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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Tara Button 2018

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Dedication

For my great makers:

My parents, who made me,

Mark, the one making dreams come true,

Juliet, the best maid of honour,

and Howard, who makes me happy every day

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: Or why I want my grandmother’s tights

List of Exercises

PART I

BROKEN BEHAVIOUR

1 Mindful Curation: Or how to resist a world that’s trying to make us broke and lonely

2 Planned Obsolescence: Or why they don’t make ’em like they used to

3 Psychological Obsolescence: Or why no one wants their parents’ old settee

4 Advertising: Or how many people does it take to sell a lightbulb?

5 Marketing: Or the ten tactics that make us spend

6 Fashion and Identity: Or why everyone should dress like my friend Ben

7 Faster and Faster Fashion: Or how to get off the trend treadmill

8 Born to Shop: Or how our monkey brain influences what we buy

PART II

LIVING A LIFE LESS THROWAWAY

9 Becoming a Curator: Or how to begin buying with purpose

10 Taking Stock: Or where did all this stuff come from?

11 Before You Shop: Or ‘A Tale of Two Shoppers’

12 Out at the Shops: Or how scents, shelves and salespeople get us spending

13 The BuyMeOnce Buying Guide: Or how to find the best stuff on the planet

14 Keeping and Caring: Or how to hold on to the things you love

15 On Money and Happiness: Or how to be happy in a cash-mad world

Conclusion: Or what does success look like in a life less throwaway?

Ten Steps to Master Mindful Curation

Appendix I: Care and Repair

Appendix II: Choosing Materials for Clothing

Appendix III: Brand Values

Appendix IV: Know Your Warranties

Endnotes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Publisher

Introduction

or

Why I want my grandmother’s tights

My grandmother’s tights used to last forever. They were so strong, people could tow cars with them, and did! Granny got two pairs – one to wash and one to wear. But then the manufacturers decided to change the way their stockings were made, and not for the better. So today, when I reach for a pair of tights, it’s like playing pantyhose Russian roulette. Which pair will break this morning?

It may not seem like a crisis to have a drawer stuffed with half-laddered hosiery, but I see it as a very small glimpse into a much larger problem. Our whole houses, our whole lives, have become stuffed full of things that let us down, cause our stress levels to skyrocket and our bank accounts to empty. But precisely because these things are poorly made or faddy, perversely we are compelled to buy more of them.

But couldn’t life be different? What if we decided to surround ourselves with beautiful, well-made things that lasted forever, instead of ‘for now’ objects that soon need replacing?

That was the seed of an idea that came to me in 2013.

Before then I was a paid-up loyalty-card-carrying member of the impulse-shopper club who never questioned the things I bought. I’d always been a spendthrift. My mother says that as a child it never much mattered how much pocket money I was given, I was always broke, and this behaviour carried on into adulthood. Once I’d decided I wanted something, I ‘needed’ it right away, and so my life and home became filled up with stuff that was ‘almost but not quite right’. Longevity wasn’t one of my criteria, so I owned temporary things, poorly thought-through and soon-regretted clothes or hobby and fitness equipment bought in fits of short-lived enthusiasm.

My habitual impulse buying eventually caused credit card debts of thousands of pounds, leaving me feeling out of control, childish and angry with myself. I would come home to a chronically cluttered house, which was exhausting to tidy or clean, and stare blankly at my piles of fast-fashion clothes, wondering why I felt I had nothing to wear.

Like many people, I was stumbling through life believing that ‘when this happens or when I have that, then I’ll be happy’. Without a clear sense of self, I’d unconsciously mould my character into whatever I thought my partners wanted me to be. When my last relationship failed, therefore, I was left so lost, I had to spend some time on antidepressants. With my thirties looming, I felt as though I’d screwed my life up and chucked it away like a free hand wipe.

At the same time I’d managed to fall into the moral wasteland that is the advertising world. My job was now to write adverts for some of the world’s biggest brands, trying to persuade people like me to buy more stuff, whether they needed it or not. Five years ago I had a full-on breakdown in front of my friends on holiday, and in the plane toilet on the way home, I looked in the mirror and vowed to make a change. I just wasn’t sure what form that change would take.

The change came in the form of a pot – a baby blue Le Creuset casserole pot given to me for my thirtieth birthday. It came with a reputation for lasting for generations, and when I held it, it just felt like an heirloom. It was startlingly beautiful, and I reflected that owning it meant I potentially never had to buy another pot again. ‘If only everything in my life was like this,’ I thought.

Enthused, I set out to find more objects that I would never have to replace – objects that would work with me and grow old with me; beautiful, classic objects worth committing to and taking care of.

I assumed there’d be a website that sold a collection of lifetime products, but when I went looking for one, it didn’t exist. ‘Maybe I could be the one to build it,’ I dared to think.

I had zero web-design skills, but the more I thought about it, the more powerful the idea seemed. If this website could release people from the constant pressure to renew and replace, it could solve some of the biggest problems the world was facing. It could ease the clutter, unhappiness and debt that came with overconsumption, it could lessen the environmental impact of our throwaway society and it could save us all money in the long term.

I started to make changes in my own life and uncovered the surprising practical and emotional benefits that come with choosing to bring only those objects into your life that reflect your values and will be with you for decades to come.

I knew that if I didn’t at least try to build the website, I’d always regret it. So in 2015 I started a company, BuyMeOnce, and began hunting for lifetime items in my spare time. I cut my salary in half and lived on a minimum wage so I could split my time between work and building my business.

Painfully slowly, and after several false starts, the site started to come together. It was very basic, it wasn’t monetised, and I had no idea if anyone would ever visit it. Most likely, I thought, it would remain a cluster of lonely pages on the sixth page of Google.

Then, in 2016, miraculously and quite unexpectedly, the world found it. The site went viral, thousands of e-mails flooded in, BuyMeOnce was featured in almost every major newspaper in the UK and I was suddenly being asked to be on TV in America. I hadn’t realised it, but I had tapped into something that people all around the world were feeling. They were tired of our throwaway culture.

By this stage, my life had completely turned around. My spending was under control because I was living by my new-found philosophy. I sadly hadn’t morphed into a ‘naturally’ tidy person, but after giving away over half of my wardrobe and countless boxes of clutter, any mess I made was easily dealt with in a couple of minutes. Owning items I loved for the long term also meant I naturally started caring for them better and lost things less regularly. I’d also stopped worrying about keeping up with the Joes or Janes, and reconnected with the person I really was. This, together with doing something I truly believed in, had raised my self-worth and allowed me to enter into a relationship based on a joyful connection rather than neediness. I had found my best friend – a kind, funny, bespectacled man who made me happier than I had imagined possible. As I write this, I’m looking forward to marrying him in six weeks’ time.

I’ve now been given the opportunity to share with you what I believe is a life-enhancing way of thinking and behaving. My hope is that this book can be helpful to you on a personal level and, if it falls into the hands of enough people, helpful to the planet.

WHAT CAN ONE LITTLE BOOK DO?

This book tells the story of how we’ve sleepwalked into a world where our lives are focused on a constant churn of items with little lasting value.

I’ll also reveal how we’re being manipulated to feel that our current possessions (and by extension ourselves) are inadequate, and how this drives us to constantly upgrade our wardrobes, homes and technology. After ten years in the advertising world, I’m able to take you behind ad-land’s glitzy curtain to reveal the tricks of the trade and arm you against its devious tactics.

Overbuying habits are often linked to low self-worth, so this book also contains sections to help you to value yourself. No object can make you more or less of a person. Once you’ve truly understood that possessions don’t have that power, you’re able to choose which ones to bring into your life with much greater ease. As an added bonus, by the time you’ve worked through the exercises of this book I would expect the clutter of your home to be greatly reduced, along with your stress levels. ‘A life less throwaway’ becomes simultaneously a simpler and richer life, because the focus is off consumption and on what really matters.

As my company name, BuyMeOnce, suggests, living a life less throwaway does involve buying certain things, but this lifestyle isn’t about buying beautiful stuff to gloat over, it’s about buying only those items that will support a functioning and fulfilling life.

MINDFUL CURATION

I call my method ‘mindful curation’, which might sound as pretentious as bringing your own tablecloth to KFC, but is the best term for it. It is ‘mindful’ because it is done with purpose and thought. And it is ‘curation’ because, like a curator putting together a collection in an art gallery, it’s about picking only those things that will work together to form a home and a life that uniquely reflects you and your needs.

It is comprised of several steps:

1. Understanding the benefits of mindful curation. (Chapter 1)

2. Understanding the pressures that promote mindless buying and developing tactics to free yourself from them. (Chapters 2–8 and 12)

3. Investigating your life’s purpose and the long-term priorities that will help you meet this purpose. (Chapter 9)

4. Identifying which items you need to fulfil those priorities and to live comfortably without being swayed by status. (Chapters 9–11)

5. Identifying your true tastes and sense of style so you can buy future-proof items. (Chapters 3 and 7)

6. Identifying your values and the brands that reflect those values. (Chapter 9)

7. Taking stock of the items you already have to understand your present tastes, priorities and buying habits. (Chapter 10)

8. Letting go of the clutter and the superfluous. (Chapter 10)

9. Developing a healthy attitude towards money. (Chapter 15)

10. Choosing each new item with your long-term priorities and tastes in mind. (Chapters 7, 12 and 13)

11. Developing the skills to take care of and keep the things you’ve chosen to bring into your life. (Chapter 14)

This book contains practical exercises on how to put all these steps into action. Skipping straight to the exercises may leave you with a shallower understanding of why they are important. However, if time is short and you just want to get cracking, go ahead – there’s a list of exercises on the next page, or simply flick through the book for them.

This is above all a book on how to be happy in the ultra-commercial world we live in right now. It’s meant to be useful, so please use it in the way that’s most helpful to you.

Let’s get started!

List of Exercises

Persuade yourself of the importance of non-material actions

Sign up for BuyMeOnce mantras

Simple ways to combat materialism every day

Identifying your homeware aesthetic

Generating empathy

Free yourself from celebrity influence

Make your own adverts

Ad-blocking

Separate lifestyle and product

Finding your fashion identity

Dressing up for the roles you play

Shape up

Find your true colours

The mindfully curated capsule

Turning necessities into luxuries

If you were the last person on the planet

Refusing to feel ashamed

How to increase your sense of being valued by your tribe

Digging deeper to find purpose

Discovering your passions

Kill yourself off (metaphorically)

Bringing it all together to find your ‘42’

Your purpose and your purchasing

The common threads of taste

Where your values and brand values meet

An exercise in commitment

The life-less-throwaway challenge

Write your own unwish list

Nourishing your self-esteem

Identifying impulse-buying triggers

Preventing lost property

Memory training for glasses

Saying goodbye to an object

Prioritising where your money goes

Find your freedoms

Connect with your special people

Find your tribe

Grow every day

Tell yourself a better story

Have a purposeful weekend

Be a friend to yourself

Improving your home’s mood

PART I

Broken Behaviour

1

Mindful Curation

or

How to resist a world that’s trying to make us broke and lonely

Our relationship with ‘stuff’ may sit squarely at the centre of this book, but I should be clear from the outset that the purpose of it isn’t to make you obsess over material things. In fact, it’s to help you do the opposite. I want to give you the tools to understand what you need and don’t need, and how to make the objects in your life work for you in the long term.

THE BENEFITS OF MINDFUL CURATION

We only have a limited amount of money, headspace and time to spend as we frolic on this planet and we can very easily waste a huge amount of each on meaningless stuff. Mindful curation helps us to free up all three, so that we can spend them enjoying the things we find most meaningful.

Being more mindful about what we buy protects us from impulse spending and gives us more resilience to advertising and marketing manipulation. So we find that we start saving money over time. Crucially, though, it doesn’t feel as though we’re making a sacrifice. Savings come naturally out of a better understanding of what we need and what best serves us, which is usually much less than the average person buys.

When we practise mindful curation, we’re also releasing ourselves from the trivial, the bland and the shoddy, and living a life where the objects around us perfectly match our needs, pull their weight, reflect our values and put a smile on our face. This frees up our time and energy for the things that matter most, like family, friends, pursuing our passions and finally finding out who wins Game of Thrones.

THE BENEFITS OF LONGER-LASTING PRODUCTS

Not all products are made equal, and I believe we’ve left longevity out of our decision-making for far too long. The commercial world does everything it can to tempt us away from longevity, but that only serves its ever-hungry self, not us, the people who have to deal with the broken zips, rattling washing machines and rips in the crotches of our jeans.

When I started to buy for the long term, I found myself thinking far more deeply about what I wanted out of my life in the future. This meant that the possessions I ‘curated’ automatically started to reflect the deeper and more stable elements of my character, values and personal style. This has brought a lovely natural harmony to my home, creating an atmosphere in which I feel refreshed and calm because it is authentically ‘me’.

My home had previously been a stressful one. Every time I’d walked through my little kingdom and seen the toaster that wouldn’t pop, the wonky flat-pack drawers, dried-up biros and dodgy dishwasher, I’d feel anxiety rise up. Once I started surrounding myself with objects I could trust, my home became a much more relaxing and nurturing place to be.

Another delightful side effect of buying fewer things and not replacing your items so regularly is that you can afford to buy higher-quality, better-crafted products, so your quality of life can actually feel higher.

IS IT MINIMALISM?

Mindful curation definitely has its roots in the minimalist movement. However, while minimalism tends to be quite clear on what we should cut out of our lives (as much as possible), it can leave us hanging when it comes to deciding what to bring into them and how to bypass the pressures to buy more than we need.

With mindful curation, we aren’t trying to reduce our possessions down to a magic number of objects or compete to see who can live with the least. Instead, we’re finding out much more about ourselves and our values and using that knowledge as a shield against clutter and the tricks and temptations of marketers. So with mindful curation we’ll end up owning exactly the right amount for us – no more and no less – and this will be different for everyone.

MINDFUL CURATION VS MINDLESS CONSUMPTION

‘The best things in life aren’t things.’

Art Buchwald, satirist

Mindful curation is a simple idea, but it can be challenging at first because there are so many forces trying to get us to think in the opposite way – the way of ‘mindless consumption’.

Mindless consumption sounds free-spirited and potentially quite fun. It’s the unwritten hashtag for every photo uploaded by the ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’, the hidden subtitle on every ‘haul video’.

The danger of mindless consumption though is that it makes us morbidly materialistic, meaning that a huge amount of our attention is focused on our wealth, our stuff and our status. And materialistic people have been shown to be (deep breath) less generous, less agreeable, less healthy, less likely to help others, less satisfied with their lives, less satisfied with their jobs, less caring about the environment, more likely to gamble, more likely to be in debt, lonelier, worse at keeping friends and less close to the friends they do have. Oh, and materialistic kids do less well at school.¹

In short – it’s really bad!

Yet advertisers, the government, our friends, and even our kids surround us with messages and put constant pressure on us to focus on materialistic things. On top of this, on average we see more than 5,000 marketing messages a day.²

Unsurprisingly, this takes its toll. Research shows that briefly subjecting someone to photos of luxury objects or even just words such as ‘status’ or ‘expensive’ can trigger a more depressed mood, feelings of wanting to outdo others and less willingness to socialise.³

Tim Kasser, who has been studying the effects of materialism for almost two decades, describes the impact as a ‘see-saw effect’. When we see ourselves as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘people’ (which is easily triggered through marketing messaging) we focus more on materialistic urges, such as our status and competitiveness. This causes an upswing of negative materialistic thoughts and a downswing of positive urges towards community, connection, generosity, trust and cooperation – all the things that have been proven to make our lives more fulfilling and happy.

So, when your grandad says that people were nicer in the ‘good old days’, in this aspect, it’s true. Our materialistic tendencies have increased so much in the last few decades that our sense of community, our trust in others and our ability to be happy have been gravely reduced.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT NOW?

I’m not going to spend too much time pressing this point, because I think we all know that mindless consumerism is pushing our poor planet to a crisis point. We need to save it, and dropping the ball isn’t really an option. We live on the ball, and we don’t have another one to move to.

But it isn’t just the planet that should concern us. The trend towards materialism is also increasingly taking its toll on our day-to-day lives because it tricks us into losing the personal connections that make us happy.

A study of 2,500 consumers over six years concluded that no matter how much money you had to spend, materialism was linked to an increase in loneliness and loneliness in turn increased materialism.⁴ In the Seventies and Eighties, only 11–20 per cent of Americans reported that they often felt lonely; in 2010 that figure rose to between 40 and 45 per cent.⁵ The Mental Health Foundation in the UK also reported in 2010 that 46 per cent of us felt that society was getting lonelier.⁶

Relying on social media for connection is like trying to live off multivitamins – they might be a nice add-on, but they don’t feed us in the way we need. Research has shown that increasing your friends on Facebook has no effect on your well-being at all, but increasing your ‘real world’ friends from ten to twenty people results in a significant life-altering improvement – the equivalent of a 50 per cent pay rise.⁷

How does materialism make us lonelier? The messages we see in ads and social media channels perpetuate a myth that having things or looking a certain way makes us worthy of love and admiration. It’s very natural to want to feel special and appreciated, so we start to focus on our looks and achievements and buy high-status items that others will admire. However, any admiration or connection we gain is on a shallow level, and because it isn’t based on anything authentic, it leaves us feeling disconnected and unsatisfied. So we try even harder to get the love we need by showing the world our possessions, our status and our achievements, never guessing that the constant focus on the self means that the connection to others isn’t going to happen.

Sadly, materialism and narcissism are on the rise. A study published in 2012 tracked the values of graduates since 1966 and found that the importance given to status, money and narcissistic life goals like ‘being famous’ had risen significantly, whereas the importance given to finding meaning and purpose in life and a desire to help others had fallen.⁸ In addition, a study of students over the last thirty years has found that college kids today are about 40 per cent lower in empathy than the students of twenty or thirty years ago.⁹

We have become ‘all about me’ rather than ‘all about we’. The irony is that self-focused people hurt themselves more than anyone else. I don’t feel that it is a coincidence that the use of antidepressants has gone up 400 per cent in the USA¹⁰ and doubled in Britain in the last decade.¹¹

To add insult to injury, marketers know how much we crave the connections that are the cornerstone of our happiness, so their adverts are full of family bonding and friends having great times – all to sell us goods that in reality are driving us apart.

IS OUR STUFF GETTING IN THE WAY OF WHAT’S IMPORTANT?

In March 2010, a group of five Pacific Islanders who had lived all their lives with practically no possessions were flown to the UK to be part of a TV programme where they looked at British life.¹² As they walked around their hosts’ houses and explored London, they were surprised by all the ‘useless extra things’ they saw, saddened that busy commuters wouldn’t stop and talk to them, and shocked at seeing homeless people. This would ‘never be allowed to happen’ in their community.

The tribesmen’s simple lives meant that they hadn’t lost sight of what was important: love, respect and enjoying each other’s company. When they first arrived, they were all given their own room in their host’s big house. Later, when they stayed at a more modest place and all four of them were put together in a small bedroom, they declared themselves happier because now they were ‘able to talk to each other’.

It’s easy to romanticise the ‘noble savage’ life. There are of course many downsides, including lack of healthcare, gender equality and Ben & Jerry’s. But it is interesting to explore how our own society’s values might change if materialism was reduced.

In 2016, my fiancé, Howard, and I were invited to be on a TV show running an experiment to try and discover this very thing. The idea was that all our possessions, including our clothes, would be taken away from us.

‘No bloody way,’ Howard said before I was halfway through explaining the idea. Howard is not a naked person. Not ever. Not even with himself. So Life Stripped Bare went on to be made without us.¹³

Six people were stripped bare. Literally. Crouching-beneath-your-window-sill-so-the-neighbours-don’t-see-your-dangly-bits bare. All their stuff was locked away and each day they were able to choose one possession that they most wanted to have back in in their lives. Then (to get as much flesh wobbling as possible), they had to run half a mile up the road to a shed to get it back.

One of the volunteers, Heidi, a 29-year-old pink-haired fashion designer with thirty-one bikinis, sobbed as the removal vans arrived in her trendy area of London. ‘I feel my stuff defines me,’ she said. ‘I want people to like me, think I’m cool, think I’m nice, and if I don’t have my hipster coat, if I don’t have my nails painted or my rings on, I don’t think they will like me …’

On Day 2, after a gruelling night on the floor, she reflected, ‘Yesterday I was crying because I wanted everything. Today I just want my mattress.’

In fact she got more than that. Out on the street, two passing girls stopped to help her carry the mattress back to her house and they bonded over the funny situation.

Almost in tears, Heidi said to camera, ‘Now I’ve got some friends, I honestly feel I’ve got everything … When you have nothing, people make the whole world of difference.’

I’d like to turn this on its head and say, ‘When you’ve got people, there’s nothing much else you need in the world.’

All the participants of Life Stripped Bare found that once their basic comfort levels were met, they became less and less bothered about picking up new items from the shed. We can be happy with very little, yet due to materialism, the average home has 300,000 items in it …

So how can we reverse this trend? Let’s start with some exercises to break free of materialism.

exercise

PERSUADE YOURSELF OF THE IMPORTANCE OF NON-MATERIAL ACTIONS

You may think you don’t need persuading that there’s more to life than materialism, especially after reading this chapter, but write an e-mail to yourself about it anyway. This may seem a bit twee, but has been proven by professor and clinical psychologist Natasha Lekes to have a tangible impact on your happiness.¹⁴ I’ll even start you off:

Dear me,

This feels odd, but I’m going to tell you about why I think having good relationships, helping the world to be a better place and growing as a person are so important …

exercise

SIGN UP FOR BUYMEONCE MANTRAS

Sign yourself up for free daily mantras at BuyMeOnce.com. These short phrases will help your subconscious make good choices for you and you’ll be less swayed by materialistic messaging. Here are three to get you going:

• ‘I am good enough.’

• ‘I have everything I need to be happy.’

• ‘I am grateful for all I have.’

exercise

SIMPLE WAYS TO COMBAT MATERIALISM EVERY DAY

• Remind yourself on waking that this life is amazing but also short – smile and say thank you for the day.

• Find time each day to focus on your own personal growth and self-worth. (You’ll find ideas in this book.)

• Find people who share your passions and build a sense of community with them.

• Block materialistic messages as much as possible (more on this later).

• Practise meditation and mindfulness – there’s a wealth of material out there to get you started.

• Feeling close to nature has been shown to decrease materialism, so get out as much as possible, even if you just go into your back garden or a public park. Nature documentaries can also be a lovely way to escape from seeing ‘stuff’.

2

Planned Obsolescence

or

Why they don’t make ’em like they used to

‘Obsolescence’ is a horrible mouthful of a word that essentially means ‘when something becomes useless’. ‘Planned obsolescence’, therefore, is when people plan for products to become useless. Deliberately. Let that sink in for a second.

There are two main ways planned obsolescence happens. The first is physical, where companies design products to break before they need to. That is the subject of this chapter. The other is psychological obsolescence, where people are made to feel that they no longer want the possessions they already have. We’ll look at that in the next chapter.

But first I’m going to take you back to the Twenties and Thirties to discover how planned obsolescence came about. I’ll also share with you some of the shocking evidence of companies who have conspired against us to change the way we buy forever.

WHO PLANNED IT?

Planned obsolescence was born and brought up (to be very naughty) in America. ‘Obsolescence is the American way,’ boasted industrial designers Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens in their 1932 book Consumer Engineering. And certainly Americans took quickly to the idea of rampantly replacing their possessions, while Europeans still held on to theirs as long as possible. Some people at the time did raise concerns about the extra waste and damage to the environment, but their concerns were quickly brushed under the cheap new rugs that were being made. Sheldon and Arens justified their championing of obsolescence by pointing out that while Europe had used up many of its natural resources, ‘in America, we still have tree covered slopes to deforest and subterranean lakes of oil to tap …’¹

America also had a problem with overproduction. By the early Thirties, the States had got very good at making lots of things very quickly, but wasn’t too good at selling them. The stock market had crashed and the country was in the middle of what became known as the Great Depression, with millions jobless and around half of all children without decent shelter or food to eat. In these conditions we can’t blame people for clutching at ideas like planned obsolescence to solve the issues, even if we are now left to deal with the fallout.

In 1932 a Russian-American called Bernard London published a grand plan entitled ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’. After noticing that people held onto their products longer in a depression and this meant less money being spent on goods, he suggested that every product, from shoes to cars, houses to hats, be given a set lifespan. Once that lifespan was up, the items would be legally ‘dead’ and people would have to turn them in to the government to be destroyed or risk a fine. They would then of course have to buy them again new.

Mr London sold his idea as the saving grace of the US economy. ‘Miracles do happen,’ he said. ‘But they must be planned in order to occur.’²

This particular miracle never came off. Maybe because the government realised that forcing people to hand over their possessions for incineration was a sure-fire way to get unelected.

What ended up happening was stealthier. Businessmen, politicians, manufacturers and the advertising industry colluded to change both products and minds, with the aim of turning citizens into consumers. In fact they had been colluding already.

The lightbulb conspiracy

It’s very hard to find a smoking gun when you go looking for evidence of people deliberately building things to break. Unsurprisingly, this is not something that companies will admit to doing if you call up their head office. The most famous proven case was the subject of a truly shocking documentary called The Light Bulb Conspiracy.³ It’s famous because it’s one of the few times we’ve found actual written proof that this shady practice takes place.

By 1924, lightbulbs had been getting better in quality for some time; some were now lasting up to 2,500 hours. Then representatives of the biggest electric companies in the world, including Osram, Philips and General Electric, met in Geneva on the night before Christmas to hatch a very unChristmassy plan.

By the end of the meeting in a cramped back room, they had formed a secret group known as the Phoebus Cartel, and had all agreed to send their bulbs to Switzerland regularly to be tested to ensure they broke within 1,000 hours. They had even agreed to be fined for every hour they went over the limit.

What they were doing was on very dodgy legal ground and we know that not everyone was completely happy about it. Some engineers attempted to get around the 1,000-hour limit by designing bulbs of a higher voltage, but they were soon found out and scolded by the head of Philips:

‘[This bulb design] is a very dangerous practice and is having a most detrimental influence on the total turnover of the Phoebus Parties … After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long-life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life.’⁴

They did not sink back into the ‘mire’. If you look at the graph below, showing how long bulbs last, you’ll see that there’s a steady decline until the cartel reached their goal and the average bulb expectancy ground out at around 1,025 hours.

Photo: Landesarchiv Berlin

How did they get away with it? Many of the changes were sold to consumers as efficiencies and improvements in brightness. And despite lasting less than half as long as the older lightbulbs, the new ones were often even more expensive.

The companies profited enormously from their tactics; one reported that their sales had increased fivefold since they’d changed their designs to be more delicate.

The cartel was disbanded during the Second World War, when it became a little awkward for German, British and American businessmen to get together. But the damage had been done; the life expectancy of bulbs didn’t recover.

I recently had the pleasure of talking to several people who work in the lightbulb industry today. When I shared the story of the 1924 Phoebus Cartel, they said that in many ways things were no better now.

One engineer told me that one of the most underhanded tactics she’d witnessed recently was bulbs being sold with an advertised life of seven years but purposefully designed so they would only last two or three years, just long enough to avoid customer complaints and returns. And this company was a major player in the lightbulb world.

‘They’re lying to us,’ she said bluntly. ‘The lightbulb industry is full of misinformation. I’ve run independent tests on bulbs and some of them are running so hot there’s no way the components inside them will survive the time the packaging says they will.

‘There are all sorts of cheats going on. For example, “15,000-hour lifetime” might be written in large print on the front of the box, while “one-year guarantee” might be written in small print on the back. And then you get guarantees that are only valid if the bulb is used for one to two hours per day.’

This misinformation has sadly stopped genuinely good bulbs from succeeding, as customers can’t see the difference.

One scene from The Light Bulb Conspiracy which filled me with dread was footage of a teacher in a design college handing out various products to his students and asking them how long they thought they were designed to last. ‘It’s important for you to know,’ he said, ‘because you’ll have to design to a certain lifespan and to the business model the company wants.’ This is particularly disheartening, as he’s teaching the next generation of designers not to make the best products they can, but ones that last as long as they need to for the company to sell them.

Beyond bulbs

By the Fifties, obsolescence was fully grown and had left home to travel the world. Now its influence can be seen everywhere, from the furniture left outside to be picked up in Europe to the mountains of electrical waste in Asia.

In the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties voices did start being raised about the need for products to last longer to avoid an environmental crisis, but governments and businesses chose instead to concentrate their efforts on recycling.

Recycling is a positive thing and certainly takes away the guilt we feel about discarding something. But the truth is the environmental difference between being able to carry on using something and recycling it is colossal. Recycling still takes energy, waste collection and processing, and usually manufacturing a new object to replace the one we are discarding. This suits companies very well, but we and our planet end up paying the price.

So here we are. The calls for longer-lasting products have been ignored for decades, planned obsolescence reigns supreme and the commercial world is steaming us blindfold into an iceberg of trash.

QUALITY STRIPPING

We’ve all experienced quality stripping, and I’m not talking about particularly adept G-string jiggling. If ‘building it to break’ is the famous poster child of planned obsolescence, ‘quality stripping’ is probably the most common tactic used. It’s being done to products all over the world, all of the time, and it’s not even being denied, it’s just being explained away.

In the spring of 2017, I was invited to the wilds of Yorkshire to visit Morphy Richards, a prominent British home appliances firm. I was thrilled that they were open to talking about longevity, as every other company I’d spoken to was quick to be defensive about the issue. I took the opportunity to question them about why things didn’t last as long as they used to.

‘I’ve been told by an engineer friend,’ I said, ‘that it isn’t necessarily that things are built to break, but that every year you might be asked to take more costs out of the product, so the materials get thinner and cheaper and the quality starts to come down. Is this true?’

‘That’s exactly it,’ they agreed. ‘It’s all about cost. With enough money, we can make you something that lasts as long as you want, but we have to hit a certain price to please the marketers and retailers.’

This all sounds quite reasonable, but the effect of it is not. There is solid evidence that appliances are breaking earlier and earlier. In fact, the number of appliances that must be replaced because of breakage has doubled since 2004. Most shockingly, boilers used to last a wonderful 23 years in 1980, but are only expected to last 12 years by 2020.⁵

There is also a heartbreaking disconnect between the people who design and make the products and the people who make the decisions to forego quality. Engineers are craftsman and generally want to make the highest-quality products they can. But many businesspeople see manufacturing companies purely as money-making projects. Whether they make hairdryers or hamburgers makes no difference to them.

The cost-cutting decisions might not even be made by the company that makes the product but by an “umbrella” company which owns a lot of brands. That company may be so far away from the making of the actual product, they may not even know what it looks like. But they can still demand that the engineers find a way to make it 10 per cent cheaper than they did the year before. You can’t do this for long before the lifespan of the product is affected.

‘Companies have become increasingly short term in their thinking,’ admitted Thor Johnsen, who has been in the business of buying, selling and managing other companies for many years. ‘They’re greedy for a quick buck, and short-term greed produces massive problems. Companies will put nearly all their money into their branding and marketing, spend a bit on design and then build their products as cheaply as possible. That’s the model now.’

‘Why are they getting away with it?’ I asked.

‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘shoppers might say they want quality when we ask them, but when we watch them, they don’t actually buy for quality. They buy for convenience or price.’

‘Do you think part of the trouble,’ I suggested, ‘is that people go into a shop and see a row of products and can only guess which one lasts the longest? So they end up going for what’s cheapest or what goes best with their kitchen.’

‘Yeah, that might be it,’ he said. ‘Branding used to help us know which was the best quality. But that’s just not the case anymore.’

So far, so depressing. And this isn’t the end of the bad news. Have you ever noticed that sometimes online reviews look as though people are talking about entirely different-quality products, even while reviewing supposedly the same item? Of course different people have different expectations, but several engineers have told me that with so many products being made overseas, there is a temptation for factories to secretly change the quality of the products after the first couple of batches. The factories win the business by making something great, but then start cutting corners. Or everything but the corners. Unless these products are then tested, they make it into the shops and quickly into landfill.

This isn’t only annoying and wasteful, but also sometimes incredibly dangerous. Tyres might be made with cheaper-quality rubber which explodes at high speeds, or the paint used on toys might be switched for a cheaper toxic lead variety.

One of the most shocking findings was that a shipment of aluminium construction materials, crucial to holding up a building, was found to have decreased in weight to under 90 per cent. All of the profits from that saved aluminium would have gone to the factory owner. All of the responsibility for the danger and the cost of recalls would have gone to the company that sold it. It’s almost impossible to sue a Chinese factory, and because companies like to keep their suppliers secret, the factories don’t have to worry too much about damaging their reputation.⁶

The British appliance company I visited is very aware of these problems, so anything that comes in from overseas is tested by them in their own lab.

‘Nothing comes out of here alive,’ said the head of the lab gleefully as he showed me around. Kettles were boiled, poured, filled and boiled again, boiled dry and abused with mechanical arms. Toasters were tortured – popped and popped and popped again until they broke. Irons were slid over miles and miles of rough denim to ensure that their plates could take the strain of years of use.

‘The factories in China know we do this,’ I was told, ‘so they know they can’t get away with sending over inferior products. If it fails here, it doesn’t go to market.’

Most companies can’t afford their own testing facility, however, so we’re often left at the mercy of unscrupulous manufacturers, some of whom are happy to take our money and give us poison and trash in exchange.

If you’re reading this and thinking it’s as depressing as an empty toilet-roll holder, I apologise. It is depressing, but it’s also important to know what we’re up against, so we can know how to combat it. There’s a section at the end of this chapter on how to do just that.

MAKING IT UNFIXABLE – OBSOLESCENCE IN DISGUISE

One scorching August day in 2016, I invited my friend Tom Lawton over to look at toasters. Tom is a rather bizarre combination of engineer, inventor and TV presenter, and I set him the challenge of looking into how six different toaster brands were made and how that might affect their longevity.

‘What we’re looking for,’ Tom said, ‘is the weakest link. A product is only as good as its worst flaw.’

We looked at the toasters to get an insight into the choices that engineers have to make: the materials used, how a product is put together, and areas where the durability is being comprised. One of the things that immediately jumped out at us, though, was how hard these toasters were to get into. Some even had special star-shaped security screws. One did come apart eventually, exposing a jagged metal edge which cut Tom’s hand open. These toasters were clearly not designed to be taken apart.

Some manufacturers do this to protect themselves. If a member of the public fixes a product and it goes wrong, it can be a PR disaster for the brand, so you can see where this defensive thinking comes from. At the same time, being sold products that are designed to be unfixable (even by a trained engineer like Tom) has conditioned us to feel helpless when things break. So when their weakest link fails they are seen as ‘dead’ and destined for the big scrapheap in the sky (or sea … or slum).

Smartphones are perhaps the most notorious for this. Their weakest link is their battery, and the makers know it, but some of the brands make it impossible or prohibitively expensive for people to replace the battery. When it goes, often the whole phone goes. There’s been some backlash over this, but in general we’ve rolled over and accepted the situation. Perhaps seduced by having an excuse to buy the newest model?

But by preventing us from replacing the battery, the manufacturers are limiting the whole phone’s life to the life of the battery. Imagine your car tyres wearing out and the manufacturer telling you that you might as well buy a whole new car. This is essentially what many technology companies are doing right now.

Phones aren’t the only products that have come under fire recently either. A 2015 investigation into washing machines by Which? (the UK’s number one consumer magazine) showed their design had changed over time ‘and not for the better’. Now they’re made with the drum and bearings sealed inside, meaning that if the bearings go (one of the top five reasons for a breakdown), we have to replace the entire drum, which may cost around £200. If the machine’s out of warranty, we’ll generally be told it’s not worth fixing and we should buy a new one.⁷

When manufacturers were asked why they now sealed in their drums, they claimed it made the machines more reliable. However, the most reliable brand, Miele, doesn’t seal its drums, so this excuse feels as suspicious to me as finding a feather in my cat’s bed. It’s clear something nasty has happened …

WHAT TO DO?

The emotional and financial toll of having something break on you is often not thought about, but whenever a vital product breaks it brings an added level of stress into your life. It can even trap low-income families into a cycle of poverty, forcing them to pay out again and again for shoddy appliances. Some might say that it is the duty of businesspeople to put profits first; however, as I sit here writing this in 2017, I would argue that to put profits before people and planet is dangerous, short-sighted, selfish and just plain rude. Fortunately, as consumers, we do have some power if we know how to use it.

When they build it to break

• Get angry and demand more. According to a report on product durability, when it comes to small appliances, we’re upset if something lasts less than three years and satisfied if it lasts 7.7 years.⁸ I think we should expect better. If something has a simple function, like to boil water or toast bread, there’s no excuse for it not to last for decades. The fact that we’re happy with less is worrying – we’ve been trained to expect poor longevity.

• Look out for petitions to change the law in your country. France already has a law to prevent planned obsolescence, and a director of any company caught in ‘built to break’ tactics can now go to jail for two years and face a fine of up to €300,000 or 5 per cent of the company’s revenue. I believe this should be the law worldwide, and I’ll be fighting to make that happen.

When it breaks

• Let us at BuyMeOnce know. We’re aiming to build up the biggest database in the world on how long products last.

• Tell the company that you’re dissatisfied and write an online review telling others how long that product lasted for you.

• Support your local fixers who still have the skills to mend things. We need more of these people.

• Have a go at mending yourself. (See Appendix I: Care and Repair for advice.)

When buying

• Seek out products that are reviewed independently as lasting longer and those that come with the best warranties.

• Ask a local repairer which models they recommend.

• Buy locally whenever possible to avoid overseas factories with less rigorous standards.

• Vote for durability with your wallet by buying BuyMeOnce-approved products and we’ll soon see more companies upping their game.

• Ask how long a company keeps spare parts for and what the most common repair is, and consider buying that part in advance.

When they strip the quality

• Showing companies that you care about longevity is the key to getting it. Ask about it and talk about it on their social media. Be annoying! It’s often the best way to make change happen.

• Sign the BuyMeOnce pledge, letting companies know that you’d be willing to support them if they made products that were built to last. This will give them the confidence to change their policies.

• Look at independent reviews to see if the build quality has gone down. You can find these at Which?, Consumer Reports, the Reddit ‘Buyitforlife’ thread, BuyMeOnce and Amazon. Check the most up-to-date reviews for any evidence of fading quality. The good news is that people tend to be rather vocal when things don’t meet the standards they were expecting.

• Support innovative companies that want to do better. If you see a gap in the market, either consider filling it yourself, if you’re feeling inventive, or tell BuyMeOnce about it and we’ll put it out as a challenge.

• Support the makers and craftspeople who have a real connection to their products. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter help us because they allow engineers and makers to go straight to the customer without retailers or marketers in between. This means engineers who want to make longer-lasting products can offer them to the public, and if we like the idea, it may well get funded.

When they make their products unfixable

• Vote with your wallet and look for fixable modular versions of products. For example, a Fairphone can be taken apart and upgraded easily.

• If you have a product that needs fixing, visit your local Restart Project or Repair Café, or start your own group through online sites such as meetup or Facebook. If you haven’t repaired a product before, seek an expert’s advice first. Some products are perfectly repairable by a civilian; however, electricity is serious stuff, so do your homework and use parts approved by the manufacturer if possible. (For more on repairs, see Appendix I: Care and Repair.)

THE BUYMEONCE #MAKEITLAST CAMPAIGN

At BuyMeOnce we’re campaigning to get companies to tell us how long they expect their products to last and to make the best products possible. Products, rather like animals, evolve over time – features that are successful and useful, like a long neck in a giraffe or a long handle on a frying pan to stop burns, should get taken on by the next generation until the design is perfected.

But then money and trends come in and rather muck things up. Instead of making the ultimate frying pan, companies concentrate on making the cheapest frying pan. What we end up with is something that will serve as a pan for a few months but soon dies. Imagine if the giraffe got the same treatment …

A board meeting at Giraffe-makers, Inc.

‘Right,’ says the product developer. ‘So we’ve worked out that halving the length of neck will take costs down by 15 per cent per giraffe.’

The board members smile and nod to each other.

The head of engineering chimes in nervously, ‘But then … then it won’t be able to eat from the top branches during droughts.’

‘So?’ asks the CEO.

‘So it will starve in a year or so … as soon as the rains fail.’

The head of engineering winces.

‘Yeah, but, like … it’s still a giraffe until then, isn’t it? I mean, we can still advertise it as a giraffe, can’t we?’ The head of marketing lolls her head sardonically to one side and stares at him until he looks away.

‘And,’ points out the CEO, ‘if they fail earlier, people will just have to buy another one!’

‘And we could make them stripy,’ chimes in the designer. ‘Stripes are going to be huge next year.’

When shoppers were asked what their top motivation was for buying a product, price and style came out top. Longevity wasn’t even on the radar.⁹ This is partly because most manufacturers don’t want it to be on the radar. If they did, you could be sure that every box would shout about how long you could expect the product inside to last. This is exactly what we’re campaigning for at BuyMeOnce.

Imagine going to buy an appliance and having a clear idea of how long it would last. It would immediately be obvious which items were the best value over time. Please join us on this mission by signing the #makeitlast petition at change.org or reaching out to us at BuyMeOnce.com.

Clearly, planned obsolescence isn’t as simple as mysterious people in white coats putting mythical ‘kill chips’ in our blenders to stop them from working the day after the warranty expires. It’s subtler and more insidious. Still, I believe it can be overcome and we can drastically improve the quality of what we are sold if we employ some of the tactics above. The fightback begins here.

3

Psychological Obsolescence

or

Why no one wants their parents’ old settee

While rummaging through our rubbish, a group of academics found that of the household objects thrown away, on average 40 per cent were beyond repair and 20 per cent needed fixing, but a whopping 40 per cent were still perfectly functional.¹ So we can’t blame all our waste on shoddy product design or irreparability. Something else is also at play here – psychological obsolescence – and it doesn’t play fair.

Psychological obsolescence is a technique used by companies to persuade us to replace the products we own, even if they still work perfectly well. Over the last few decades companies have conditioned us increasingly to see things as temporary and throwaway. They keep us obsessed with the new. They keep us excited, but it is a cheap, short-lived excitement, as the products we adore on purchase start to shift in our affections. This chapter explores the forces that set this in motion and what we can do to combat it.

THE MOTHER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE

Several men have been given the rather dubious honour of being titled ‘the father of planned obsolescence’, including King Gillette, inventor of the disposable razor, J. Gordon Lippincott, who praised the economic benefits of obsolescence in his book Design for Business, and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr, president of General Motors, who pioneered the idea of slightly updating the look of cars every year. Finally we have General Motors designer Harley J. Earl, who said in 1955, ‘Our job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934, the average car ownership span was five years; now it is two years. When it is one year, we will have the perfect score.’²

All these men played their part. However, planned obsolescence also has a mother, and she’s rather intriguing.

When Christine Frederick was born in 1883, her father apparently cried, ‘Horrors! Why, it’s only a girl!’ It wasn’t a promising start, but this girl grew up to be energetic, bright and imposing-looking, even in sepia. She gained a degree, and public power through her prolific writing and speaking, at a time when most women had neither. Sadly, she then used this rare female freedom to argue that a woman’s place was in the home … being a consumer.

Both Christine and her husband were in the advertising game. George Frederick was a busy boy, revolutionising the way advertisers wrote, promoting the use of psychology in ads and having several extra-marital affairs.

Christine meanwhile conducted scientific research in her own housekeeping facility – we have her to thank for all kitchen counters being the same height – and became a writer for The Ladies’ Home Journal, covering everything from economic and commercial theory to ‘Frankfurters as You Like Them’.

In 1928 her husband coined the phrase ‘progressive obsolescence’, and a year later Christine took on this idea wholeheartedly in her book, Selling Mrs. Consumer. It might just as easily have been called Selling Out Mrs. Consumer, for part of it was a guide on how companies could manipulate women’s insecurities, vanities and natural feelings of motherly or sexual love to persuade them to consume at an increased rate.

Christine’s main message was that the public should embrace ‘progressive obsolescence’, which involved developing:

‘(1) A state of mind which is highly suggestible and open; eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living.

(2) A readiness to “scrap” or lay aside an article before its natural life of usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing.

(3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one’s income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living.’³

In short, she encouraged her readers to become highly suggestible people willing to spend above their means, upgrade regularly and throw away perfectly useful items – something she called ‘creative waste’.

She saw materials as ‘inexhaustible’, and so professed, ‘There isn’t the slightest reason why they should not be creatively “wasted”.’ She scoffed at the Europeans who ‘buy shoes, clothes, motor cars, etc., to last just as long as possible’:

‘That is their idea of buying wisely. You buy once and of very substantial, everlasting materials and you never buy again if you can help it. It is not uncommon for English women of certain circles to wear, on all formal occasions, the same evening gown for five or ten years. To us, this is unheard of and preposterous. If designers and weavers and inventors of rapid machinery make it possible to choose a new pattern of necktie or dress every few weeks, and there is human pleasure in wearing them, why be an old frump and cling to an old necktie or old dress until it wears through?’⁴

I suppose in Christine’s mind this brands me and anyone living a life less throwaway as a ‘preposterous old frump’. I wonder if we can get that put on a (lifetime-guaranteed) T-shirt?

THE THREE STAGES OF CREATIVE WASTE

Or, ‘Meet the Consumer Jones’s’

Christine describes how the three stages of creative waste work, using a radio as an example:

• Her perfect family, ‘the Consumer Jones’s’, start out by updating their radio set up to twice a year as it gets technically better. This is the ‘technical’ phase.

• Next is the ‘practical’ phase, where they throw out their radio and buy an integrated product such as a radio in a desk.

• Finally, they throw that out and buy a new product purely for how it looks. That is the ‘aesthetic’ phase.

What does this mean for us today and how should we act in these three phases?

The technical phase

Christine makes a valid point here in that we do need some people to be willing to take a chance on new technology so that it can progress. If a product is getting technically better, upgrading is a natural result. However, now we’re aware that resources are not, as Christine described them, ‘endlessly replenishable’, I feel we need to demand that tech companies do more in the technical phase. They should design products with upgradable or modular parts and products that can be dismantled, repurposed and recycled easily.

The practical phase

I take issue here with buying something purely to combine two objects, such as a desk with a radio. I think that complicating your furniture by embedding pieces of tech in it is a sure-fire way of forcing yourself to throw away your furniture! The more complicated you make an object, the more there is to go wrong with it. This phase, in my opinion, will cause more problems than it claims to solve.

The Aesthetic Phase

Getting people to discard perfectly working products because they were no longer seen as beautiful was the real masterstroke of psychological obsolescence. Manufacturers started to tweak the look of their products just enough every year to make purely useful things fashion items too. These products then became unfashionable within a few years.

This trend started in car design and then quickly moved into home design and appliances. A new model would come out and suddenly people’s pride in the old model was reduced. It was particularly noticeable in cars, as they were parked on the street, where all the neighbours could see them. The American car was soon considered to be a ‘kind of motorised magic carpet on which social egos could ascend’.⁵

The manufacturers would say that the public demanded these constant style changes, but in fact the public had been trained to expect them by the manufacturers themselves. As Charles Kettering, head of research at General Motors, famously wrote, his job was to make people dissatisfied with what they had already.

However, while all the other car manufacturers were tweaking the designs, one company bucked the trend. The VW Beetle looked exactly the same from 1949 to 1963. In fact, the company ran an advert celebrating the fact. Called the ‘VW Theory of Evolution’. It showed every identical-looking car with its year number, lined up in neat rows. Underneath was written:

‘Can you spot the Volkswagen with the fins? Or the one that’s bigger? Or smaller? Or the one with the fancy chrome work? You can’t? The reason you can’t see most of our evolutionary changes is because we’ve made them deep down inside the car. And that’s our theory: never change the VW for the sake of change, only to make it better. That’s what keeps our car ahead of its time. And never out of style.’⁶

As VW shows here, there is an alternative way for successful companies to behave if they choose to take it.

REASONS FOR WASTEFUL BUYING

Before the twentieth century, people didn’t naturally switch their possessions before they were worn out, so reasons had to be invented to get us to change things on a regular basis. To be fair to Christine Frederick, she did say that changes to products should not just be for change’s sake, but ‘for the sake of increased knowledge of taste, color, line, efficiency, better workmanship, health, hygiene and fitness’. Let’s pick these reasons apart.

Taste, colour and line

If a designer comes up with new colour schemes and shapes which the media proclaim to be ‘good taste’, is this a good reason to change what we have?

I would say it isn’t, as taste is in the eye of the taster. You simply can’t say someone has ‘better taste’ than someone else. That would be like saying someone’s preference for vanilla ice cream was better than someone else’s preference for strawberry.

Our preferences can change over time, of course, which is why it’s important to dig deeper into our true taste when we choose our products in the first place. More on this later, but for now, let’s carry on with Christine’s list of reasons to chuck out our stuff.

More efficiency

‘More efficiency’ is something to strive for, but unless the product in question is a vehicle, appliance or insulation, this isn’t a reason to jettison what we already have. Also, we’ve come to the point now where energy-efficiency improvements in appliances have plateaued, so unless your current model is very old or polluting, it’s always better environmentally and financially to hold on to the one you have. The carbon and money you’d save with the more efficient model would be wiped out by the energy and money needed for the new purchase. If you want to buy something new based on efficiency, wait for the great leaps forward that happen less often, such as moving to solar energy.

Better workmanship

Changing products regularly is a sure-fire way to undermine good workmanship, and sadly, workmanship standards have been proven to decline when we get into the habit of obsolescence. This is partly due to a decrease in the price and an increase in mass production and partly because there’s no point in putting proper craftsmanship into objects that will be thrown away in a couple of years.

Improved health and hygiene

This is a common marketing ploy for new household products. Companies have done a great job of convincing us that every cranny and surface in our homes is crawling with dangerous microbes. However, much of this fear-mongering is simply to sell us things. For example, washing your hands with normal soap and water is just as effective as the antibacterial soap sold at jumped-up prices.⁷

In the twenty-first century, we bleach and disinfect everything in sight, but just as we all have ‘good bacteria’ in our gut, we also need them on our skin for it to function properly. There is also evidence to suggest that our over-clean homes aren’t allowing our children’s immune systems to develop properly. Kids who grow up on farms and are subjected to the widest range of bacteria show significantly reduced levels of asthma.⁸

Nowadays kitchenware and bathroom accessories are often sold as being more hygienic, but as long as basic hygiene is used, such as washing your hands after using the bathroom and making sure that anything touching raw chicken is washed thoroughly, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get sick from the natural microbes that live in the house. Sterile isn’t something we should be aiming for. For a healthy life, cleanish is clean enough.

Medical innovation is to be encouraged; however, when it comes to health, while a couple of innovations such as car safety and less polluting cookers have had a big impact, I’d recommend turning a deaf ear to the health and fitness industry’s insistence that we need heaps of equipment, supplements and gadgets. We actually require very little to be healthy. Varied unprocessed food, clean water, clean air and a decent amount of activity. Done.

Better fitness

Here, I think Christine means a product that is more ‘fit for purpose’ or more ‘convenient’, and I acknowledge that we want innovations to make products better at what they do.

However, a huge amount of ‘innovation’ around convenience is also change for change’s sake, and much of the innovation overcomplicates products that worked wonderfully in their simplicity. I have an engineer friend for whom this is a personal gripe: ‘A toaster doesn’t need to be able to do your tax return, it just has to make bread warm and a bit brown on each side.’ But often companies will add extra elements to products to justify a higher price tag and to make their product seem new and different from previous models.

My instinct is that most of the time these ‘innovations’ aren’t needed. To prove this to myself, I tried to imagine what my life would be like if all consumer product innovation had stopped in the Thirties, just after Christine’s book came out. Would life be unbearable, or even that different? Not at all. Almost everything in my home would be just as good, if not better, for being made in the Thirties. The only things I think I would miss are the kitchen appliances and boiler, the hoover, my laptop, phone, electric toothbrush and car. Around twelve items. That’s paltry when you think of all the products that have come out since the Thirties. How many of them truly do their jobs better?

HOW TO FIGHT PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE

Recognise it and call it out

Christine might claim not to have encouraged change for change’s sake, but this is precisely what happened once the idea of psychological obsolescence took hold.

One of the little-understood effects of psychological obsolescence is described by Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things. He explains in essence that designers are under pressure to bring out something that looks different every year, so they never get to perfect their creations and make them the best they can be. They have to start from scratch each time so that something different is seen on the shelves.⁹

We can get designers out of this trap by recognising psychological obsolescence and calling it out when we see it. We should make a distinction between what is genuine progress (switching from a petrol to an electric car) and what is change for change’s sake (a car with a slightly wider grill, or ‘Seventies accents’), and shouldn’t give up on our products to buy new versions unless there is a compelling reason to do so. A 5 per cent better pillow or coffee machine isn’t good enough. If it’s 50–100 per cent better, I might consider it. If it’s solving a problem I actually have, I might be interested. Even if the new design is eco-friendlier, in almost all cases (highly polluting cars aside), it’s more environmentally sound to stick with what we have for as long as possible.

Find your ‘true taste’

As I write this, a decor magazine is urging me to kiss last year’s trends of zig-zag patterns and brushed metal goodbye and give my home a different look and feel with butterflies and folding furniture. But the new trends they’re offering are completely arbitrary and not necessarily a look that resonates with my personal aesthetic.

What you choose to bring into your home can have a profound effect on your mood, energy levels and the time you must spend keeping it in order. Unfortunately, when it comes to buying homeware, psychological obsolescence swings into full force. To counter it, it pays to know your true taste. You may know it already. If not, try the exercise below.

exercise

IDENTIFYING YOUR HOMEWARE AESTHETIC

This exercise will take at least twenty minutes, so make sure you have enough time.

• Grab a notebook or open a computer document. Make two columns: Like and Dislike.

• Now go online and search for images of interiors. Don’t go to an interior magazine, but somewhere like Pinterest, Instagram or Google images where you can see a mix of pictures from all eras, from the Tudors to the present day.

• Spend the first five minutes just seeing the colours in the pictures, nothing else. Start jotting down those you do and don’t like in an interior setting and any colour combinations you like.

• Then spend five minutes on textures and patterns – for example, natural wood, clapboard, granite and polka dots.

• Now spend five minutes on styling – for example, window shutters and jugs of flowers.

• Spend the last five minutes on types of furniture and appliances – for example, wing chairs, log coffee tables and retro fridges.

Keep this list handy or go one step further and make a mood board to arm yourself against fads and future-proof your homeware purchases. (For detailed advice on how to find long-lasting homeware, see Chapter 13.)

Resist the lure of the latest technology

There is a sort of ‘natural’ obsolescence that occurs when a new object comes to market and is so good and useful that no one wants the old version. The iPod killed the CD, the CD killed the cassette and the cassette killed the record for everyone apart from hipsters. It’s like a technological survival of the fittest.

It’s not helpful or realistic to expect the world to stop inventing. Past innovations have meant that we live longer now, get to experience more things, travel more widely and have a broader understanding of the world and the people in it. Innovation may even lead to our salvation, with inventions such as Tesla’s solar roof tiles. But it’s also left us with a poisoned and polluted planet and allowed us to harm each other at an increasing rate and distance.

It’s worth questioning our upgrading impulses and thinking through the implications of it. Technology companies turn to psychological obsolescence to make us upgrade whether the new product is significantly better or not. There’s no real reason why Apple should launch new products every year, but mostly we accept this unquestioningly. Start to question it. This is vital, because the lifespans of these products are now shorter than ever, and electrical waste is growing at a scary rate. Eight per cent of our household waste is now electronic¹⁰ and 42 million tons of it was generated in 2014.¹¹ Much of it still works perfectly. It’s estimated that if we sold the items instead of trashing them, people in the UK would make £220 million and people in the USA would make around $1 billion.¹² It isn’t just that many of these products are toxic once they begin to rot in the ground, but also that they have valuable and rare materials still inside them. These are lost to us forever, buried underneath a town’s worth of carrot peelings, chicken bones and poopy nappies.

In one episode of the TV series What to Buy and Why,¹³ my engineer friend Tom Lawton goes to a trash heap and picks out a pair of earphones, a vacuum cleaner and a microscooter. Within a couple of minutes, he finds the problems and fixes them easily. The items are worth several hundred pounds.

If we could just make a clone army of Toms and set them up fixing the world’s electronics, all would be well. One Tom in every town. When I suggested this to him, he laughed and replied, ‘There used to be – tinkers.’

These people are becoming rarer, but they do exist, and if we start making the effort to repair rather than replace, there will soon be many more of them. We can also set up petitions and lobby the government to help us repair and reuse. The state runs our recycling facilities because it sees the benefits. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t run a reuse facility as well.

Governments can help in other ways too. For example, Sweden has reduced the tax on repairing to try and encourage people to go down that route.

It took time for us to get used to the idea of recycling and it will take us a while to get into the swing of repairing and reusing. But if governments and reuse companies make it easy and promote the benefits, then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t become completely natural to send products off to the repair yard instead of to the junkyard. (For more on repairing, see Chapter 14 and Appendix I.)

Read on

I believe that psychological obsolescence is even more insidious and dangerous than physical obsolescence, because with the right messaging, marketers can get into your head and make you dislike the things that you liked perfectly well when you bought them. So read on. Many of the chapters in this book are focused on helping you deal with the lure of psychological obsolescence:

• Chapters 4 and 5 explore advertising and marketing. You will learn how to combat these messages and buy things on your own terms.

• Chapters 6 and 7 will talk you through how to discover your own clothing style and step off the trend treadmill.

• Chapter 9 will help you discover your inner purpose so that whatever you buy nourishes the important goals in your life.

• Chapters 11 to 15 will give you the practical advice you need while you’re out shopping and once you have the products in your life.

We’ll start with advertising – the fuel that makes obsolescence run.

4

Advertising

or

How many people does it take to sell a lightbulb?

According to Fifties industrial designer Brooks Stevens, advertising exists to give people ‘the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary’.¹ Although it’s hard to imagine now, we are not naturally rampant consumers. Marketers had to pump this drug of desire into us.

Drawing on my decade working in advertising, this chapter will give you a peek behind the curtain to show you how the Wizards of Ads bamboozle us into spending money we may not have on things we may not really want.

BEHIND THE ADVERTISING CURTAIN

It was a bright day outside, but you’d never have known it. I was sitting on one of several black fake-leather couches in a vast dark warehouse. The only lights were at the back of the room where the car was waiting for its close-up.

Looking at the scores of stressed-out and scurrying people who had been working on this project for countless days, it suddenly hit me just how bonkers my job really was. If you’re not familiar with how the ad industry works, this is what happens. Brace yourselves.

The car company decides to advertise their car and hires an agency. The ‘planners’ at the agency then do exhaustive research into the aptly named ‘target market’, delving deep into the details of how we think, feel and behave.

Occasionally brands want to change their audience or how people feel about their product, so they change their advertising, which is cheaper and easier than changing the actual product. We might think that we’re too savvy to be swayed by ad strategies, but this is sadly not the case. For example, when my old agency started telling parents that a certain chocolate spread brand was not just a treat but could be a ‘part of a healthy breakfast’, sales doubled. (The morality of employing a strategy like this tends to be ignored.)

Once the planners have a strategy, they hand it over to the ‘creatives’. In the case of this car ad, that was me. The strategy was to get people to see the car as a fashion item – I guess like a snazzy handbag that you drive to your granny in. Together with my creative partner and creative director, I spent weeks coming up with dozens of ways to turn this strategy into a poster concept.

Then things got practical. I auditioned over fifty models, looking them up and down to decide whether they had the ‘right look’ to make people want to buy a three-door hatchback. Incidentally, having to judge someone else’s appearance isn’t a comfortable or life-affirming activity. It manages to make you feel disconnected from your humanity, creepy and fat all at the same time. Despite my final choice being a size 6 (US size 2), the client who sat beside me on the black sofas confided that she was worried the model might be ‘too chubby’.

Finalising the outfit for this not-at-all-chubby woman then took several weeks of deliberation, research into the target audience and late-night fittings. What did we end up with? Cropped trousers, plimsolls and a layered T-shirt. A simple enough look you might think, but every detail had been debated and signed off by multiple people.

Then it was up to the clothes stylists, hair and make-up stylists, lighting directors, photographers and all their many assistants to ensure that both car and model looked ab-sol-ute-ly perfect. We all had one last passionate debate with the client about the shoes the model was wearing and then the photographs began. They flashed up onto a big computer screen where we could examine them, and more minute adjustments were made. Several hours later, we wrapped, congratulated ourselves and went back to the office to pick our final picture.

Once there, however, none of the shots were considered ‘just right’, so we ended up expertly knitting three different photographs together in Photoshop. Later, the retouch artists began the work of making both the perfect-looking car and the perfect-looking person (who had already been rigorously perfected) look more perfect.

A month later, the poster was finished. It looked, unsurprisingly, rather perfect. It went up on billboards all over the UK and the whole campaign was considered a success.

Why am I telling you this? It’s not to relive my ‘glory days’ in advertising, I promise. It’s to show the strategising and conscious effort behind every tiny detail to create an advert that’s as seductive as possible.

Ads like this are designed to weave a fantasy world around the product and (at a subliminal level) make us want to be, or be with, the people in them. They seduce us by getting bits of our brain that we’re not even aware of to think, ‘I want to look like that. I want to feel like that. I want that life.’ But the truth is that it’s a very cleverly constructed lie. No one looks like that, not even the models in the ads. To look like that, you’d have to pay the 50 or so people at that shoot to construct every split-second of your life and somehow Photoshop you as you walked along the street.

That day, in that room, I had a moment of clarity. Of all the things to spend your life doing, rush around for, lose sleep over, spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on, why advertising? What even is this?

WHAT EVEN IS THIS? A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF ADVERTISING

At first advertising was simply a means of sharing information. One of the first written adverts we know of was created 5,500 years ago by a Babylonian chap who inscribed into a clay tablet what cattle and feed his master had for sale and what the prices were. It probably made for dull reading, with no catchy end-line or joke to make the buyers feel better about the prices.

Times moved on. Before the printing press was invented in the 1400s, town criers gave out the news, sometimes accompanied by a musician, so the first advertising jingle was probably played on a lute! During the 1700s and 1800s, paper ‘bill’ ads were plastered on every public wall available, including cathedrals. These ads became increasingly eye-catching, with varied graphics, fonts and etchings. They showed everything from elaborately dressed women keeping themselves clean with Pears Soap to boastful bulletins informing people of a recently arrived cargo ship full of ‘138 Remarkably Healthy Slaves’.

In 1941 the first television ad was shown, during a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. It presented a map of America with a Bulova-branded watch face superimposed over the top. A deep male voiceover announced proudly, ‘America runs on Bulova time.’ And that was it. Ad over.

If only all advertising breaks were that short. Now in America, of the five hours that the average person watches TV,² approximately 1.2 hours will be adverts.³

This has led me to the terrifying realisation that the average person is watching over three and half years of adverts over a lifetime! If a pal called you up and said, ‘Hey! Let’s spend the next three and half years watching commercials,’ you might well question their sanity. But this is what many people are choosing to do. To me, three and a half years sounds like a prison sentence, but in this case the prison constantly asks for your money and gets irritating songs stuck in your head.

Digital ads are now the new town criers, and they don’t even play the lute. We now see and hear an estimated 362 ads a day and over 5,000 ‘brand exposures’ from logos and other branding devices.⁴ It’s no wonder that this has massively affected our behaviour. Even if we claim, as many of us do, to ‘never pay attention to ads,’ the sheer number of them, coupled with the activity of our ever-curious brains, means their messages sink in somehow, shifting our ideas of what’s important and how we feel about things.

Mindful curation therefore can’t just be about being mindful of the objects we allow into our lives, but also has to be about being mindful of the messages and content as well. This needn’t mean a media blackout, rather that we should aim to identify the sources that nurture us and give us the information we need to make good choices. To everything else we can say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

Rather creepily, there are thousands of people now working on ways of getting more ads in front of our eyes every day. In the future, who knows, there may be a way to beam adverts directly into our brain. With home appliances becoming part of the ‘internet of things’, don’t be surprised if in a few years’ time, your fridge starts giving you suggestions as to what you might like to fill it with.

If we want to stay mindful, we should be on the lookout for anything that sneaks ads into our homes or heads via the back door. Our homes need to be a sanctuary if we are to stay sane in the next millennia. So, in the words of one of my favourite Harry Potter characters, ‘Constant vigilance!’

THE SEDUCTION OF SYMBOLISM

The biggest change that I’ve seen in advertising, and something that particularly affects us when we’re trying to practise mindful curation, is the switch from useful detailed information to help with making choices to symbolism and manipulation. You may have noticed that in many ads today, you might not even see the product, just an idea with the brand’s logo on it.

For example, when Levi’s invented their jeans in the 1870s, some of their earliest adverts showed two horses trying to rip a pair of jeans apart. The line went ‘They never rip’ and the advertisement then went into detail on the quality and construction of the jeans.

In comparison, a Levi’s advert in 1998 showed a hamster called Kevin running on a wheel to heavy metal music. A little boy speaks over the top:

‘Kevin loved his wheel, but one day … it broke.’

The music stops and the hamster wheel stops working. The light fades in the room as night falls.

‘Kevin grew bored …’

We see the sun rise and Kevin standing still in the cage. Then a pencil pokes him through the bars and he falls over into his sawdust.

‘… and died.’

The ‘Levi’s Original’ logo then appears and the ad ends. ⁵

At the time, this ad caused quite a few complaints, but what I find interesting is just how far away the ad is from the product it is advertising. A depressed hamster has nothing to do with jeans and yet Levi’s wouldn’t have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to run this ad unless they thought it would increase sales, so what’s going on?

What this ad manages to do very well is create a powerful reaction of shocked laughter/disbelief at the same time as we see the Levi’s logo. This is classic subliminal messaging. When we next see the Levi’s logo, maybe in a shop or online, that feeling of heightened activity in our brain will return as an echo in our mind. We probably won’t remember the ad, but we will feel a slight thrill – a thrill that will make us far more likely to remember the brand, pay attention to the jeans and buy them.

The ad may also be saying that Levi’s are for people who love to move or who can’t bear to be still and bored. They’re for people who want to ‘live’. That is a sentiment that might resonate with many, and it might even make them feel a closeness to the Levi’s brand, but it has no basis in the reality of the product.

I believe that this shift from talking about the attributes and quality of a product to the symbolic qualities of a brand goes hand in hand with why the quality of products has fallen. At some point, companies realised they just needed to sell us an idea, and if we bought into the idea, we’d probably buy the product too. So they didn’t need to put their efforts into making the best products possible, just into making the best ads.

It is the same with customer service. It’s easy to see where brands’ priorities lie when companies spend $500 billion on marketing and advertising globally compared to just $9 billion on customer service.⁶ The average sales rep might make double the salary of the poor old customer service rep who is the one who has to deal with the irate and potentially sweary customers.

Many companies will charm you right up to the moment you’ve bought their product, and then you’ll be invisible to them until they can flog you something that’s ‘even better’. In the meantime, what is to be done with their product if it breaks is ‘not their problem’.

It is the companies who break this pattern that have the potential to become BuyMeOnce brands. These are the people who believe in their products and commit to their customers. They will make you feel like a valued customer before your purchase and for many years into the future. They may be hard to find, but I’m happy to report that they do exist.

BEYOND SELLING – HOW ADVERTISING IS AFFECTING HOW YOU THINK

What’s less obvious about advertising but important not to overlook is that it doesn’t just sell us things, it also sells us its own moral code. It has a significant amount of power to shape our beliefs by showing us what’s acceptable and what’s not. Currently, it mostly shows us a creepy, fun-house mirror version of our world, where almost everyone has over-white teeth, thigh gaps and immaculate houses, and people of colour are tolerated, so long as they aren’t ‘too black’.

That was a direct quote from one of my clients, by the way. A lot of progress towards equality has been made, but from my experience there’s still some way to go.

A couple of years ago I was writing a TV ad and was specifically asked to show lots of different types of people enjoying the product in different ways, so I wrote a gay couple into the script. They were going to be in dressing gowns in their kitchen stealing bits of each other’s breakfast, but the feedback from the client was that we could have two men in the scene ‘so long as they didn’t touch, flirt or look at each other too long’.

‘So they want flatmates,’ I said. ‘They can’t be gay because…?’

I never got an answer to that question, and my colleagues couldn’t understand why I was livid and throwing all my toys out of the pram.

‘I’m gay and I’m not offended, so how can you be?’ said my account manager.

‘Okay,’ I explained. ‘Imagine a 15-year-old gay person who’s anxious about coming out overhearing this conversation. They’d hear that a huge global company won’t have a gay couple in their ad because they’re worried sales of their product will go down. What kind of message does that kid get? That they’re not going to be accepted – that their mere existence can put people off their breakfast.’

The ad was eventually shelved, so the row never escalated, and a year later I managed to persuade the same client to put an interracial family into one of their ads. However, when I chose the actors, the client came back saying that they would not accept my casting because my choices were ‘too black’.

Feeling there must be some misunderstanding, I asked if there was any other reason why they didn’t like those actors. ‘No,’ came the reply. It was pure skin tone.

I tried everything I could think of, including threatening to quit, to persuade my bosses to insist on the hiring, but I was told, ‘We can’t afford to lose them as a client,’ and in the end, although my agency strongly voiced their objection to the stance, they gave in and the ad was recast with lighter-skinned people. It was this incident more than anything that spurred me to do something else with my life.

How can we who are horrified by the idea of prejudice counter these messages? The best defence I know against prejudice is empathy.

exercise

GENERATING EMPATHY

So much of the imagery we see, in ads and other areas of life, can divide us into ‘us and them’, ‘the haves and the have-nots’, and actively undermine our happiness by preventing us from connecting and empathising with others. In order to counteract this, here’s an exercise specifically to help you generate more empathy.

• Spend twenty minutes on the Humans of New York website (www.humansofnewyork.com). There are stories there from people of every background and walk of life. Some are funny and some are deeply moving.

• Pick a person you wouldn’t normally meet. Look into their eyes.

• Now take a deep breath, close your eyes and try to imagine yourself in their skin, seeing the world as they do. Imagine going about your day as that person.

• Imagine meeting yourself as that person. How do you react? Do you ignore yourself, or do you engage? Can you find common ground?

I believe my experiences in advertising shine a light on why we need to question the messages that we see and I hope that through this questioning we can override the subconscious messaging from companies who may not share our values. Only this will leave us free to make our own choices.

SHOULD WE BAN ALL ADS?

Having read this far, you may be thinking, ‘If advertising is so bad, why not ban it?’ If we could click our fingers and get rid of it all, would we? I might be tempted, but no.

At its heart, all advertising is a mass sharing of information, and it doesn’t even have to be for commercial gain. It’s often useful in telling us about things we might not otherwise have known about and services that are available to us. Plus sometimes there are puppies involved, so it’s not all bad.

However, I am one of the growing number of people who believes we should have a choice over whether we see ads in our daily life or not. They do, as we found out in Chapter 1, harm us by triggering materialism. We can choose to forgo certain TV channels and publications to avoid certain ads. However, it’s impossible for us to avoid all the posters and billboards plastered all over cities and I feel they should be phased out.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. In 2016 a group raised funds to replace all of the ads in one London underground station with pictures of cats. So for one glorious week the residents of Clapham Common got tabbies instead of tablet adverts.⁷ And in São Paulo, Brazil, the city council has banned all outdoor advertising. Fifteen thousand billboards have been taken down, which has completely changed the identity of the city. It has brought architecture to the forefront and also highlighted some of the social inequality of the housing usually hidden behind the vast ads.

There are now channels, apps and publications offering you the choice to pay if you don’t want to see advertisements. This could be seen as a step forward, but there is the danger that it could force poorer people to watch ads while the rich can afford to avoid them. This idea was taken to its extreme in an episode of Black Mirror that showed a dark future where everyone lived in tiny cubes, their walls entirely made out of TV screens.⁸ Ads blazed at them all day long, but if they wanted to close their eyes and shut it out, they had to pay. If they ran out of credit, they were forced to keep their eyes open and lap it up … shudder.

Advertising, like anything that can influence a huge number of people, is a powerful thing. This power can be harnessed for the dark side, the light, or all the myriad of greys, beiges and bubble-gum pinks in between.

What I’ve started to campaign for is an advertising industry with a conscience. I’ve met many people in ad land who want to have a positive impact on the world, but think that they can only advertise what people pay them to promote. They believe that the ad industry can’t afford to have a conscience, but that doesn’t have to be true.

I’ve moved away from talking about the products that I don’t feel are beneficial to humanity and chosen to put my effort into brands that I do feel can help. If advertising agencies started to seek out game-changing ethical businesses and spread the word about them, these companies might disrupt more complacent and damaging big businesses.

The people who work in advertising might feel that they’re just cogs in the machine that is commerce, but cogs can spin in both directions. Maybe, if the advertising industry empowered itself to change, it could spin its cog the other way, and take the rest of commerce with it.

If you’re one of the millions of people who work in marketing, PR or advertising, get in touch. There’s a lot we can do.

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