A Life Less Throwaway. Tara Button
to buy for the long term, I found myself thinking far more deeply about what I wanted out of my life in the future. This meant that the possessions I ‘curated’ automatically started to reflect the deeper and more stable elements of my character, values and personal style. This has brought a lovely natural harmony to my home, creating an atmosphere in which I feel refreshed and calm because it is authentically ‘me’.
My home had previously been a stressful one. Every time I’d walked through my little kingdom and seen the toaster that wouldn’t pop, the wonky flat-pack drawers, dried-up biros and dodgy dishwasher, I’d feel anxiety rise up. Once I started surrounding myself with objects I could trust, my home became a much more relaxing and nurturing place to be.
Another delightful side effect of buying fewer things and not replacing your items so regularly is that you can afford to buy higher-quality, better-crafted products, so your quality of life can actually feel higher.
IS IT MINIMALISM?
Mindful curation definitely has its roots in the minimalist movement. However, while minimalism tends to be quite clear on what we should cut out of our lives (as much as possible), it can leave us hanging when it comes to deciding what to bring into them and how to bypass the pressures to buy more than we need.
With mindful curation, we aren’t trying to reduce our possessions down to a magic number of objects or compete to see who can live with the least. Instead, we’re finding out much more about ourselves and our values and using that knowledge as a shield against clutter and the tricks and temptations of marketers. So with mindful curation we’ll end up owning exactly the right amount for us – no more and no less – and this will be different for everyone.
MINDFUL CURATION VS MINDLESS CONSUMPTION
‘The best things in life aren’t things.’
Art Buchwald, satirist
Mindful curation is a simple idea, but it can be challenging at first because there are so many forces trying to get us to think in the opposite way – the way of ‘mindless consumption’.
Mindless consumption sounds free-spirited and potentially quite fun. It’s the unwritten hashtag for every photo uploaded by the ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’, the hidden subtitle on every ‘haul video’.
The danger of mindless consumption though is that it makes us morbidly materialistic, meaning that a huge amount of our attention is focused on our wealth, our stuff and our status. And materialistic people have been shown to be (deep breath) less generous, less agreeable, less healthy, less likely to help others, less satisfied with their lives, less satisfied with their jobs, less caring about the environment, more likely to gamble, more likely to be in debt, lonelier, worse at keeping friends and less close to the friends they do have. Oh, and materialistic kids do less well at school.1
In short – it’s really bad!
Yet advertisers, the government, our friends, and even our kids surround us with messages and put constant pressure on us to focus on materialistic things. On top of this, on average we see more than 5,000 marketing messages a day.2
Unsurprisingly, this takes its toll. Research shows that briefly subjecting someone to photos of luxury objects or even just words such as ‘status’ or ‘expensive’ can trigger a more depressed mood, feelings of wanting to outdo others and less willingness to socialise.3
Tim Kasser, who has been studying the effects of materialism for almost two decades, describes the impact as a ‘see-saw effect’. When we see ourselves as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘people’ (which is easily triggered through marketing messaging) we focus more on materialistic urges, such as our status and competitiveness. This causes an upswing of negative materialistic thoughts and a downswing of positive urges towards community, connection, generosity, trust and cooperation – all the things that have been proven to make our lives more fulfilling and happy.
So, when your grandad says that people were nicer in the ‘good old days’, in this aspect, it’s true. Our materialistic tendencies have increased so much in the last few decades that our sense of community, our trust in others and our ability to be happy have been gravely reduced.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT NOW?
I’m not going to spend too much time pressing this point, because I think we all know that mindless consumerism is pushing our poor planet to a crisis point. We need to save it, and dropping the ball isn’t really an option. We live on the ball, and we don’t have another one to move to.
But it isn’t just the planet that should concern us. The trend towards materialism is also increasingly taking its toll on our day-to-day lives because it tricks us into losing the personal connections that make us happy.
A study of 2,500 consumers over six years concluded that no matter how much money you had to spend, materialism was linked to an increase in loneliness and loneliness in turn increased materialism.4 In the Seventies and Eighties, only 11–20 per cent of Americans reported that they often felt lonely; in 2010 that figure rose to between 40 and 45 per cent.5 The Mental Health Foundation in the UK also reported in 2010 that 46 per cent of us felt that society was getting lonelier.6
Relying on social media for connection is like trying to live off multivitamins – they might be a nice add-on, but they don’t feed us in the way we need. Research has shown that increasing your friends on Facebook has no effect on your well-being at all, but increasing your ‘real world’ friends from ten to twenty people results in a significant life-altering improvement – the equivalent of a 50 per cent pay rise.7
How does materialism make us lonelier? The messages we see in ads and social media channels perpetuate a myth that having things or looking a certain way makes us worthy of love and admiration. It’s very natural to want to feel special and appreciated, so we start to focus on our looks and achievements and buy high-status items that others will admire. However, any admiration or connection we gain is on a shallow level, and because it isn’t based on anything authentic, it leaves us feeling disconnected and unsatisfied. So we try even harder to get the love we need by showing the world our possessions, our status and our achievements, never guessing that the constant focus on the self means that the connection to others isn’t going to happen.
Sadly, materialism and narcissism are on the rise. A study published in 2012 tracked the values of graduates since 1966 and found that the importance given to status, money and narcissistic life goals like ‘being famous’ had risen significantly, whereas the importance given to finding meaning and purpose in life and a desire to help others had fallen.8 In addition, a study of students over the last thirty years has found that college kids today are about 40 per cent lower in empathy than the students of twenty or thirty years ago.9
We have become ‘all about me’ rather than ‘all about we’. The irony is that self-focused people hurt themselves more than anyone else. I don’t feel that it is a coincidence that the use of antidepressants has gone up 400 per cent in the USA10 and doubled in Britain in the last decade.11
To add insult to injury, marketers know how much we crave the connections that are the cornerstone of our happiness, so their adverts are full of family bonding and friends having great times – all to sell us goods that in reality are driving us apart.
IS OUR STUFF GETTING IN THE WAY OF WHAT’S IMPORTANT?
In March 2010, a group of five Pacific Islanders who had lived all their lives with practically no possessions were flown to the UK to be part of a TV programme where they looked at British life.12 As they walked around their hosts’ houses and explored London, they were surprised by all the ‘useless extra things’ they saw, saddened that busy commuters wouldn’t stop and talk to them, and shocked at seeing homeless people. This would ‘never be allowed to happen’ in their community.
The tribesmen’s simple lives meant that they hadn’t lost sight of what was important: love, respect and enjoying each other’s company. When they first arrived, they were all given their own room in their