could just make a clone army of Toms and set them up fixing the world’s electronics, all would be well. One Tom in every town. When I suggested this to him, he laughed and replied, ‘There used to be – tinkers.’
These people are becoming rarer, but they do exist, and if we start making the effort to repair rather than replace, there will soon be many more of them. We can also set up petitions and lobby the government to help us repair and reuse. The state runs our recycling facilities because it sees the benefits. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t run a reuse facility as well.
Governments can help in other ways too. For example, Sweden has reduced the tax on repairing to try and encourage people to go down that route.
It took time for us to get used to the idea of recycling and it will take us a while to get into the swing of repairing and reusing. But if governments and reuse companies make it easy and promote the benefits, then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t become completely natural to send products off to the repair yard instead of to the junkyard. (For more on repairing, see Chapter 14 and Appendix I.)
Read on
I believe that psychological obsolescence is even more insidious and dangerous than physical obsolescence, because with the right messaging, marketers can get into your head and make you dislike the things that you liked perfectly well when you bought them. So read on. Many of the chapters in this book are focused on helping you deal with the lure of psychological obsolescence:
• Chapters 4 and 5 explore advertising and marketing. You will learn how to combat these messages and buy things on your own terms.
• Chapters 6 and 7 will talk you through how to discover your own clothing style and step off the trend treadmill.
• Chapter 9 will help you discover your inner purpose so that whatever you buy nourishes the important goals in your life.
• Chapters 11 to 15 will give you the practical advice you need while you’re out shopping and once you have the products in your life.
We’ll start with advertising – the fuel that makes obsolescence run.
How many people does it take to sell a lightbulb?
According to Fifties industrial designer Brooks Stevens, advertising exists to give people ‘the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary’.1 Although it’s hard to imagine now, we are not naturally rampant consumers. Marketers had to pump this drug of desire into us.
Drawing on my decade working in advertising, this chapter will give you a peek behind the curtain to show you how the Wizards of Ads bamboozle us into spending money we may not have on things we may not really want.
BEHIND THE ADVERTISING CURTAIN
It was a bright day outside, but you’d never have known it. I was sitting on one of several black fake-leather couches in a vast dark warehouse. The only lights were at the back of the room where the car was waiting for its close-up.
Looking at the scores of stressed-out and scurrying people who had been working on this project for countless days, it suddenly hit me just how bonkers my job really was. If you’re not familiar with how the ad industry works, this is what happens. Brace yourselves.
The car company decides to advertise their car and hires an agency. The ‘planners’ at the agency then do exhaustive research into the aptly named ‘target market’, delving deep into the details of how we think, feel and behave.
Occasionally brands want to change their audience or how people feel about their product, so they change their advertising, which is cheaper and easier than changing the actual product. We might think that we’re too savvy to be swayed by ad strategies, but this is sadly not the case. For example, when my old agency started telling parents that a certain chocolate spread brand was not just a treat but could be a ‘part of a healthy breakfast’, sales doubled. (The morality of employing a strategy like this tends to be ignored.)
Once the planners have a strategy, they hand it over to the ‘creatives’. In the case of this car ad, that was me. The strategy was to get people to see the car as a fashion item – I guess like a snazzy handbag that you drive to your granny in. Together with my creative partner and creative director, I spent weeks coming up with dozens of ways to turn this strategy into a poster concept.
Then things got practical. I auditioned over fifty models, looking them up and down to decide whether they had the ‘right look’ to make people want to buy a three-door hatchback. Incidentally, having to judge someone else’s appearance isn’t a comfortable or life-affirming activity. It manages to make you feel disconnected from your humanity, creepy and fat all at the same time. Despite my final choice being a size 6 (US size 2), the client who sat beside me on the black sofas confided that she was worried the model might be ‘too chubby’.
Finalising the outfit for this not-at-all-chubby woman then took several weeks of deliberation, research into the target audience and late-night fittings. What did we end up with? Cropped trousers, plimsolls and a layered T-shirt. A simple enough look you might think, but every detail had been debated and signed off by multiple people.
Then it was up to the clothes