Stuffocation: Living More With Less

Last year, we really liked the book Happy Money - it had some really good evidence-based ideas about how to change your spending to improve your wellbeing.  Along similar lines is James Wallman's Stuffocation: Living More With Less.

Wallman's main (again, largely evidence-based, though perhaps not as rigourously as Happy Money) conclusion is that being an "experientialist" is better than being a materialist, i.e. allocating money/time to *experiences* not to things.  Stuff makes people less or no more happy, and is environmentally bad, and things that give you intrinsic enjoyment (i.e. you do them because you like them) are shown to be healthier for you psychologically than things that give you extrinisic enjoyment (i.e. they impress other people).  He says that experiences often do have extrinsic benefit (you can show off about them on Twitter and Facebook) but that, empirically, experiential things are more likely to be bought for intrisic benefit than physical things are, even if sometimes they are bought partly to show off, so you should not worry too much about the detail and just prioritise experiential things over physical things anyway, as statistically you'll end up with more intrinsic enjoyment.

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two, Wallman correctly says (you might buy a nice suit both because of the way it feels and the way it looks, and you might go on a weekend away both to absorb it but also to have some interesting pictures and comments to pass on).

 

A really interesting thing Wallman says is that one of the five things that mean a trend or development is likely to take off (he's a professional cultural forecaster) is that it has to be observable by other people so that the mainstream can copy the innovators and early adopters.  So he doesn't think minimalism (another potential rival to materialism) can take off because you can't see volumes of people doing it in day-to-day life (unless you happen to notice someone always wearing the same clothes).  Whereas Facebook and Twitter mean that you *can* see people sharing an experiential life every day.

 

His advice on practical steps was a) get rid of stuff you don't need, b) don't replace it and then c) spend a couple of months spending the same amount of money you'd normally spend on stuff, but spending it on experiences instead.  In practical terms we think we're probably experientialists already to a large degree at Fizz - but we can always do better!

If you're interested in this kind of thing and enjoyed Happy Money, then you should read Stuffocation.  If you're interested in this kind of thing and haven't read Happy Money, read Happy Money and *then* Stuffocation!

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