AllConsuming.org.uk

I haven’t bought anything for a bit.  Well a bag but it was a bargain so it doesn’t count. I try not to shop but the pressure builds. Men never used to have bags.  But now we have mobiles, MP3 players (I refuse to advertise iPods on account of the fact they are so good they destroy my anti-consumerism rife) notebooks and fashion pens.  As jeans got tighter there has to be somewhere to put everything. My bag is very cool.  The inside is lime green.  Only I know that but it helps.  Until I’m persuaded that I need a orange lining to determine that I’m cool.

I had a small drinks gathering last night to toast the launch of the book.  It was done with the excellent global poverty campaigners War on Want.  I chose them not just because they fight the causes of global poverty but also because I like the pun of a war on want.  They mean poor people and I mean those that consume too much.  The problem of the evening was of course knowing what to wear! With the cheap wine flowing it felt a bit like a time share convention only the unlucky guests weren’t being shoe-horned into buying two weeks of the year in a dodgy Costa apartment – just a book.   Anyway today the book got an incredibly generous review in the New Statesman by Sophie Elmhirst. She is very kind to me but most importantly for me she gets what I am trying to do with it. Others will judge whether I succeed.

Yesterday (Monday) there were no less than five stories in the Guardian newspaper that relate strongly to world of turbo-consumerism; the consumerisation of education on the letters page; a poll that says that consumers are moving away from ethical food, the launch of very.co.uk an online clothes and gadget retailer aimed at female shoppers aged 25-45 with young families; just add lime (to the sea) – to cut C02 emissions and the poor face more hunger as crops fail because of climate change.

Consumerism, its dynamic force and its consequences shape our world more than any other. Strange then that on the same day Jackie Ashley wrote an article about equality in which she didn’t mention that we are struggling for equality in a world of more and more in a way that makes any notion of equality impossible.  While the treadmill keeps turning and we define ourselves primarily by what we own in an endless quest for social status we perpetuate the moral and cultural dynamics of an unequal society.  You can’t by definition strive for more equality on a treadmill, you can’t have social cohesion and you can’t have a democracy worthy of the name either. the fact that you can’t have a functioning planet is obvious.  But on the treadmill we remain!

A report from Scottish Widows this week shows that only half of us are saving enough for our retirement and a quarter are saving nothing. They want us to save more because that is how they make a profit.  But hold on a minute; what are we saving for, why and how much do we need?  We certainly save less now because we spend more.  No one wants to delay gratification in a consumer society.  But why do we need so much when we retire?  Do we have to stay on the same consumer treadmill? And will we save more while we continue to be bombarded with messages to spend now, to keep up and be normal.  In the book I suggest three things about retirement; first is that we should all consume less and therefore earn and spend less; second we are probably going to have to be forced into saving more through a compulsory scheme and third if we can we should have jobs we enjoy and are fulfilling and therefore we never want to retire from.

In the book I mention a few times the technique that on line sellers like Amazon are refining of building up a buying pattern and prompting us to buy more.  If you have bought X then you might like to know Y has just been published. Well I’ve bought a lot of books about shopping from Amazon for my research and have they sent me a prompt yet to buy All Consuming? Of course not. Where is the dynamic, creative and innovate free market when you need it most.