Dining, Travel, Technology …

The chopped liver on crostini had a wintery smokiness to it, as did a fold of flat bread, scorched on a griddle to black in places, then layered with slices of garlicky wild mushrooms. Best was a fritto misto of squid, anchovies and prawns in batter … As the chef here used to cook at nearby Bocca di Lupo, it was no surprise that the crumbly, coarse Cotechino sausage with braised cabbage and mustard was outstanding.

Observer








1.

THE NEWS IS intimately connected with the workings of ‘consumer society’. Every day a not inconsiderable part of its output is taken up with informing us about objects and services that fall within categories such as Dining, Travel, Technology, Fashion, Motoring and Home Furnishings. The news wants to be helpful here, to spare us mistakes and to assist us in making wiser and more fulfilling purchases.

There is a lot of disapproval in certain quarters about our desire to consume. The modern appetite for acquiring things far and above what is strictly necessary to survive is frequently described as shallow, destructive of the planet, futile, greedy and, in a word that rolls all these insults into one, materialistic.

Yet given just how great a share of our societies’ resources is taken up with the manufacture and sale of non-essential goods, it may be no frivolous task to try to ensure that our acts of consumption proceed as well as they possibly can. The news has a serious job to do in helping us to spend our money well.


2.

IN FULFILLING ITS self-imposed brief, the news tends to examine and report on three things: first, what is available on the market; second, what it costs; and third, whether or not it is any good.

To these ends, it will dispatch journalists to the restaurant to try the pear, Gorgonzola and chicory salad; to the hotel to evaluate the all-inclusive spa weekend, and to the consumer electronics fair to scrutinize the new smartphone’s browser and camera.

Whole sea bream, under review.

(picture credit 19.1)

These are surely important matters, yet to restrict consumer news to such practical investigations is to overlook a key feature of why we are motivated to buy certain things in the first place. The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a deeper, often unconscious desire for some form of psychological transformation. We don’t only want to own things; we want to be changed through our ownership of them. Once we examine consumer behaviour with sufficient attention and generosity, it becomes clear that we aren’t indelibly materialistic at all. What makes our age distinctive is our ambition to try to accomplish a variety of complex psychological goals via the acquisition of material goods.


3.

Few dishes are as satisfying and elemental as a simply grilled sea bream, served at a plain wooden table with checked napkin and chunky scuffed cutlery. The flesh had just the right consistency, with no additions beyond a little flaky sea salt, some finely chopped parsley and a dash of lemon …

Our ostensible reason for wanting to travel to the new restaurant in the centre of town is that we feel like having a bite to eat. But a substantial, perhaps even decisive part of our desire has a less mundane, more subtly psychological basis: we want to absorb the values of the restaurant itself. We want (in some vague sense) to become like it: Relaxed, Dignified, Convivial, Content with Simplicity, In Touch with Nature, At Ease with Others. These are the abstract virtues that we semiconsciously detect in the dishes, the service and the decor, and which we are confusedly seeking to bolster in ourselves through the ingestion of a sea bream with chopped parsley and a side order of burrata with lentils and basil oil.


Each of the 82 rooms gives out onto the azure sea in the bay. In front of the hotel is a large, quiet pool, on the surface of which the gardener scatters flowers early every morning. The air is balmy, the breeze ideally gentle …

Likewise, we don’t want merely to visit a calm and tranquil hotel for a few days; we are in search, rather, of a physical environment that can assist us in a larger project of becoming Calm and Tranquil people. We go abroad not just for a change of scenery but in the hope that the outer landscape will help to rearrange the inner one.


The smartphone sends data at dizzying speeds, can take pin-sharp images, understands voice commands and could hold your entire library in its prodigious memory …

And by a similar logic, we don’t want the phone only for practical reasons; we also want to assume some of its traits, we want to grow a little more Rational, Elegant, Capable and Precise.


4.

GIVEN THAT CONSUMPTION is a far more complicated – and interesting – process than it first appears, consumer news should reexamine its underlying assumptions about the needs of its audiences.

We are currently accustomed to being guided as to what we might buy under headings such as:

DINING

TRAVEL

TECHNOLOGY

FASHION

But a fairer and richer assessment of our needs would group consumer news stories under rather different headings:

CONVIVIALITY

CALM

RESILIENCE

RATIONALITY

Restaurants, trips abroad and electronic equipment may well give rise to desires, but it is misleading to suggest that they are our ultimate aims. They are merely subsidiaries of larger psychological objectives upon which the investigations of consumer journalism should properly focus.


5.

THE IDEAL CONSUMER news of the future would not be opposed to the material realm. Although some schools of thought have argued that materialism of any kind should play no role whatever in a decent life, the truth is more complex. Material objects are promises of, and enticements to, future states of mind; they provide us with idealized images of where we want to get to. The diminutive Italian city car speaks of a winning cheekiness and playfulness, the titanium desk lamp hints at a busy life reduced to its meaningful essence, the mountain hiking holiday promises an end to hesitancy and fragility and the birth of a new and more resilient self.

Purchasing any of these items won’t on its own grant us a more secure hold on the inner states that they speak of. But these items can provide us with an inspiring picture of a destination and thereby bolster our efforts to get there. For better and for worse, consumerism is condemned not to be a total waste of money.

Religions have always understood this dualism. While trying to influence their believers in spiritual ways, they have simultaneously appreciated the function that might be played in the shaping of character by particular foods, clothes, travels and items of interior decoration. For example, Zen Buddhism advises its adherents not only to read and to pray, but also to furnish their homes with pieces of celadon pottery, which they are directed to contemplate in order to bolster a commitment to Simplicity and Ego-lessness. There is in this recommendation to purchase no hint of the modern Western assumption that a beautiful pot can on its own transform one’s character, but at the same time Zen wisely acknowledges that the right sort of pot approached in the right sort of way can make a worthwhile contribution to inner evolution.

In the secular sphere, we can likewise acknowledge that material goods are sometimes able to lend us valuable encouragement – that a new coat may, for instance, give us an inspiring glimpse of a more confident self or that a plain crockery set may goad us towards a calmer demeanour. Yet at the same time we need to bear in mind that the hoped-for transformation won’t occur simply through the act of purchase. We need to do our acquiring within the context of a sufficiently multifaceted and subtle assault on the desirable auras that hover around objects.

In the ideal consumer news section, categories like Confidence and Calm would present us with a range of both conceptual and material options. We would learn about psychological approaches we might take to reach a desired destination – listening to a certain piece of music, reading a book about a period of history, studying a school of philosophy or performing a mental exercise – but we would also be shown a number of material purchases in sympathy with our desired outlook – a particular sort of jacket, perhaps, or a trip abroad, or a comfortable armchair.


6.

BECAUSE WE HAVE allowed ourselves to divorce consumption from our deeper needs, our purchases have become unsupportive of our psyches. Just as consumer news has helped to create this schism, it can also help to rectify it, for it is in large measure the media that informs our notions of what we should be buying, and to what end. The categories, language, positioning and cues it uses when presenting options for purchase possess an extraordinary power to influence what we feel we must own and do. By changing something as apparently minor as the categories in which consumer news reports its findings, by focusing on genuine needs rather than inchoate desires, we might start to do proper justice to the underlying aspirations generated by consumer goods – goods that we exhaust ourselves and our planet to make and pay for. We thereby stand a chance of becoming truer versions of what consumer news has always wanted us to be: happy shoppers.

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