I turned the shower on this morning and stood in it for longer than I needed to. Hot water, on demand, at the turn of a tap. I didn’t draw it from a well, heat it on a stove or carry it up the stairs. I didn’t think about this for a second, because I do it every day, which is rather the point of this essay.
Consider what the ordinary person in London, or anywhere in the major economies, takes for granted before breakfast. Water that will not kill them. Food on shelves that never seems to run out, in a variety no medieval king could have commanded. A phone that gives access to more of the world’s knowledge than the library of Alexandria ever did. Doctors, vaccines, antibiotics, anaesthetic. A child born today is overwhelmingly likely to live, and so is the mother who bore her. For most of human history, losing a child was an ordinary grief, not a catastrophe of the unlucky.
This is not to pretend that poverty has disappeared, or that material comfort is evenly distributed. It hasn’t, and it isn’t. But for those of us fortunate enough to have our basic needs met, the question is no longer simply how to get more. It is why more so rarely feels like enough.
We live in extraordinary plenty, and yet we do not feel it. We feel, if anything, a low hum of dissatisfaction, a sense that the real life, the contented life, sits just beyond the next purchase. The newer phone. The upgraded kitchen. The better life with better stuff. We are surrounded by things and convinced we lack them.
As a Crowded House song has it, my possessions are causing me suspicion but there’s no proof.
The treadmill and the manufactured want
There are two things going on here, and it is worth separating them.
The first is in us. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation: we get used to things. Brickman and Campbell described the “hedonic treadmill” in the 1970s, the idea that improvements in our circumstances often produce less lasting happiness than we expect. The new car thrills for a month, then becomes simply the car. We do not always return to the same baseline, but we are remarkably good at making yesterday’s luxury into today’s necessity.
This is not entirely a flaw in the design. A creature that stayed delighted by every good thing would never go looking for the next one. But it means that wanting is a poor guide to what will make us happy, because the want is always calibrated to what we already have.
The second thing is done to us. Thorstein Veblen noticed in 1899 that a good deal of what the wealthy bought was bought to be seen, and he called it conspicuous consumption. What he could not have imagined is that we would all be shown the lives of the conspicuous every day, in our pockets, curated and lit and filtered. Advertising no longer needs to persuade us that a product is good. It only needs to make us feel that our present arrangement is faintly inadequate.
The want is the product. The gizmo is merely the packaging it comes in.
Schopenhauer, as ever, got there first and with less cheer. Desire, he said, is a pendulum swinging between want and boredom: when we lack something we suffer, and when we get it we are bored, and so we reach for the next. A consumer economy has found a way to profit from the pendulum.
And then there is the oddity that we are not only wanting more, we are drowning in what we already have. The garage so full of stuff that it no longer fits a car. The wardrobe full of clothes, and yet nothing to wear. We have reached the curious stage of civilisation in which we rent storage units to house things we cannot remember buying.
A friend of mine, having moved into a new apartment, asked me not to bring back any trinkets from my travels. I have a habit of doing this, imagining that some small object will be a charming reminder of wherever I have been. She wanted to preserve the space she had, and the absence of clutter. I am ashamed to say I only managed to partially comply.
It turns out that knowing what is enough, particularly when it comes to gifts, is harder than it sounds.
The old advice, which is still the best advice
None of this is new, which is a comfort of a kind. The ancients worried about it constantly. Epicurus argued that the pleasures worth having are few and cheap: friends, freedom, thought, a simple table. Most of what we chase beyond that, he thought, adds anxiety faster than it adds pleasure.
Seneca made the same point in his letters: poverty is not having too little, it is craving more. He recommended, rather charmingly, that one occasionally live for a few days on the plainest food and in the coarsest clothes, and ask: is this what I was afraid of? Admittedly, advice on the virtues of poverty is easier to dispense when one is spectacularly rich!
Montaigne, retreating to his tower, concluded that the greatest thing is to know how to belong to oneself.
In the twentieth century Erich Fromm gave the problem its sharpest framing, in To Have or To Be?: we increasingly define ourselves by what we possess rather than by what we do and are. A life organised around having is condemned to anxiety, since what is held can be lost, and what is wanted can never be fully satisfied.
None of them were arguing for misery. That is the common misreading, and it is why “simple living” so often sounds like a sermon. The argument is the opposite. It is that a great deal of what we buy gets in the way of the things that actually delight us, and that clearing it away is a form of pleasure, not of sacrifice.
It is the Marie Kondo question applied to a whole life: does this thing bring me joy, or does it merely take up space?
Perhaps the difficulty is that we rarely stop to ask what enough would actually look like. We know what we want next. We are much less certain what would make us stop wanting.
Buying less, but better
So what do we do, practically, in a world designed to make us want?
There are some useful habits: waiting rather than reaching for the instant gratification of Amazon Prime; considering the lifetime cost of a thing and buying better; turning away from the Temu-style accumulation of quantity over quality. We might have fewer, better things, and spend less time shopping, which has somehow become a leisure activity.
Of course, buying better can become its own form of self-deception. The expensive object is still an object, and we are remarkably inventive when explaining to ourselves why this particular purchase is an investment in quality rather than another indulgence. There is always a good reason to buy the better Swiss watch, the finer Japanese kitchen knife (guilty!) or the beautifully made thing that will supposedly last a lifetime. Sometimes the reason is even true.
But I think my main focus is to spend money on experiences and people.
Research suggests that experiences often make us happier than possessions, partly because we adapt to them differently and partly because they become part of the stories we tell about our lives. They are frequently shared, anticipated and remembered. To be fair, a miserable holiday is still a miserable holiday, however much it costs. But a dinner with an old friend can last in the memory long after the gadget has been superseded. The time spent with someone you love, cooking food together, watching a season of Game of Thrones or Salad Fingers, talking about life. These are the things I increasingly value over a new thing and remember with affection.
And, a point I find myself returning to in these essays: pay attention to the joy of ordinary things. The first coffee of the day, watching the world go by in a café as you write a card or letter to someone, the walk home, the light across a table. The pleasures that cost almost nothing are the ones that the consumer economy has the least interest in drawing to our notice, which is exactly why they are worth noticing.
There is a peculiar freedom in enjoying something without needing to own it, improve it or replace it.
The Christmas problem
I should first of all say that I love Christmas, and I do not want this to sound like a lecture from a man in a hair shirt or a Dickensian villain. The lights, the food, the people gathered round a table, the decorations in trees and windows, the cold outside and the warmth within, the music: this is one of the best things we do as a culture. And I love to give gifts that are both serious and frivolous. Probably too many.
So, my argument is not with Christmas. It is with the way Christmas has become the season in which the manufacturing of want reaches its annual peak. From the start of September these days, as the first Christmas products arrive in the supermarkets, we are told what we should want. We are shown gifts that are, in the great majority, things nobody needs, selected because they can be bought quickly by people who are short of time and anxious about getting it right.
And there is some evidence that this does not even work on its own terms. The economist Joel Waldfogel called it “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas”. He found that recipients often valued gifts at less than the giver had paid for them. We spend billions, collectively, to give people things they would not have bought for themselves.
It is a remarkable piece of inefficiency, and I say this as someone who spends his working life in the plumbing of how money moves.
But perhaps the economists are measuring the wrong thing. A gift is never simply the transfer of an object. It binds people. It says something about the relationship, about the giver’s regard for the receiver, about the obligations and affections between them. A gift can be economically inefficient and still mean a great deal. The value of a book given by someone who knows you may have very little to do with the price printed on its cover.
If that is right, then the thing that matters about a gift is not what it costs but what it says.
A gift is a form of attention.
Simone Weil described attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity, and a thoughtful gift is that attention made visible. It says: I have listened to you. I have remembered. I know something about what might make you happy.
So: give thought, not value. Show love in the time you spend thinking about gifts, whether they are expensive or modest. In practice, this might mean a book you have read and loved, with a note in the front saying why you thought of them. A letter, actually written by hand, telling someone what they mean to you. An evening you have planned: dinner at the restaurant they once mentioned, the walk you have both been meaning to take, the play or ballet they really wanted to see.
A meal cooked for them. Something that connects to a conversation you had in March, which they will be astonished you remembered. A broken thing replaced, which can be as simple as a chopping board. A framed photograph of a day you shared.
Or simply the gift of time, which is the most valuable thing we have and the one thing none of us has enough of.
None of this requires us to stop buying presents. A beautiful object, carefully chosen, can be a wonderful expression of love. The point is not to spend less for the sake of spending less. It is to give something that means more.
The difference is between buying a gift and choosing one.
Enough
The luck of our age is real, and so is the dissatisfaction. The strange truth is that we seem to be wired to feel the second more strongly than the first.
Gratitude, like attention, is a discipline rather than simply a feeling. It does not always arrive on its own, and it has to be practised against the pull of the treadmill.
The word I keep coming back to is enough.
It is, I think, one of the most radical words in a consumer society, and one of the most freeing. To know what is enough, of food, of clothes, of money, of things, is to loosen the grip of the pendulum Schopenhauer described, the endless sense of lack that keeps us buying.
It does not mean having nothing, or refusing pleasure, or feeling guilty about the comforts we enjoy. It means recognising when we have what we need, and turning, with relief, to the things that were never for sale.
And perhaps that is the real luxury of our age. Not that we can have almost anything, but that some of us are fortunate enough to be able to say we have enough.
This Christmas, I intend to give less stuff and think more. To offer time, attention and something that shows I’ve been listening.
I think it will make me happier. And those I love happier too.
Though I suspect I shall still come home from somewhere with a trinket nobody asked for.
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Steve Robson is an impossible romantic, lapsed French literature academic, and sometime transaction banker, who divides his time between a Liverpool Street tower, cafes and second hand bookshops. He episodically travels a lot and likes to bring back gifts and trinkets, whether wanted or not. A true believer that a flat white solves everything, he somehow manages to believe in a Camus inspired philosophy of human salvation and love, his hero’s passion for the beauty of an indifferent earth and more personally the élan and elegance of the Roger Federer backhand.
