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.

Why tax is a moral issue

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There’s been a lot in the press about tax recently.  The leak of data from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca confirms my view that tax is more of a moral issue than a practical one – and that paying tax fairly is a moral duty.

Let’s start by defining what tax is.  It’s about contributing your fair share to keep society running well, including funding public services and supporting those in need.

It says a lot for the dominance of the neoliberal, individualistic way of thinking in most western societies that the idea of tax is often cloaked in convenient double talk portraying it in a negative light – usually focussing on the idea of the ‘tax man’ – a shadowy figure who will take your money from you (to be spent on who knows what).  Many people seek to minimise the taxes they pay, but why can’t we see paying tax as the positive moral act that it is – like doing a service for your community or helping an old lady across the road?

So, paying tax is simply ‘doing your bit’. If we see it this way, as a moral issue, paying tax becomes a question of how much you’re prepared to ‘play fair’ as a member of society – to what extent you are prepared to play your part to contribute.

It’s also an unusual thing within ethics – a relatively simple moral issue. The government sets specific rates of tax we need to pay, and there are legal consequences if we fail to pay at these rates.

Yes, there are loopholes here and there in the tax system which can complicate the practical side of things, and enable an individual or company to minimise or avoid paying tax altogether –  but these are practical matters and to my mind the moral (as opposed to the practical) side remains simple and clear – it’s following the spirit of the principle of paying your fair share of tax that matters.  So, if you have to go to significant lengths to identify loopholes to avoid paying tax or minimise it, then it’s pretty likely you’re not behaving in the spirit of the idea and therefore not behaving morally.

The fact is that if you don’t pay enough tax you are behaving selfishly, anti-socially and amorally.

As a quick aside, the people (and more often, companies) who explain their lack of payment of tax by saying they contribute to the economy in other ways (like creating jobs through their wealth) are missing the point spectacularly.  Tax is a way for everyone – rich and poor alike – to make an equal contribution (according to their means) to society. Paying tax correctly is a non-negotiable – it’s the starting point of your contribution, and other ways of contributing to a society or economy can follow this – but they do not replace it.

Finally, back to the issue that prompted this blog post in the first place – tax havens and offshore companies.

From a moral perspective, it’s a no-brainer – every individual and company should pay tax in the country they are based in. If they are based in more than one country they should pay tax proportional to the amount of time they stay in each (as individuals) or the amount of income they make in each (as companies). Any attempts to manipulate the picture of where an individual is resident or where and how a company makes money should be seen as an immoral act – and also illegal.

It therefore follows that the entities (including tax havens and offshore companies) that enable individuals or companies to manipulate the picture in this way in order to pay less tax (i.e. to avoid ‘doing their bit’) – as well as the legal firms that provide advice on how to do this – are immoral and should be made illegal.  We should get rid of them altogether.

Right royal hypocrisy

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Poor old Prince William. He obviously cares about the conservation of wildlife but his views have been shaped by his own uniquely privileged, hunting-tradition background and this makes him vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy. His latest well-intentioned but mistaken intervention was to suggest that trophy hunting of animals could be condoned in certain circumstances:

“when one [an animal] is infertile, he’s at the end of his life, if somebody out there wants to pay that money – and it wouldn’t be me – but if somebody did, then as long as that money goes back into protection of the species then it is a justifiable means of conserving species that are under serious threat”

Clearly, his argument is missing one very important point – that even if an animal is infertile or coming towards the end of its life, it remains a living creature that demands some compassion and respect, rather than being treated like a resource. This is one of the central arguments of the anti-hunting movement, and does not become invalid just because an animal has become old or its extermination would raise money for a good cause.

The prince’s interventions on conservation would gain more credibility and be less vulnerable to claims of hypocrisy (like when he went hunting a day before launching a wildlife appeal) if if he was able to distance himself from the hunting set that he was born into. Then, he could be a truly useful advocate for wildlife.

One planet living?

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I’m in the process of writing a booklet for our forthcoming ‘Story of Energy’ project at Life Squared, and my suspicions are proving correct – it’s almost impossible to find a simple description of what a real 1 planet lifestyle would look like for the ordinary individual. Fill in a footprint calculator (like Bioregional’s) and even if you give answers that show the minimum level of impact, it still tells you you’re using over 2 planets’ resources. This may well be true (given the resource-hungry infrastructure around our lives) but even so, we need to know what a real one-planet lifestyle would look like. Otherwise how can anyone know what the green movement is aiming for? I get hugely frustrated with the good-intentioned but vague and fluffy resources and advice coming from even the biggest and best environmental organisations. Enjoinders to fly less and grow your own veg are fine, but until we build a more detailed and meaningful picture of what each person would need to do in order to live within their share of the planet, even the people with the best intentions are going to be living 2 planet lifestyles – and why bother doing this if you’re not going to do it properly? It really is time to define our goals and vision better as a movement – even if the reality of what we’re suggesting (a real one planet lifestyle) isn’t palatable to some people. We need to get real. And this might even encourage people to take more action now while we can.

Our hidden impacts

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One of the important features of modern life that Life² helps people to deal with is the increased level of complexity within which people live. One example of this complexity is the chain of processes, people and impacts that sit behind even the most simple products or services we consume. As I noted in ‘Modern life‘ – the ingredients of a typical BLT sandwich could have travelled 31,000 miles before the final product reaches the supermarket shelf.

So, our actions and purchasing decisions have a much more complex and wide range of impacts than we might think, and we all need to become much more aware of what these impacts are. Life² helps people to do this through its resources such as the knowledge base, and there are now other people and initiatives helping people to develop this area of knowledge. Bestselling author Daniel Goleman looks at this topic in his new book ‘Ecological Intelligience‘, which although flawed in its loyalty towards free markets and economic growth, gives some interesting ideas on how ‘eco labelling’ schemes might be set up to help people understand the impacts behind their products and services.

Perhaps the most successful initiative to show these hidden impacts has been ‘The Story of Stuff‘ – a free web-based video that has now been downloaded 10 million times. Although it has its own inherent biases that one should be aware of, the film provides some useful, accessible information. A book of the same name has now just been published by Annie Leonard.