How to Right the Consumerist Force

 Last week, as you may recall, I mentioned that brilliant graduation speech that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. It is among the most famous graduation speeches ever. So if you haven't already read it or watched it on YouTube you should totally check it out. I'll add a link in the show notes.  So he opens that speech with this little story, which he says is the kind of quote, didactic, little parable-ish story that's mandatory for all American graduation speeches. I'll let David tell it. 

 There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, Morning boys, how's the water?  And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?  

In fact that speech has come to be titled "This Is Water" and it appeared in a book of the same title that came out the year after David Foster Wallace died. By the way you can find that book at lots of places that aren't Amazon.  My favorite is Better World Books, which donates a book for every book it sells. 

I'm not a paid spokesperson for them, but you should check them out at betterworldbooks.com.  

The point that David was trying to make with that parable was quote "The most obvious ubiquitous important realities are often the ones hardest to see and talk about."  Okay, so we're talking about really important realities that are tough to see and difficult to talk about.  Man, if that isn't fertile ground for gaslighters.  And for many of those realities, if you trace them back to their origins, you begin to realize that they were based on a con that convinced us to take them seriously in the first place, and then eventually absorb them into our culture so that now when we do on rare occasion, think about those realities, we make a fundamental error.  To paraphrase the otherworldly wise and insightful Gabor Maté  from his book, The Myth of Normal, we make the mistake of believing that what's normal is natural. It's like, we think the things that are normal in our world are just governed by the laws of nature. It's just, that they've always been that way. So why even think about changing them?  

A favorite example of mine, of this kind of thing is the tradition of the diamond engagement ring.  When my wife and I got married, as we immersed ourselves in the Wedding-Industrial Complex, we were skeptical enough to constantly be asking why of all the different professionals that we encountered. And one of the whys was. Why is everyone supposed to get a diamond engagement ring? Well, here's why.  It turns out in the late 1800s the diamond market was flooded after the discovery of huge mines in South Africa.  And like any honest company would do DeBeers Consolidated Mines Ltd., completely monopolized the market.  So now that they had complete control of supply, they needed to find a way to juice the demand. So in the late 1930s, DeBeers just created out of thin air the rule that an engagement ring has to be diamond.  And they even came up with the one-month salary rule For the price of the ring. which they changed in the 1980s to two monthly salary.  Because why not?  By the way my wife has a beautiful Opal engagement ring that she loves, which costs about $120, because f*** DeBeers. 

This week, I want to explore another such reality that kind of exists on a slightly higher level than that engagement ring reality. And in this reality, there is a force that holds us in its rapacious grasp for our entire lives.  And most of the time, we're completely unaware of it. It's like the water to those fish or the air around us, or more specifically. It's like the ubiquitous and invisible force of gravity.  To find out what this mysterious force is. Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting.  a podcast about the ways we've all been conned about ourselves and each other and how we can fight back and together put the kind back in humankind.  

Before we dive into this week's topic. I just want to take a quick commercial break.  

Oh, Hey, it's Craig  again.  Actually, we don't have any commercials. We don't have any sponsors and I don't want any sponsors. It would kind of defeat the whole point,  which is to show people how we've all been duped into accepting a world that doesn't really serve our best interests. So, if I were to lore you here with the promise of a hopefully novel, honest approach to dealing with your fellow humans and then commoditize your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, that would be the ultimate in hypocrisy. 

I'm producing this podcast because I believe it's important for everyone to think about things a little differently. For example, to not just think about how do I pay the least for something I want. But how do I interact with the economy in a way that promotes the kind of world I want to live in?   If I want small, independent businesses to survive in my neighborhood, that's valuable to me, and it's worth it to pay a few dollars more for that. I get something of value back from that transaction, namely, a neighborhood that I'm proud of, that I like to live in.  And I think we're all seeing how chasing the cheapest price and the most convenient delivery might save us a few dollars, but comes with all kinds of negative consequences that in my mind, Don't make it worth the savings.  So maybe someday, I'll ask you to think about what this podcast is worth. And I'd hope, if the podcast is doing what I want it to, you'll say, that's valuable to me and I'm willing to spend a dollar an episode or whatever to keep it going. But for now, it's free.  You are my guests here. I'm willing and able to provide this podcast at no cost of any kind, and I hope people find it at the very least entertaining and maybe even useful. That's it for our commercial break. Now let's get back to the show, which once we dive in, this whole commercial break shtick will hopefully make more sense.

 A few years ago,  I had the absolute privilege to spend almost an entire year. In South and Central America with my family.  My wife is a professor and she had a sabbatical. So we picked up. And relocated the family for what we dubbed the life elsewhere tour.  During that year, we spent the bulk of our time volunteering for wildlife conservation organizations, such as the Jocotoco Foundation in Ecuador and OSA Conservation in Costa Rica. 

I'll post links to both of those in the show notes. And I highly recommend you check out the great work they're doing and support them in any way. If you can.  

Because we were traveling around a lot. We traveled really light. And we really didn't buy anything but necessities for an entire year.  I did break down at the Pablo Neruda Museum in Santiago, Chile. And bought a replica of little salt and pepper shakers that Neruda displayed on his table. One of them was labeled marijuana and the other was labeled morphine. But other than that, We bought pretty much nothing but food and toiletries for a year. 

Before we left on this trip. I'd been told many times that travel, like this changes a person. But you won't really recognize how until after you come home. And that's kind of what happened when we came home, we flew to New York city. To visit some family and friends that we hadn't seen in a year. And man talk about being thrown into the deep end. 

And as I was walking down the street, I realized that something felt really different.  Something was missing.  I felt like I was standing up particularly straight and walking down the street with a certain freedom that I hadn't really felt before. And when I thought about it, I realized what was missing was this force, this pull that would sort of draw me towards the stores. You know, if I'm walking on the right side of the street, I'm being pulled sort of to the right.  But that force was gone. It didn't exist. And I felt really free about that.  

And it was in that moment that I was able to kind of infer the existence of the consumerist force. The consumerist force is one of those obvious, ubiquitous, important realities that are so hard to see and talk about.  I kind of think of it as.  When you go to.  A very poor country.  Or a place where the culture is very different from ours, particularly if it's different in a way that we believe is somehow inferior to ours. You go and you look and you think, wow, how can people live like that. 

How can people live without all of the niceties that we have here in the United States?  And the thing we don't see is that. A lot of those people look at us and they realize these are people who are never satisfied. 

They have so much. But they don't seem happy. They seem like they're wasting a huge opportunity.  And it goes both ways. We look at them a certain way and they look at us a certain way that we can't see about ourselves. And that's what I'm hoping to do with this podcast is break through a lot of those cultural norms that we believe are natural and realize That they're anything but natural. Remember that David Graber quote. The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.

Now of course, keep in mind that there are people and institutions and entire industries that would have a real problem with consumers fighting back against the Consumerist Force.  After all, we're basically told that it's our patriotic duty to keep spending more and more and more to grow the economy. Well, I'm particularly suspicious of an American industrial culture that constantly touts the power of the consumer, but then warns us about all the potential terrible consequences of we consumers actually learning to control and channel that power.

So I want to share with you a few strategies that I found to be really helpful to break free from the consumerist force. 

And once you embrace these strategies, I think you're going to love the new reality that you're making, and the freedom that you can fully experience.

The first strategy for fighting back against the Consumerist Force. It's just to realize that you have some power to do it. 

A bunch of years ago, I was on a trip to South Africa and I was in Cape Town. And we had hiked up to the top of Table Mountain. Which is this stunning plateau overlooking the city. . And there's a cafe up there by the cable car.  And we thought we'd stop in and get a bottle of water and a snack or something. And I noticed that. The prices there were reasonable. Which was kind of shocking. 

I was like, you're at this cafe at the top of a mountain. And. You're not getting screwed on the prices. And the South African friend, I was there with said, well,  You know, we, we just won't have it. You know, we won't accept it,  

And I realized that we Americans are kind of suckers for this sort of thing.  We just go along and grudgingly pay the ridiculous prices were supposed to pay at sporting events at movie theaters at places like that.  Without realizing that we don't have to do that. We can resist that. And if we do resist that.  Based on the laws of supply and demand.  The prices should come down. 

And I thought about this a lot during this inflationary period after the pandemic. And not once. Did I hear anyone any politician, any influencer, anybody say. You know, one way. We can fight inflation. Is to not pay inflated prices.  Now I realize a lot of things are necessities  and you have to pay for them. 

And that's just an unfortunate nature of our market-based reality. But, there are ways to fight back against that. So like for example, I'd like to get ice cream for my kids. And also for me, And I really like to get  Talenti or Ben & Jerry's. Or occasionally Haagen Daz.  And I noticed one day that all three of them had raised their prices pretty much the exact same amount on the exact same day. And I thought, well, that seems odd. And that seems illegal. And then I did a quick internet search and I realized that all three of them are owned by the same company, Unilever. So they're not three distinct brands. They're all part of the same company. So. I won't buy it at that price. 

I just won't. I will only buy it if it's on sale and even then, I'm not so sure I'm going to do it because I don't appreciate being screwed over like that. So I'm not saying you need to starve yourself, or I'm not saying everybody has the same options, but when you do have options, Try to take advantage of them.  Another example is the two places where I buy Greek yogurt. There's a traditional supermarket, and then there's Trader Joe's and I can get the same thing for pretty much the same price.  And it depends on where I am whether I buy it at one or the other.  And then I noticed that the traditional supermarket raised the price like 50 cents And the Trader Joe's price remained the same. 

So now I will only buy it at Trader Joe's.  It might seem insignificant, but if enough people do it, it becomes significant.

Another strategy to help you fight back against the consumerist force is to focus more on value than on price. And I'm actually talking about both senses of the word value here. Not just the value inherent in a product, but your own personal values. So in that regard,  as I mentioned earlier, when you see something that's cheaper, think a little bit about what are the consequences of me saving these few dollars. What's happening in the labor market.?  What's happening in my community?   And is it worth it? Is it really worth it to me to save a couple of dollars, if there are going to be deleterious effects that harm my experience of the world. 

And then of course thinking about the value of a product.  So, if you are able to,   focus on the longer-term value of a product than the price that you're paying right now, because over time, If you spend more on a product that will last longer,  It might actually end up being cheaper than if you buy the cheaper product now that will fall apart quickly.  Now, this is an issue that is really problematic because a lot of people can't afford to pay for value and have to pay for the lowest possible price. And that really gets into the economic unfairness that is so inherent in our culture And why it is so expensive to be poor in America.  I'll  talk about this on future episodes, but in general, if you are able to, try to focus on value rather than price. 

Now for the third strategy for fighting back against the Consumerist Force I want to encourage everybody to own something for its entire life. Particularly things like cars or phones, where there's a lot of pressure to upgrade to constantly be thinking what's the new model that's out now and what do I have.   It is so liberating if you have your phone and you just think, I've got a phone. 

It works. When it stops working, I'll get a new phone. Same for a car. I've got a car it's working. It might even be paid for. When it stops working. Or when it gets too expensive to maintain then, and only then will I think about buying a new one and you'll quickly discover that it is so much easier to exist in a world where people are barraged with marketing messages for phones and cars to not give a crap about what the latest phone and car is out there because I've got a phone and I've got a car. 

And by the way, that car is paid for. And I have no interest whatsoever.  In what's out there now.  Because I don't need it.  I find this strategy to be hugely powerful in resisting the consumerist force. 

Well, that's it for this week. Do me a favor. If you've had experiences where you've awakened to the realization that there is this consumerist force that engulfs us all day, every day  And you've figured out ways to fight back against it, that work for you, please share those with me. You can email me at craig@ungaslighting.com. Or you can go to the website ungaslighting.com and send me a voicemail.   So until next week, be kind to yourself. Cut each other some slack, and as always folks use your damn turn signal.