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.

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 value of reflection

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Good to see this interesting post by Matthew Taylor, Director of the RSA, outlining the value of reflection in our rational decision making processes. One paragraph in particular caught my eye:

Instead of ‘nudging’, which seeks to change choice architecture (for example, putting healthier food more easily in reach than unhealthy in canteens), the RSA’s ‘steer’ approach aims to give people the understanding and tools they need to change their own behaviour.

This is exactly the approach we are pioneering in a range of areas of people’s lives at Life Squared – from our consumption of resources to the way we approach our lives in the first place. We’ll soon be applying these principles to another important topic, which I can’t announce yet, but hopefully can in a couple of weeks!

For now though, check out Matthew’s post as well as Jonathan Haidt’s book he refers to, as his previous book ‘The happiness hypothesis‘ was very good.

Consumerism for babies

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It’s been a while since my last post because of a particularly busy period of work and the arrival of a new member of the Docwra household. The process of having a child has opened a door to a whole new world that many non-parents may be unaware of – and consumerism seems to have a strong hold over this new parenting world!

Take the Bounty pack for example – these are packs of free goodies given to new parents at the hospital just after their baby has been born. The Bounty pack reps are allowed to wander through the maternity wards distributing their packs – and they do this in a way that not only seems to have the blessing of the NHS, but that also seems to be an integral part of its maternity service.

This is a serious piece of misrepresentation, as in reality the Bounty pack is simply a commercial tool. It says it provides ‘expectant and new mums with…important information, expert advice, support and try before you buy samples’, but in reality it is simply a bag of samples and advertisements for baby products. Take out the promotional items and you are left with nothing of any informational value. And these promotional items are being presented to a captive audience, who are new to their role as parents and slightly vulnerable, masquerading as information from the country’s trusted health service.

I was so suprised at how a piece of commercialism was allowed to get into such a sensitive part of our health service in this way that I asked a midwife about it. They (slightly sheepishly) agreed that these packs are basically just a load of adverts and product samples.

I’m not having a go at our health service – it is one of our great institutions and the care we received was absolutely brilliant. I just feel this is a great example of how the influence of consumerism can seep into every aspect of our lives – from the minute we are born – and that we need to do something to halt its spread.

Older people’s well-being

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At Life², we’re researching the topic of older people’s well-being, in preparation for a future project.

Although we’re living longer and in better physical health than ever, many people are still suffering in their later years from preventable causes like depression, loneliness and isolation. The well-being of the over-65’s has been neglected to date, and we could do a great deal more, both as a state and in society generally, to understand the factors that prevent or promote flourishing in older people, and to take action to improve the quality of later life.

IPPR have done some interesting research on the well-being of older people as part of an ongoing programme. The findings are interesting and sometimes unexpected. For example, studies show that litter and traffic are more important concerns to older people than fear of crime and young people in public spaces. Click here and here to read a couple of their reports.

Stay tuned in the coming months to find about our project on flourishing for older peoople…

Making mental health accessible

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The Mental Health Foundation do some good work in breaking down the big (and, for many people, scary) topic of mental health and showing how it relates to some more specific topics that can feature in many of our daily lives and experiences of life – including loneliness, happiness and fear. Their most recent report asks whether modern life is leading to greater loneliness.

This is important work, as it encourages people to see mental health not as a taboo subject, but as something we all need to look at and work on in life – just like our physical health. One of the most fundamental ways we can improve our experience of life is by improving the way we deal with this experience and how we see the world. Improving people’s mental health is therefore an important component of Life²‘s work – part of helping them to live happier, wiser and more meaningful lives.

Here are some links to a few of the MHF’s recent campaigns and reports – Fear, Be Mindful and 10 ways to look after your mental health.

The lost art of living well

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I have written a brief article to provide more details on the rationale for our not-for-profit organisation Life².

Its basic argument is that we face a range of challenges and pressures as individuals living in the modern world, and if we are to flourish in this environment we each need to be given access to a particular range of life skills and information in our lives. Currently, these are not being adequately provided by institutions in modern society, so Life² has been set up to begin providing them to the general public, and to raise awareness of the need for them in society.

Click here to read the article. Click here for an outline of the organisation and some of its activities to date.

The science of happiness

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Most of us seek it in our lives, yet it has proved to be something that politicians are unable or unwilling to put at the centre of policy making – until now. In recent years, the science of happiness has been a growing area, and we are now able to identify and measure (with scientific backing) a number of the factors that are proven to make us happy and, conversely, unhappy.

Although policy makers are just starting to get to grips with the implications of this work for policy making, this report by the Young Foundation gives a useful overview of the impact that this thinking on happiness and well-being could have on policy developments in different areas of life – from the elderly to the workplace.

Anyone working for social or environmental change will be interested to read about the possible ways a focus on happiness and well-being could increase their effectiveness in seeking behaviour change from the public. Contact me if you want to discuss ways of applying this thinking to your organisation’s work.