Consumption as Scarcity or Abundance?
- By Shea Adelson
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I was picking up some pants getting re-hemmed at a store in a mall and my three year old and I had to walk through Nordstrom’s to get there. She was walking next to me and then stopped suddenly, at the end of the rug. I said, “Come on!” And she yelled, “Come pick me up!” I walked back to her and she looked down at the floor and I realized, the floor was freaking her out. I took her hand, and as we walked we talked about the fact that the floor was so shiny it looked like you could fall right through to “down there.”
I was overwhelmed myself. It is not the first time I have felt shabby walking through a mall (after all, why do you need all those fancy clothes but to feel like you fit into the glossy mall scene to buy some more). I am not immune to the seduction of beauty. To the plush rugs. The uber shiny floor, buffed moments before the big Saturday opening. The shoes in the shoe department we walked through looked edible. I stepped off our path to the exit when we were leaving to admire a pair of boots; a well groomed woman was by my side immediately. “All these are waterproof,” she said. “The technology is so advanced now with leather.” “Ahhh…” I said, expressing my desire and repulsion all in one breath.
The reality is I have been thinking like I need a new pair of boots. The perfect pair. Waterproof and attractive. It is also not lost on me that my buying the perfect pair of boots helps to pay the saleswoman’s bills. That my consumption helps drive the economy. As a colleague with strong ties to retail once said, “Retail is the foundation of the economy and many jobs, including my ex-husbands, are reliant on our buying stuff.” Another time, she said, “The more presents under the tree, the better. Those presents represent possibility to me.” In this way, abundance = more is better.
I can be seduced by this, easily. More consumption means jobs, means support from the ex-husband, means my feet are warm and stylish. Throughout the mall, I was aware of the team of salespeople so exquisitely dressed and thoughtfully arranging their gorgeous department store wares. Their talent at display, design, and engaging customers is not lost on me. Retail is an art. Retail is about abundance, and abundance is seductive. More is better.
Lynne Twist in her book The Soul of Money distinguishes Scarcity Myths. One of them happens to be More is Better, the unexamined cultural assumption that drives our economy and makes me feel special in a new pair of boots. Because for sure, I do not need a new pair of boots. I have a bunch at home I’ve collected over the years. (I was wearing a well-worm pair to the mall.) All functional, none perfect, none matching the current trend to a T, but what are trends for then? To remind us to buy the next best thing. I am seduced by buying, by owning, by fitting in to these cultural norms and assumptions that I deserve abundance, that I am entitled to as much as I want, as much as I can get my hands on, and more, much more than I actually need to live comfortably. I just am.
But I am also afraid. I am afraid of energy descension (Peak Oil). I am afraid of climate change. Of higher and higher food prices. Of health care insurance and health care costs. I am afraid of what I am hearing and reading (Depletion and Abundance by Sharon Astyk, Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) and I am afraid that so few of us are listening, including myself much of the time.
Consuming stuff makes me feel part of the world and it dulls my senses. Some experts are talking about the fact that the response loop to our actions is delayed in the earth’s response. So we can’t see it. Sitting still and listening, reading what the experts are actually saying, is frightening. At the moment I am strung between scarcity and abundance, fear and yearning. Sufficiency is the way out, the exit off the continuum of scarcity and abundance. If I could just get by the boots…
