While searching for publications about sustainability, principally in energy and economics, I noticed with a twist of irony how critics of consumer culture still like to sell books, as if halting the depletion of natural resources is simply a matter of buying this instead of that. I paraphrase Ann Leonard who wrote The Story of Stuff, in saying this, and she stands out from the crowd in producing her initial thesis as a 20-minute movie, uploaded to YouTube. A colleague reminds me that computers running YouTube also use energy and are very much a part of consumer culture, I don’t have an answer for this, yet, but I do implore you to watch her, she’s intelligent, provocative and entertaining.
This morning the radio told us that we are about to become seven percent worse off, as the hangover from the financial crisis hits home. Apparently, at this point we are still been a bit pissed from the night before and it’s going to get worse before it gets any better. In the old days we used to get on it again, to put off the inevitable, and one can’t help but wonder if another round of quantitative easing (QEII as it’s waggishly being called), isn’t just, well, another round.
It feels like we're playing a waiting game and with the Black Bullet off the road for maintenance but no real opportunity to get stuck in, I’m back to scratching around for other useful things to do. Inevitably, I'm also indulging my predilection for a bit of ‘soap-boxing’ - 'It’s okay,' I tell myself, 'provided you weigh your arguments adequately and stay hawkish on assumptions, prejudices and repetition, and try not to get too pointy, however much fun it is.' So here goes...
...Tidying up is useful, if a bit dull, but you do feel good afterwards particularly if you operate a reward system. A hunt around in the Drawers of Forgotten Things upended a small stash of old mobile phones, which I flogged to a recycler for sixty quid. That’s sixty quid I haven’t allocated, free money in fact, and there’s precious little of that around so for fun I made a list of things outside of The Plan that I’d like to do. Then I went in search of other disposable assets: a broken camera netted thirty, an old dishwasher, rescued from a pile due to be skipped at the time of our office move, brought in another fifty and pretty soon I was looking at guitars and all sorts on eBay. Retail therapy, I might be against it, in principle, but it sure feels good.
But the Fender Jaguar I eyed up just waved me away, saying, ‘Huh, you can’t play me, so you can’t have me. You don’t play any of the others anymore so hands off!’ And it was right. I had allowed the idea, that, with a new guitar I would somehow become a player again, to seduce me – what nonsense. In the end, I took more exploratory tack. For months now I’ve watched my private share holdings sink to their knees, feeling powerless I’ve become one of those cowed investors whining, “you can keep your cheese, just let me out of the trap...” Buying a few more shares in companies I already hold, with everything so depressed, made me feel in control again. It’s a small deal but the average cost of shares came down as a result and a spring returned to my fiscal step.
As a qualification I'd like to say that until retail and investment banking are effectively separated, if you have money in the bank, it’s probably being invested, only you wouldn’t necessarily know were, by whom or, indeed, see any of the profits. Losses, on the other hand, are another matter. It’s my understanding that the post-crash (2007 & 2011) recapitalisation of the banks is being paid for, in part, by you and me. So, becoming sick of this seemingly one-sided relationship, I decided to do a bit of my own investing, cutting out at least one middle man. Thing is, it isn’t my line of work and it shows.
I'd also like to expand on the point about retail therapy feeling good. Jane says that no war on drugs will ever work until the people involved admit that the primary reason for taking them is that they are fun and they make people feel good, really good, at least for a time. There are plenty of discussions that could use a similar degree of fessing up at the outset. Any discussion of consumerism, for example, has to take into account that it makes people feel good, really good, at least for a time. Fun is an important factor, often overlooked by serious people. Anyone else remember having fun precisely because it was illegal, or at the very least disapproved of? The best fun is often this kind of fun - it's a tricky one.
