New Glasses

When I started working for myself I chose to take a fairly big drop in my salary, so from the outset Alicia and I were thinking about how we were going to make ends meet. I’ve never had any trouble spending what I earn. To be brutally honest, I’ve always spent more than I earn. Sometimes you hear people talk about what they would do if they won the lottery. There is usually a fairly crafted shopping list. People rarely say ‘Oh I don’t know’ in the way that they might if you asked them what their favourite movie is. The shopping list seems to be written, prepared, regularly redrafted, and ready for that lottery win. It is a conversation that seems, in itself, to bring people genuine pleasure. I see friends faces light up as they reel through the purchases and carve up the fictional winnings amongst friends, family and charities.

Earlier this year Chris Weir, a psychiatric nurse, and her husband Colin, a camera man, netted £161m (around $262m) in a European wide lottery. The prize was Europe’s biggest ever. The couple made public appearances, giddy, excited, energized, unable to sleep, endearing themselves by telling the British public that they were ‘tickled pink’. When the UK lottery was launched the basic idea was for the sale of lottery tickets to support ‘good causes’ as well as give players the chance to win a life changing sum of money. Just over a quarter of the money raised from the lottery ticket sales goes towards ‘good causes’. What constitutes a ‘good cause’ is decided by one of the thirteen distribution bodies. Six of these concern sport, five relate to the arts, one deals with heritage grants and one, a distributor called the Big Lottery Fund, provides funding to community groups and to projects that improve health, education and the environment.

What constitutes a ‘life changing sum of money’ is anyone’s guess. In the UK, chances are your everyday household with personal loans and credit cards is going to owe somewhere in the region of £15,000 (around $24,000), and that isn’t counting the money we owe on our mortgage. Certainly, before the credit crunch, banks and credit card companies were willing to offer me a total of £35,000 (around $57,000) of credit in the form of plastic, personal loans and overdrafts. It was for me, and I’m guessing many others, our very own lottery win. When did it become ok to dangle that sort of money in front of people? When did a ‘life changing sum of money’ become the £15K we need to clear our debts? And what on earth did we all spend it on? The total UK personal debt at the end of June 2011 stood at £1,451billion! That is £1,451billion we have spent before we’ve earned it! £1,451billion we have spent on ‘stuff’ that we told ourselves we wanted and needed. So when we compare our developed world to the developing world, is what we are so proud of, our ability to access and spend money that isn’t ours to spend? And we can’t afford it. Every 14 minutes a home in this country is being repossessed.

So the banks said we could have the money, and the seductive adverts, fashions and fads told us we needed the money, but what about us? The middle men in this exchange of borrowings for ‘stuff’ and services (stuff would sometimes be referred to here as ‘goods’ - now there is a loaded word if ever I heard it). Why didn’t we put the brakes on? Why are we still out there shopping like our lives depend on it? It is as if all those old instincts and drives to seek out food and shelter, to survive, to belong, to achieve and have worth in our belonging, have been played, taken advantage of, substituted. As though ‘stuff’ has become administered like methadone to substitute the heroin we usually call ‘striving’.

I’m not name calling here. I’m at the meeting too, just recognising I’m an addict and trying to come off the dependency. We are what we are, human beings with brains that make us both of the animal kingdom and other than it. Both virtuous and flawed. Saying we are to blame is just nuts to me. We just are… this is what it is to be a human being… it’s tricky… our old instincts and drives are not of this seductive modern world, but they have to get along just the same. Sometimes we seem to elevate ourselves too far above the rest of animal kingdom, and forget we are just another primate with a few extras and some unique ways of using what we have.

Teaching in schools I saw increasingly how school just felt so old fashioned. Despite the ever flowing technology and the new building programmes, it was what schools did with it all that just felt old fashioned. The comment we’d hear with increasing frequency was ‘why do we have to be here’, and ‘why do I have to learn this’. Educationalists and parents alike try and steer a path through these very pointed questions, caught in the headlights of a youth that are ready to start buying, and feeling held on the bit by their inability to earn. And we were right to resist, and stutter out our arguments about the power of knowledge, the value of an education… but I’m not sure even we didn’t feel like our arguments were somehow being hollowed out from within. Nowhere else was belonging and worth and identity so tied up with what you had; nowhere else was the curse of the self more evident. And not surprisingly either, after all adolescence is a time in our lives when our identity is thrown open as part of everyday brain maturation.

I digress, and how difficult it is not to, and how much I want to. So whilst I’m spending like it is the last day of my life every day, along with all the other shoppers… I start wondering where all this ‘stuff’ comes from, where it all ends up. I watch The Story Of Stuff and it’s a good starting point. The prices we pay for ‘stuff’ are determined by the raw materials, the costs of manufacture, distribution and sales, and then the mysterious profit margin… which we are to understand is determined in effect by us…. by how much we are willing to pay… by the worth we place on ‘stuff’. And then there are those things which the price doesn’t reflect: the air and water pollution, the depletion of natural resources, the people whose health, education and futures are jeopardised by the need to keep production flowing and cheap. Isn’t it a strange world where in one country we protect environments and workers from exploitation, and then across the water it happens without restriction.

So I’m spending money I don’t own, to buy things I don’t need, made by people who can’t escape, on a planet that can’t give anymore. I’m not trying to make a political point here, this is personal. This is just one family’s realisation that in so many ways, and for so many reasons, we can’t keep living like this. We can’t live with our consciences if we are perpetuating and contributing to keeping communities enslaved. And we can’t afford to keep spending beyond our means. So we have taken a long hard look at what we buy and who we buy from. We are just starting out, starting out for the first time again. It isn’t about making ourselves endure some kind of suffering… it has more to do with finding happiness in pursuits other than ownership and competitiveness. It is another piece of the jigsaw that we found on the slip road as we left the rat race.

I admit, I never really cared about the planet, but I’ve always cared about people and now I realise that the two are interconnected. When I buy something that impacted on an environment, it also impacted on a community’s way of life and their ability to sustain themselves. I can’t spend money now without knowing a bit more. And the internet has changed that, because I don’t have to take the advertisers’ word for it any more. I don’t buy clothes often but when I do, I can seek out clothing that pays the cotton growers a fair price and that doesn’t use sweat shops. It will cost what it costs and I’ll either be able to afford it or I’ll go without. But I can’t live with myself buying something that brought harm to my fellow human beings, however much they are hidden out of sight, and I won’t be duped into buying something because it appeals to my need to fit in, be accepted and add to my self worth. It is a simple life we are travelling towards and we are learning as we go.

Something that might interest you: http://www.teamsweat.org/