Mindless Consumption and Mindful Consumption
An idea I have begun to dwell on, which I believe goes hand-in-hand with this challenge, is that of mindful consumption. We often refer to consumption as mindless, and I believe that the facets of consumption which are mindless, and some notions I have engaged with recently while starting a personal mindfulness practice, complement each other. I believe that the constraints of this challenge reduce my consumption that is mindless, and lead to a more mindful consumption.
Functionally, consumption comes in two pieces: the purchase of the product, as well as the usage of the product. By adding the artificial constraint of nothing new to my purchases, I am forced to be more mindful of the purchasing piece of consumption. By writing out a consumption diary recording my usage of these products, I become more mindful about how the things I consume ultimately make me feel. The two parts of consumption can no longer be done mindlessly, and both elements will force me to purchase and use products with intention, to consume mindfully.
Today, I am going to focus on the latter of these facets: that of usage. I will have lots of time to think about how buying things mindlessly and mindfully makes me feel, but right now I am in the process of downsizing my life in order to move across the country. In a way, for the price of postage, I have to purchase my lifestyle anew, and with this levy I need to mindfully consider my lifestyle and my usage of products.
There are items in my life, many of them, that I already use mindfully, and so in order to jump start this process of consuming more intentionally, I want to survey some of the items in my life that I use with intention and mindfully, and a few purchases that I thought would be used intentionally, and be parts of my daily life, but which, for whatever reason, never did, those items that did not find themselves worth the second price of shipping.
So let’s think through some products.
A few objects of intention.
My rice cooker
These are a ballpoint pen brand, by Pilot, that I like a lot.
Projector
A few objects without intention.
Tatami mats
A few plushies of various characters, particularly Pusheen, the delightful tubby tabby
Products that are Habitual
Products which enhance something I am bound to do, that I need to do or want to do: this is a characteristic that unifies the products in the first list. I have to eat, and my rice cooker makes it incredibly easy to make a nutritious meal. With it, I can spend five minutes on meal prep and have a steamed steel-cut oats dish for lunch and dinner. My acroball pens are pens that I discovered in college as being the best bang for my buck: their ink doesn’t smear, and they are quite comfortable to hold. Since I write in my diary every day, they are guaranteed to add comfort to a regular routine. And finally, my projector enhances most of my media consumption: playing video games on a nice fancy digital projector is a delight.
None of these items take center stage in their own lives. The rice is what I love; the rice cooker aids. It’s my writing, my words that I love; the pens simplify that experience. They are simply enhancements to a living habit.
The items in this second list don’t factor into any of my habits. The tatami mats tried to accomplish this, the idea being that with them I would sit low to the ground more often and feel comfort in my own home. Sadly, they went largely unused — I ended up purchasing, and using chairs anyways. The plushies don’t give much comfort: the plushies are fun to squeeze every so often, but they cannot fit into my daily routine.
I am mindful of these products because they follow me daily, and they make the process more comfortable, and noticing such small feelings of comfort in the background of our lives is a core piece of mindfulness. It’s the reason so much meditation focuses on the body scan, attempts at finding differentials in sensation across the body. Certainly, the products fade into the background of habit, but that is not the same as mindlessness. Often, the background is the mindfulness.
Therefore, some potential future purchases that likely fall into this category are monitors I can plug my laptop into and external batteries for my smartphone. My habit of using my phone and my laptop would be made easier. These are items that I have been considering for a bit, but by doing this meditation on products that I currently share my life with, I think I have successfully convinced myself to get them (used, of course).
Products as Production
A great unity in these products is that they are part of hobbies that themselves produce, even arguably the projector. A rice cooker makes me food, and my pens make me my art, which is writing. I would warrant that my projector belongs here because I watch film and television partially for the sake of writing about them, and do video game reviews for my other blog.
I’d like to discuss two notions from economics, one orthodox and one heterodox. The orthodox one is that of the “home good” and “home production.” In theoretical microeconomics, certain classes of goods only provide utility for the household because they are used in the production of other goods, through the combination of time and labor. These are often referred to as inputs for the “home good,” and can be used to make some lovely (albeit, abstract and simplified) models of certain behaviors. Examples of the home good include education, which is produced from books and time and practice, and health, which has diet and exercise and time as inputs. Household products such as food also fall into this category.
The reason for this home good is to account for items that deviate from passive consumption, which could not account for the idea that people expend their labor both on their works and their pleasure. This structure is used to portray how people use their time when hours spent working give them money to purchase goods, while hours spent playing with these goods provide joy.
I think we all have seen this trade off, and can list off items that constitute our home production. For me, the hallmark of home production is whether or not, after a long day at work, you feel you have the emotional and physical energy to tackle the task at hand. That, after a long day at work, I tend to order takeout, and find myself incapable of writing, shows that writing and food are a joy that I labor for and produce.
The heterodox stance, explicated well by Henri Lefebvre, is that production done by hand and for one’s self is the natural mode of production, and its absence from our lives leads to alienation. The action of making a cup of coffee for oneself, and making a cup of coffee for a customer while working for tips in a cafe, are mechanically similar, but they imbue quite different emotions within us. I hope to come back to the idea of consumption, production, and alienation at a later date, when I have my copy of Lefebvre’s work out in front of me, rather than in a box headed for the post office.
But, in short, production done for one’s self is talisman against alienation. And for me, at least, the argument holds. A day where I do not write in my diary, where I do not produce a few words for myself, tastes like a flat diet Coke.
The items in the first list, as noted above, are productive. The items in the second list do not have production at their end. They are finished, purchased products with no relation to household production. I do not need to spend time laboring with a plushie to gain joy from it.
As such, the things I buy that require my labor seem to be the winning ticket. This isn’t to say all the things I buy should be like this: the deepest pleasure I have most days is sipping a Coke Zero from the gas station next door. Given my work schedule, I need to have passive consumption in my life, consumption that requires none of my soul and none of my labor, or my week nights would be quite difficult indeed.
Obviously, these things cannot be mindlessly consumed. This is both a great benefit, and a curse. If I have had a long day, and cannot conjure the mindfulness necessary to write, then the acroball pens are useless. Since they are inputs and aids in production, and require my labor for activation, they are products that require mindfulness just as a baseline.
To go back to the possible purchases I mentioned above, extra monitors and external batteries for my phone, these both fall in this category. I use my phone largely for productivity — to generate to do lists, to write tentative thoughts, to do things which are labor intensive. The extra monitors will benefit me, I think, in coding, another productive hobby of mine.
Products Purely Semiotic
Don’t we talk to each other so much through products? Or, how many products around you right now did you purchase to tell someone (and even maybe that someone is yourself) just a little bit about yourself?
The tatami mat I purchased exemplifies this. I wanted to have an item that told people of my sophistication as a decorator. Yes, there were numerous practical benefits to having a tatami mat. I like to sit down on the floor, criss-cross applesauce, moreso than sitting in a chair. But the reason I opted for a tatami mat rather than a plush rug, or a play mat, is because the aesthetics of the tatami mat would say something about me when people entered the room. They would know me as a sophisticate, someone with an urbane and worldly sensibility. And, more importantly, I would know myself as someone who owned a tatami mat. It had been my desire to own a tatami mat for some time, actually, and looking back I can’t see a reason for this particular interest other than the fact that a tatami mat conjures up certain (problematic and orientalist) ideas, and by owning one I could tell a story about myself that was more dashing and dynamic and cultured. I once had a similar fixation with owning an Eames style chair, and wanted to purchase one quite badly, which, while lacking the orientalist aspect, still was merely a way to signify my taste to others. Whenever I look up an RV, something I do at least once a month, it’s largely due to the same impulse: to the be the sort of person who owns and lives in an RV.
The Pusheen dolls do something similar. I love Pusheen. Mascot culture in general, such as Gudetama, Hello Kitty, Garfield, Minions and Ryan the Lion is a hobby of mine. Had I bought a single Pusheen doll, and one Hello Kitty, to give me something soft to cuddle with in bed, that might be sensible and not mindless. But I purchased backpacks and neck pillows, two copies of some of my favorite dolls, and one Pusheen plushie that lit up.
People collect very rarely for themselves, I think, and more often do so to project an identity. I became known, and was happy to be known as, the fan of Pusheen. My friends would send me Pusheen stickers on Facebook, and if they spotted her at a store they would send me a picture of her.
Now, the secondary effect of this collection has given me great joy. To have a memento of me in malls and clothing stores everywhere, something rather widespread whose presence makes my friends think of me, is quite lovely to have. But, is that worth the environmental toll of producing all of these plushies? And isn’t this so passive and mindless?
It’s all about identity. My tatami mat was similarly about identity, and how I represent myself to the world. And while I may be proven wrong (some potential counterexamples, off the top of my head, are items from black-owned businesses, or potentially refusing to buy new goods) having purchases contribute to your identity seems dubious.
Another issue, and I think this one is small but contributes often to the disconnect between what I purchase and what I use, is that of articulation. When we talk with others, we spend so much time attempting to communicate our needs and desires of the moment. The momentary nature of what we want always strikes me when thinking about conversations in the past, things I have said.
A product is timeless, and has no desire to articulate itself: Pusheen is Pusheen, soft and with nebulous intentions. She, like all products in the physical world, stick around. Unlike pleasantries, she does not fade away.
This physicality represents a great problem for using purchases to tell people about yourself. When I purchased my mermaid Pusheen, it is because of a feeling that I felt she expressed so well in her fishy form. But this feeling has not stuck around. Like the answer to an ice breaker in a team meeting long ago, or some mediocre bon mot, I don’t remember it. She’s most definitely cute, but I happily sold her to another collector earlier this week, and I have no regrets. She’ll have an excellent new home, and I no longer have her around as a reminder of an impulse purchase from Amazon that I am sure said something at the time. Maybe all it said was that I had found a Pusheen plushie on sale.
This problem of articulation relates most intimately with that of mindlessness. While I certainly was of a certain mind when buying these plushies, and I probably had a great argument for their purchase, now that I am no longer able to access the mindset that lead to their purchase, they feel mindless, meaningless.
On first inspection, an extra monitor and a new battery do not have this semiotic potential. They are sturdy, and have a job to do.
But, they can certainly come in flavors that are meant to signify. For awhile, when looking at extra monitors, I became enamored with the idea of getting a curved monitor. This desire was not based on the proposed benefits of a curved monitor— I had not researched these benefits— but because high end gaming rigs I had seen had used curved monitors, and I hoped to see myself and for others to see me like the sort of serious gamer that would have this curvature.
Having now read through the benefits of curved monitors, which include reduced reflection and greater depth, both certainly advantageous for video games, I realize that these features don’t have much benefit for me. I’m not discerning enough to take advantage of them, and the games I play are mostly retro turn-based RPGs with anime graphics, poor candidates to take advantage of a product that increases depth of field.
But damn would they make me feel like a real gamer! They would say something distinct about me, that I am the sort of person who cares about an immersive experience and a real high quality rig. If I had one, I could think of myself as someone who took this hobby seriously.
Since this challenge necessarily restricts myself from purchasing anything too flashy, I am hoping to greatly reduce the number of purchases I make that are meant to tell someone who I am. This, I am sure, will benefit me and my checkbook in the long run.