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I just finished reading Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior, which was lent to me by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rifmeister. It was not a challenging read, but quite entertaining, especially to read during a time of not buying things.
First, it made me think a lot about trait display: the idea that we do things and buy things (often? primarily? almost entirely?) in order to signal our positive traits to other people. It's easy to fall down a rabbit hole with this one (am I now writing about this just in order to show how thoughtful I am? aaaaaaah!) but at the same time it made me think about what traits I do try to display to other people. The book had some interesting things to say about conspicuous consumption, especially the insight that the "conspicuous" part can fall along any of a few axes: conspicuous use of material, conspicuously ethical consumption, conspicuous precision (anything small and really well made, or anything 99.99% pure), conspicuous brand name / reputation, conspicuous rarity.
I've known for a while that I mostly like conspicuous precision, with second place going to branding and, as I get older, conspicuously ethical things (hemp shirts, fair trade coffee, anything made by local artisans out of any percentage post-consumer content, Priuses). What's different, and nice, is having the words to put to that concept.
Then, personality, mostly in terms of intelligence plus the so-called Big Five personality traits. Depending on who you're friends with, you might have seen some about this whenrifmeister posted about it recently, prompting me to wax lyrical on the advantages of being other than extroverted. :) Here's my score:
I'm a O90-C94-E37-A27-N49 Big Five!!
It seems pretty accurate for such a short test. Conscientiousness is probably not a trait I need to advertise (sigh), as most people probably know me for about 45 seconds before guessing where I fall on that, for better or worse. Agreeableness? Well, I thought it may have scored me a little harshly, by conflating niceness/politeness with being trusting, but then I took a much longer test that ranks me much lower in agreeableness, and also in every single facet they roll up into agreeableness. Youch! Not like I want to be in the 99th percentile there, but 11th? Well, anyway, personality. The evidence suggests there are five independent axes instead of two (as in Meyers-Briggs and other models), so that's interesting no matter what my own scores are.
Spent really talks about these things to lay the ground for its central message, namely: it's just a fact that we are primates and want to display our traits, but most people see through our trappings to sense our real traits anyway, and so retail shopping is a wasteful, eco-unfriendly and inefficient method of trait display; we can save a lot of money, and maybe increase our satisfaction in life, by doing things differently and with more attention paid to our social and physical needs as primates.
A quote I really liked:
From my point of view, that quote is the best of the rest of the book, as it goes on to suggest alternatives to buying retail and then some suggested alternatives to larger things like tax policy, laws about local communities etc. The ideas there weren't new to me; and I felt the author failed to explain why spending less was even desirable, as he failed to ever tie savings or net worth or whatever to happiness -- a bit of an oversight. :P I was just getting bored when I got to the final "exercises for the reader", which got interesting again.
As suggested, I tried to list my 10 most expensive purchases (including things like college degrees, weddings, etc) followed by the 10 purchases that have made me happiest. I kind of failed, because I've long been a fan of many small purchases instead of a few big ones. Only about five purchases of my life really stand out as expensive before the muddle of ~$1K purchases begins. All I'm sure of is that the condo is on both lists. :-) Also, two other things on my "happiest" list are Nala and whatever-the-heck I've spent on fitness over the years, and the second thing on my "expensive" list is my MIT degree (ah, branding and reputation).
I'm already on to reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, and mostly wanted to get some thoughts down before my brain switches to that entirely. This is a long blog post for a book I don't even necessarily recommend, but what can I say? I found it to alternate really oddly between fluff and areas of extreme interest. And electrons are free.
rifmeister. It was not a challenging read, but quite entertaining, especially to read during a time of not buying things.First, it made me think a lot about trait display: the idea that we do things and buy things (often? primarily? almost entirely?) in order to signal our positive traits to other people. It's easy to fall down a rabbit hole with this one (am I now writing about this just in order to show how thoughtful I am? aaaaaaah!) but at the same time it made me think about what traits I do try to display to other people. The book had some interesting things to say about conspicuous consumption, especially the insight that the "conspicuous" part can fall along any of a few axes: conspicuous use of material, conspicuously ethical consumption, conspicuous precision (anything small and really well made, or anything 99.99% pure), conspicuous brand name / reputation, conspicuous rarity.
I've known for a while that I mostly like conspicuous precision, with second place going to branding and, as I get older, conspicuously ethical things (hemp shirts, fair trade coffee, anything made by local artisans out of any percentage post-consumer content, Priuses). What's different, and nice, is having the words to put to that concept.
Then, personality, mostly in terms of intelligence plus the so-called Big Five personality traits. Depending on who you're friends with, you might have seen some about this when
rifmeister posted about it recently, prompting me to wax lyrical on the advantages of being other than extroverted. :) Here's my score:I'm a O90-C94-E37-A27-N49 Big Five!!
It seems pretty accurate for such a short test. Conscientiousness is probably not a trait I need to advertise (sigh), as most people probably know me for about 45 seconds before guessing where I fall on that, for better or worse. Agreeableness? Well, I thought it may have scored me a little harshly, by conflating niceness/politeness with being trusting, but then I took a much longer test that ranks me much lower in agreeableness, and also in every single facet they roll up into agreeableness. Youch! Not like I want to be in the 99th percentile there, but 11th? Well, anyway, personality. The evidence suggests there are five independent axes instead of two (as in Meyers-Briggs and other models), so that's interesting no matter what my own scores are.
Spent really talks about these things to lay the ground for its central message, namely: it's just a fact that we are primates and want to display our traits, but most people see through our trappings to sense our real traits anyway, and so retail shopping is a wasteful, eco-unfriendly and inefficient method of trait display; we can save a lot of money, and maybe increase our satisfaction in life, by doing things differently and with more attention paid to our social and physical needs as primates.
A quote I really liked:
Modern consumers are like children doing spin art: we pour our favorite colors over a fast-spinning lifestyle, fling pigment in all directions, and hope that some will stick to observers long enough for them to notice our composition. Given sufficient resources, a few of us do succeed in attracting attention.... Most of us, however, just make a mess. We put too much of ourselves into our product facades, spinning too much mass into our outer edges where we hope it is both publicly visible and instantly lovable. One problem with this strategy is that it leaves too much blank space in the middle, so there's not much of ourselves there for lovers or friends to discover in the longer term. This could be called the centrifugal-soul effect...
From my point of view, that quote is the best of the rest of the book, as it goes on to suggest alternatives to buying retail and then some suggested alternatives to larger things like tax policy, laws about local communities etc. The ideas there weren't new to me; and I felt the author failed to explain why spending less was even desirable, as he failed to ever tie savings or net worth or whatever to happiness -- a bit of an oversight. :P I was just getting bored when I got to the final "exercises for the reader", which got interesting again.
As suggested, I tried to list my 10 most expensive purchases (including things like college degrees, weddings, etc) followed by the 10 purchases that have made me happiest. I kind of failed, because I've long been a fan of many small purchases instead of a few big ones. Only about five purchases of my life really stand out as expensive before the muddle of ~$1K purchases begins. All I'm sure of is that the condo is on both lists. :-) Also, two other things on my "happiest" list are Nala and whatever-the-heck I've spent on fitness over the years, and the second thing on my "expensive" list is my MIT degree (ah, branding and reputation).
I'm already on to reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, and mostly wanted to get some thoughts down before my brain switches to that entirely. This is a long blog post for a book I don't even necessarily recommend, but what can I say? I found it to alternate really oddly between fluff and areas of extreme interest. And electrons are free.
