Don’t mention the E-word

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It’s been baffling and annoying this morning to see so much news coverage of the non-story that the National Trust and Cadbury have dropped the word ‘Easter’ from their annual Easter Egg Hunt event.

First, it’s hard to work out who planted this story in the media as a bit of speculative PR.  The most likely suspect would be the church, as this one of the main times of year it likes to pop up and remind people how much we’ve forgotten about Christianity in the UK – as a result, generating lots of publicity for….Christianity in the UK.  Alternatively, it could just as easily have been planted by the National Trust or Cadbury, who have seen a massive spike in the publicity for their event as a result of this coverage.

So, the fact that an obvious PR story rather than actual news item can gain so much coverage is annoying.

Equally irritating is how the usual suspects from religious interest groups can stir someone as senior as  the Prime Minister of our country into getting involved in such a debate, with Theresa May calling the omission of the word Easter ‘absolutely ridiculous’.

First, she seems to have been very badly briefed on this, as they’ve only removed the word ‘Easter’ from the title, and it remains prominent in the rest of the advertising. Does the PM not have better things to do than get involved in this?
Second, what business is it of hers – or any church leader – to get involved in how a company decides to brand and present their event?

This episode is another example of how the voices  of certain interest groups are given too much attention in the UK – however ridiculous their claims are. To illustrate how ridiculous this particular example has become, Archbishop of York John Sentamu is quoted as saying “To drop Easter from Cadbury’s Easter Egg Hunt in my book is tantamount to spitting on the grave of Cadbury.”

Religious voices somehow still seem to have greater influence than other interest groups  in the UK – and this minor episode is yet another example of religion’s over-reach into the business of our state, and another illustration of why we need to support groups like the British Humanist Association to challenge this influence.

On the CUSP of a better future?

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Yesterday I was at the launch of a new initiative, called the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). The event was chaired (and the centre is run) by Professor Tim Jackson, one of the country’s leading thinkers on sustainable economics, and the author of one of the best (and most accessible) books on the subject – Prosperity Without Growth.

It was really pleasing to see that a centre has now been set up to push forward work on the idea of sustainable prosperity – or creating a world “in which people everywhere have the capability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological and resource constraints of a finite planet.”

This is not just about climate change, economic inequality or well-being – it incorporates most modern progressive issues and touches every area of our individual lives and society. In short, it is probably the most important challenge that human beings are presented with right now.

So, the launch of this centre is welcome (to say the least), and another useful aspect of the centre is its focus on both research and practice – not only putting together rigorous academic thinking on how to achieve a more sustainable future, but also testing this thinking out and putting it into action, as the latter is what is most urgently needed. I hope the work of CUSP will be complementary to that of existing organisations like nef, who have done great work in getting individuals, politicians, businesses and other institutions to take this range of issues seriously and start gaining traction in tackling the challenges they present.

One question that was asked at the launch event yesterday was how we can get politicians to take action on a radically sustainable agenda. Caroline Lucas gave a good answer, in that we need more courageous politicians who are prepared to do more radical things, and that the only way they’ll develop the confidence to do this is to know that they won’t be punished at the ballot box for doing so. The way to give them this confidence is for people to show them that we want these policies.

So, ultimately, we – the public – have an important role to play in making this change happen – by being vocal in our support for sustainable economic policies, opposing the status quo, supporting companies and institutions that are trying a new way of working and generally by showing politicians this is how we want the future to be.

In conclusion, this will only happen by us leading the politicians. So let’s join the movement, support these organisations and start showing politicians that we want more fun, and less stuff!

#CUSPlaunch #MakeProsperityMatter

Must have it?

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Acquisition anxiety – how our constant need to acquire things is hurting us

Picture the scene. You’re walking through a beautiful village in the countryside. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the whole scene is idyllic. What is the first thought that enters your mind?  Is it something along the lines of “I feel happy to be alive” or it is more like “I wonder how much that divine 2-bedroom cottage is?”?

There seems to be something about modern life, perhaps in middle age when one has greater affluence, that makes it hard for people to just experience and enjoy things in their own right, and instead leads to them wanting to acquire them.

It would be tempting to label this thinking with the pejorative adjective of ‘childish’, yet it is quite clearly anything but, as I certainly didn’t have this tendency when I was younger, yet now I can see it in many of my friends and – to my great shame – in myself sometimes.

This need to acquire things isn’t just driven by an actual desire for the item under discussion (although it may be to some extent) – it’s also driven by a more defensive impulse – the fear of losing ground to other people and the desire to keep up with others in a competitive world.

We see the world as a race to maximise our own resources (in competition against everyone else), and in such a highly competitive worldview we become afraid of not making the most of our opportunities and losing ground on other people.

This leads to everyone feeling a pressure to acquire, protect or monetise things – from houses to new ideas – in fear of them being snapped up by someone else or rising in value because of the market so that they’re unaffordable in future. It’s a similar reaction to throwing your arms around possession defensively and shouting ‘it’s mine!’.

This isn’t simply a form of status anxiety – it’s a form of ‘acquisition anxiety’, jostling for resources within a highly competitive environment.

And this pressure never ends – as even when we have reached the enviable position of having a perfectly good house, we may be anxious about taking the next step to buy another one or a bigger one, in order to make the most of the decent position we have got ourselves into – even though in our hearts we may be perfectly happy with what we have and realise that this is adding unnecessary pressure and distraction to our lives.

Why does it matter?

This acquisition anxiety is a powerful influence in our lives and can have a range of negative effects on us. It reduces life to a series of acquisitions and our success in living to our ability to gain more material goods, which most of us know by now is no way to gain fulfilment. It distracts us from the things that really matter in life, including appreciating the experience of living itself. It stops us from being content with what we have. It also creates a massive level of self-imposed stress and pressure for us to endure.

The development of this trait isn’t simply a product of middle age, as it isn’t confined just to people in this group.  Instead, it reflects a broader and worrying cultural trend – namely, that neo-liberal, market-led thinking now dominates our culture so much that it has seeped in to influence our own individual worldviews.

How can we change things?

We mentioned earlier that this ‘acquisition anxiety’ was a feature of jostling for resources within a highly competitive environment.

Some of the resources in the modern world (like houses in the UK) are finite, but others (like ideas) are not.  The immediate issue is not with the availability of resources though, but rather with the culture of extreme individualistic competition, and if we got rid of this toxic atmosphere we would remove much of the ever-accelerating ‘race to the bottom’ that we are currently on.

The world doesn’t have to be hyper-competitive like this but for the past 30 years global thinking has been dominated by a neoliberal market-led view of economics and this has seeped into every area of society, including our own worldviews and attitudes as individuals.

We need a different economic model to drive a shift in culture away from neoliberal individualism and towards greater compassion, collaboration and a fairer distribution of wealth.  See my book ‘Modern Life – as good as it gets?’ for more thoughts on what such a world might look like and how we could get there.

This cultural shift would not only make life a great deal more pleasant and fulfilling for the majority of the world’s population (including us in the west) but would also provide a more viable way forward for a world with an ever-increasing population to share resources between. The alternative may be chaos and breakdown – or a dystopian picture of a future where 1% have all the resources and the other 99% have very little.

A final aside, on the specific issue of housing. Aside from the broader shift in thinking outlined above, we need to protect certain resources from the competitive pressure of the marketplace – and this includes housing. The UK is one of the most inflated housing markets in the world – in part due to scarcity but also further inflated by second home ownership, the buy-to-let market and other symptoms of an extreme, marketised housing system.

We should therefore ease the pressure on the UK housing market, not just by building more houses, but by seeing decent housing as a basic right for everyone, and therefore beyond the reach of the market – so that people are not able to own more than one property.  This would help to take the heat out of the housing market and lead us towards a saner vision of housing – one that is held in many other European countries.

The commodification of wisdom

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I like what the School of Life is trying to do – bringing philosophy, wisdom and broader thought into our daily lives.  Indeed, Life Squared shares a similar aim in much of its work.

Where we differ (apart from size, finances etc!) is that Life Squared is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to offer its ideas and output to anyone who needs it, regardless of their ability to pay – whereas the School of Life is a business, offering its wisdom only to those who can afford it.  This is not a criticism in itself – it’s a business with a positive social outcome.

But I worry that the finance-generating side of the business could be diluting the credibility of their content.

It was seeing some of their new products in a local shop that made me feel sufficiently queasy to write a post on it.  These products include 6 pencils, each embossed with a ‘key word’ (such as ‘tragedy’) from psychoanalysis, literature and visual art – all for the sum of £12.  Or a set of 3 essentially blank note books for £15.

Not only does this seem like a lot to pay for very little, but surely it also contradicts some of the wisdom and ideas that they are trying to spread to people?  And also by commodifying these ideas in a rather throw-away manner like this it feels like the SOL leaves itself open to accusations of being inauthentic, which may reduce its credibility as a source of wisdom and stimulating, challenging ideas.  Just a thought.

Consuming experiences, not stuff, is still consumerism

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I went to an interesting talk at the RSA today by James Wallman who has just published a book called ‘Stuffocation’. His basic argument was that in the society of scarcity of around a generation ago, what mattered in life was having more stuff – i.e. in a society of scarcity, materialism is not a dirty word.

But as we have moved into a society of plenty, materialism and ‘more stuff’ are no longer the answer to the question of ‘What will make us happy?’. So far, so good.

He goes on to suggest that, in our society of plenty, what we do is now more important than what we havein terms of its contribution to our happiness. He therefore advocates the idea of ‘experientialism’ – of seeking experiences rather than new stuff.

He made some interesting arguments but the trouble is he didn’t go far enough. He was careful to state that he didn’t want his ideas to be seen as anti-consumerist – but why not? The only way they would have any real value is if they wereanti-consumerist. Otherwise, he is simply shifting the problem of consumption from stuff to experiences. We’ll be on a treadmill seeking the next new experience and trying to find the money and lifestyles to enable these experiences to happen, and rather than enjoying our experiences our lives will become a list of experiences to try and tick off. It’ll be no different to our attitudes towards stuff today. And in fact we already have this attitude towards experiences! See the forthcoming Life Squared booklet ‘How to achieve less’ – out at the end of the year – for more details on this issue.

The problem we have in the modern world is about much more than having too much stuff and the fact that this doesn’t make us happy. The broader problem is the fact that our lives are focussed on acquiring this stuff and of chasing a particular vision of ‘the good life’ that seeks us to acquire more. The point is that we’re making too many sacrifices in terms of our personal identities, autonomy, stress levels and fulfilment in order to chase this pointless acquisition.

We live in a bubble in the modern world. We need to help people burst this bubble and live truly autonomous lives. That is the only way we’ll lead the fulfilled lives we really want – and sadly just changing our consumption from stuff to experiences won’t do this.

Life versus adverts

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I had a much-needed day off recently and decided to visit a few places in London – like the London Library (wonderful) and Westminster Abbey (claustrophobic in its conservativism).

I ended up at the Westfield shopping centre at Shepherd’s Bush to meet a friend for dinner before going to a gig, and I had to write a blog entry for it because I’ve never seen anything like it.  It’s a cathederal to consumerism – a building on such a massive scale that it seems to go on forvever.

All the shops and ads surrounding them are of course glossy, but the place (like most shopping centres) feels fake; a place that sucks meaning out of one’s life rather than adds it.

All of the pictures in the shops and adverts are of people doing real things – from walking in the country to laughing with friends – yet almost none of the products they are advertising are actually essential for undertaking these activities.  It is as if the retailers know very well that buying their wares won’t make anyone happy, so they have to sell them by associating them with the simple, authentic activities that actually do give us fulfilment – like walking in nature or having fun with friends – in order to sell them to you.  Yet their wares won’t contribute at all to your enjoyment of these activities – so in the end they are simply void, vacuous, worthless.  It’s worth remembering this when you’re feeling yourself being sucked in by an advert!

Overall, the experience leaves one with a sense of emptiness and a desire to get back to the real things in life that actually do matter!

The joy of advertising

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My dislike of advertising grows stronger by the day – partly because of the corrosive and limiting effect it can have on people’s lives, worldviews and aspirations, but also partly because of the insulting, manipulative rubbish that the industry continues to pump out.

Take this new McDonald’s ad for example – peddling the idea that burgers can mend bridges between families.  It’s so obviously revolting as an idea I really don’t understand why more people don’t complain more about adverts like these – I know lots of people get annoyed by them but maybe there’s just no outlet for complaining about them.  Hopefully that will change soon with an idea we’re working on…

As a final treat in this post – and when you thought things couldn’t get more absurd, Justin Timberlake has joined the ranks of celebs becoming ‘Creative Directors’ for big brands, as he is unveiled as the ‘Creative Director’ of Bud Light Platinum.  This is of course nonsense in itself, but the real fun is in the press releases. Says Paul Chibe, vp U.S. marketing, Anheuser-Busch:

 “Justin Timberlake is one of the greatest creative minds in the entertainment industry, and his insights will help us further define Bud Light Platinum’s identity in the lifestyle space.”

Lifestyle space.  Ahem.

Ghastly xmas ads

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It’s bad form I’m sure to put a second consecutive post from the same person but Charlie Brooker does know how to skewer the shallowness and depressing nature of advertising with some humour – certainly better than me ranting angrily about it for several lines! Here is his article about the glut of ’emotional’ xmas TV ads currently being chucked out by the large chains.

Check out Life Squared’s free publication Xmas² for ideas on how to avoid too much commercial nonsense at Christmas.

Evil Weetabix

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Great article by Charlie Brooker in today’s Guardian about the repugnant practice of advertising to kids, and how consumerism is finding new ways to enter our lives.

Consumerism for babies – part 2

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A few months ago I wrote about the highly questionable presence of Bounty packs in maternity wards (see this post for a reminder) and the unpleasant form of ‘captive consumerism’ they seem to enforce on new parents.

In the last week the Independent has also covered this issue in that explains more of the commercial workings behind the scheme – and the evidence they present makes the whole idea even more unpalatable.

Both the National Childbirth Trust and the Royal College of Midwives object to this practice, so it’s about time we saw it stopped. Contact the NHS Confederation to tell them you want to see an end to it.