How to be Free Through Anti Consumerism
Do you wish you could stop working? Wish you had more time for the things you enjoy? Would you like to be financially independent but have no idea how to get there besides making more money? Maybe you feel swept up in the expectations of our culture and are looking for a simpler, easier life.
Being independently wealthy is every bit as much about limiting needs as it is about how much money you have. It has less to do with how much you earn than what you value. There are many things money can buy, but the most valuable of all is freedom.
~ J Collins, The Simple Path to Wealth
If you seek the path to freedom to do whatever you want with your life, there’s a basic formula to follow:
Limiting your needs sounds simple enough in theory, but how do you get in the mindset to genuinely desire less? Believe it or not, the answer is not to deprive yourself of everything fun and good you’ve ever enjoyed. It’s to internalize that most of what you’ve been taught to desire is a sham, a hollow prize full of fake thrills and empty symbols. If you’ve been raised in Western culture, an important path to happiness is right under your nose. Here’s how to hack your brain to be able to see it.
What is Hedonic Adaptation?
Humans are astonishingly adaptable. As a species, we have adapted to every kind of ecosystem and created technology to, in turn, adapt our environments to fit our needs. Individually, our brains are ever-changing and are wired to accept novel stimuli as the new normal over a short period of time.
Hedonic adaptation describes the emotional baseline that most people have for subjective well-being. When positive or negative things happen in your life, they may affect your happiness in one direction or the other for a little while, but after time, you adapt to the reactive feelings and return to your baseline of contentment. This means that for better or for worse, things we think might have a large effect on our lives might not change our overall sense of happiness in the long term.
In one famous study, lottery winners reported a brief period of elation, returning to their everyday happiness levels after about a year. On the flip side, people handicapped by accidents initially experience loss and devastation but generally return to their pre-accident happiness.
This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for anything to change the life-long course of your emotional state, but usually, over time, without effort, initial feelings towards an event or thing will lessen in intensity.
Many things can increase our short-term happiness, but in Western and modernized society, we are constantly told that material items and wealth will bring us joy. The capitalist message is that material things can define our personalities and make us more attractive, fun, smart, powerful, and special. Things aren't just things, they have the power of transformation.
Another term for hedonic adaptation is ‘the hedonic treadmill’ and if we look at this concept through the lens of consumerism, we can see how we are promised more and more happiness the more we buy and add to our material status. Yet, with each consumer goal we meet, we ultimately go nowhere in terms of happiness. Each purchase gives us a dopamine hit that quickly fades into the steady pulse of our happiness baseline.
The hedonic treadmill: working hard to get nowhere
In popular culture, dopamine is often linked to pleasure and happiness, but in fact, dopamine more closely correlates with desire. It’s a motivation signal, disconnected from other chemicals that actually bring us satiation and happiness. So dopamine will keep us wanting more of something, like eating junk food or scrolling through social media, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re enjoying it. This makes sense when we consider how many products in our culture are designed to trigger dopamine responses and keep us wanting more but ultimately make us no happier or even make us actively feel miserable while participating. Much of what capitalism sells today exploits our instincts to create a Sisyphean struggle with addiction without real contentment attached.
Think about the last few things you’ve bought. How long ago did you buy them? How did you feel when you first got them? How do you feel about them now? Take a look at purchases from a year ago. Have they brought you long-term happiness?
Putting aside happiness goals, it’s also important to examine the true cost of buying things. These days we understand the environmental impact of endless capitalism and how so much of what we buy contributes to the destruction of our planet and the suffering of other humans and animals. Though we can logically understand that, it’s difficult for us to internalize and actually process the scope of devastation from our shopping habits when it is so far removed from our everyday lives and encouraged by the system that surrounds us.
That’s why it’s so easy to shrug our shoulders and still shop on Amazon, eat factory-farmed meat, and buy fast fashion. Fighting against these damaging effects is important but may not be feasible for everyone. Long-lasting personal change often has to come from internal motivation, not from media-induced guilt. As a positive side effect, by consuming less, you will naturally be contributing less to the destruction of our planet, which is a nice win-win.
Perhaps selfishly, but realistically, let’s look at the cost of buying things for ourselves. Unless you’ve been born into an extremely fortunate situation, labor in exchange for money will be a huge part of your existence- one that is likely to dominate your life path.
In Your Money or Your Life, Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez explain:
Our life energy is our allotment of time here on earth, the hours of precious life available to us. When we go to our jobs we are trading our life energy for money. You could even say that money equals our life energy. So, while money has no intrinsic reality, our life energy does — at least to us. It’s tangible, and it’s finite. It is precious because it is limited and irretrievable and because our choices about how we use it express the meaning and purpose of our time here on earth. Money is something you consider valuable enough to spend easily a quarter of your allotted time here on earth getting, spending, worrying about, fantasizing about or in some other way reacting to.
Money is essential to life, is our life, and yet what do we pour that energy into? More often than not, things we’ve only been told we need, things we bring into our lives without thinking, and things that don’t even make us happier. This is not to say there are no material items that will improve our quality of life or bring us lasting joy. But the first step to finding long-term satiation is differentiating between what has meaning to you and what doesn’t.
How to Counteract Hedonic Adaptation
Why try to fight the hedonic treadmill? It’s literally a matter of life or death. If money is one’s life energy, by resisting spending on things you don’t truly care about or need you are giving yourself more life.
Hedonic adaptation means that regardless of what you add to your life, you eventually return to your happiness baseline, so the simplest way to need less is to reset to this baseline. Rewire your brain to need less to be happy and you’ll be happier easier and more often.
Capitalist societies tell us that we should always be reaching for higher and higher goals of wealth and status, increasing the monetary value of what brings us joy and makes us worthy. A starter home should be turned into a nicer home, we should wear fancier clothes for our jobs that get increasingly more prestigious, and we should be ever-increasing the complexity of our adult lives and responsibilities in order to maintain our stuff.
All of this pressure results in an artificial starting level of where we think our needs and desires are. If you’re only happy driving a nice, expensive car, driving anything lesser (or god forbid using public transportation) will be a miserable experience. If you let others define what the ‘good life’ is for you, then you train yourself to only enjoy the prescribed materiality handed to you by advertising and pop culture.
Being immune to ads can be your superpower
So if you reject these snowballing notions and the expensive items that go along with them, you will find that suddenly you don’t need as much money as you thought you did, and the sooner you can quit work you don’t care about.
Fighting back against consumer pressure doesn’t mean that you can never spend money again or buy things you want. It’s not an all-or-none situation. But science shows us, again and again, that spending on experiences gives us longer-lasting happiness than buying possessions.
The first step is to think about what you really in your heart care about. This could be passion projects, like building, making art, gardening, novel experiences like travel and learning how to do something, or simply spending time with people you love.
Once you’ve narrowed down what fills your heart with joy while you’re doing it, you can examine the leftover desires and ask yourself WHY you are pursuing them. Is this something you really truly want, or do you want it because you were told you’d be more successful, more beautiful, more popular if you had it? Do you want it to impress or keep up with your peers?
Sometimes the answer is not always clear and it’s not worth beating yourself up if you buy something in earnest, only to feel the dopamine slide away shortly thereafter. But by asking these questions every time you go to make a purchase, you can start to train yourself to think about your real desires with every purchase.
Another exercise to try when you see enticing ads is to ask yourself what the ad is REALLY trying to tell you. Is it saying that with their product, you will be better at what you do? You’ll look better? You’ll be more adventurous? You’ll be happier, like the smiling models? Or you should be afraid? Once you can identify the big life themes being sold to you, it can easier to separate them from the product itself. Then, you can evaluate the merit of the item on its own, rather then being subconsciously swept up in marketing tactics.
It’s also worth trying to do what you love with a lower cost of admission. Instead of buying books to read, utilize a library (or a tool library, for handy projects). If you love eating with friends, organize a picnic instead of going to a restaurant. Try enjoying the outdoors without fancy gear or a sport without buying the latest gadget that goes with it. Or, if doing what you love has to involve buying something, delay the purchase for as long as you can, as anticipation brings its own form of joy.
Once you’ve cut out the extraneous noise of materialism for the sake of materialism, you can move on to the next level of fighting hedonic adaptation: giving up basic comforts.
Voluntary Discomfort
Not the good life
Comfort is a core American value. It is routinely equated with happiness or believed to be a path to happiness. Like the blobby, incapacitated humans in the movie Wall-e, Americans will sacrifice just about anything to feel cozy, safe, and taken care of, with their every need catered to.
Now don’t get me wrong…I love being comfy! But the goal is to lower what you find comfortable to very attainable, simple states and increase your acceptable comfort range. Instead of only feeling comfortable in designer clothes, in a large temperature-controlled house, or with all your favorite foods, you instead find joy in little things, like running water, toilet paper, sunning outside, or quiet stillness, among so many other simple delights.
In order to do this, the trick is to make yourself temporarily uncomfortable and deprive yourself of some of the things you normally enjoy.
The Stoics of Ancient Rome were big advocates for the concept of voluntary discomfort. Seneca said:
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence.
Voluntary discomfort brings freedom, the ability to weather adversity, and find joy in a wider range of experiences.
Some ways to practice voluntary discomfort are:
Camping
Cold showers
Fasting
Hard manual labor
Immersion in a place with a lower standard of living
Not using A/C or heat
Giving up something that brings you pleasure frequently (coffee, favorite foods, TV)
Or anything else that is personal to you and your own limits. It’s important to give yourself at least a few days to get out of your comfort zone fully. Once you return to normal life, it is important to examine your feelings about the newly-returned comfort and how its absence affected you.
Need another example? Read about how I counteract hedonic adaptation on the toilet.
Temporary discomfort will help you answer those questions of what is essential in your life and what desires are really at your core. You might even discover that you no longer need one of the so-called essentials you gave up. Hardship has a way of re-focusing the important things in your life, even if it is artificially induced.
You’ll also build up resilience, and along the way, you’ll be surprised to find that, given long enough, the discomfort becomes less uncomfortable, like a muscle that needs strengthening. When organic discomfort comes a-knocking in life (and with climate change and increasing natural disasters, people are experiencing a new level of disruptions to their lives), it will be less of a shock to your system.
Most importantly, when something you care about is missing from your life and then abruptly returns, you experience the most important part of voluntary discomfort: gratitude.
Feeling Gratitude
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you do not have; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
~Epicurus
Gratitude is the secret to happiness. It’s ultimately the goal when we reset our hedonic adaptation baseline. If you’re going to get used to whatever you add to your life, then the things to get used to might as well be simple pleasures that cost little or nothing.
By taking away the comforts we currently enjoy, once they return we can see them in a whole new light. For example, if you’ve been thinking about upgrading your ‘starter home’ but then go on an extended camping trip where your home is now a tent or a car, when you return, that previously inadequate home will feel like a palace, full of incredible amenities that make your life cleaner, easier, and cozier. You will feel grateful for that which you already have.
Feeling gratitude costs nothing
And what wondrous things we already have! Running water that gets hot on demand, plumbing systems, electricity and so many other modern marvels that hum away in the background of developed countries. If you allow these basics to be the things that bump up your happiness from your emotional baseline, how simple it would be to achieve joy everyday.
Earlier in my life, I habitually took long, hot showers, sometimes upwards of 20 minutes long. A 20-minute shower uses approximately 50 gallons of water. Once I moved into an RV full-time, I found myself with a hot water heater that only heated 6 gallons at a time and limited gray water tank space, so using as little water as possible was a priority. I became used to a low-flow showerhead and navy showers, where I turned the water off while lathering. Today, I never reach the end of the 6 gallons of hot water and can take a shower in under 5 minutes.
To my old self, this would have appeared as a hardship, but curiously, I find that it has no negative impact on my life. In the instances where I shower in a hotel or at a friend's house, a normal shower for me is not only much shorter because of the habit I built, but also an exciting luxury! Instead of my short showers taking a ding out of my happiness levels, a regular ol’ shower adds to them. I took something I did every other day and didn’t think twice about and made it into something that brings me extra joy.
Now, long hot showers may be something you decide is essential in your life, but this can be applied to nearly anything else you do regularly.
Study after study shows that gratitude banishes negative emotions, keeps us in the present moment, and helps us feel accomplished and connected. Do you know how hard it is to advertise to someone feeling this way? How can we continually fill our lives with new stuff when we like what we already have?
So here lies the path to freedom.
Recognize that you are unwittingly making your threshold for happiness more costly by allowing others to define the good things in life. Reject the unrelenting pull of consumerism by defining your own priorities. Remove your common comforts temporarily. Return to your life with a new appreciation for what you have and a lessened desire for what you do not. Reclaim yourself and your energy by spending less, working less, and having more without having more.
