news & views - Australian Greens

Autumn 2007 ISSUE 22 PAGE 6
This aspirational life
the challenge to make meaning
Looking behind the glitter
Advertisers equate the consumer lifestyle with cherished
notions of happiness, security and fulfillment. And let’s be
clear – there is no nobility in poverty. Material sufficiency
is central to human survival and personal dignity. But the
current obsession with material acquisition in societies like
Australia’s has outstripped valid concerns about survival -
or even about living modestly and comfortably. In so doing, it
has produced a paradox. Instead of living well, many live with
increasing levels of ‘dis-ease’.
Along with environmental damage, the most obvious symptoms
of dis-ease are increasingly acknowledged. They include
widespread stress, depression, and pandemic-scale obesity.
Mostly, the symptoms are given band-aid treatments.
The deeper causes remain undiagnosed and untreated.
A commodified sense of the world
Aspirational consumption rests on a commodified sense of the
world. Increasingly, aspects of human existence that should
never be commodified are being reduced to inappropriate
material measures.
For example, many people seem to describe and measure their
own identity and worth in material terms. Popular advertising
both reflects and encourages this - the Seiko ad that proclaims
‘It’s not your car. It’s not your friends. It’s not your job. It’s your
watch that tells most about who you are’ is a telling but not
unusual example.
Similar material criteria are often applied when people engage
with others. A startling study by Barbara Pocock and Jane
Clarke (Can’t Buy Me Love, Australia Institute 2004) revealed
that Australian teenagers live ‘within a powerful force field of
competitive consumption’ and that ‘the costs of falling behind
are seen to be high – teasing, not fitting in, feeling bad, failing
socially’ (p.xi). Targetting adults, luxury car-maker Maserati
exploited the same ‘force field’ with its ad cleverly captioned
‘Have your life flash before other people’s eyes’.
JOHN HILLCOAT AND BRIAN HOEPPER
Last Christmas, the festive season again delivered a deluge of advertising to Australians. The spirit of Christmas came
gift-wrapped with tags inscribed ‘bigger’, ‘faster’ and ‘more luxurious’. Lovable Saint Nick carried a sack to gladden the
heart of all ‘aspirationals’.
With Christmas over, the seductive messages about the good life did not disappear. And with the federal election
looming, politicians of the major parties will take up the slogans. For aspirational values lie at the heart of the vision they
promote.
Because aspirational goals involve the relentless growth of production, acquisition and consumption, they are fairly
easy targets for green critique. Aspirational lifestyles leave oversized ecological footprints stamped across the planet. In
environmental terms, living aspirationally seems incompatible with living sustainably.
But let’s allow ourselves a brief flight of fancy. Let’s imagine that aspirational material dreams could be met without
compromising environmental sustainability. Could people then live ‘the good life’ and ‘live sustainably’?
A crisis of meaning making
However, measuring worth and identity through material
possessions is a tragically flawed way of making sense of the
world, particularly as the urge to make meaning out of life is
a central human need. Decades ago, Erich Fromm alerted us
to the folly of this in his To Have or To Be. More recently,
Cushman and others have described the ‘empty self’ – the
sense of unfulfilment that returns after the ‘fleeting sense of
satisfaction’ produced by so-called ‘retail therapy’. For many,
the remedy – paradoxically unsatisfying – is to plunge into a
further cycle of acquisition. And thus a deep human yearning
remains unfulfilled. As Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss
noted in Affluenza, ‘people who construct their identity from
what they consume basically don’t know who they are’.
Social sustainability
If lack of meaning is commonplace in a culture then
loneliness, depression, anxiety and destructiveness become
widespread – another prescient observation by Fromm.
Relationships within communities and societies suffer. Social
sustainability is threatened.
Social sustainability is threatened further by the closely
related influences of our fast paced lifestyles and the culture
of overwork that many people embrace to pay for aspirational
ways of life. Again, Pocock and Clarke’s study explored some
related dimensions of this – parental exhaustion, children’s
resentment and time-poor relationships. They described
guilt-ridden parents compensating their children with material
goods. Workplaces can also be sites where unhealthy levels of
individualism and competitiveness can prevail - mirroring the
‘competitive force field’ of consumption mentioned above. In a
recent ‘Modern Dilemma’ column in The Weekend Australian,
‘humanist’ Ruth Ostrow gave the following advice to a worker
expressing qualms about sacking junior staff – ‘Grow up. … If
you want to leave the ranks of drone monkeys and join planet
of the apes then you have to learn how to beat your breast,
take power, and make tough, unpleasant and often unkind
decisions.’