Would a Less Consumerist Society be Better?

Deep inside a book called The Day the World Stops Shopping by J. B. MacKinnon, the people you and I call Escapologists are cited as anecdotal evidence by a professor of Finance called Aswath Damodaran:

The idea that a less consumerist society would be better stems from the fact that everyone today knows somebody who stepped off the money-in, money-out treadmill, simplified their life and ended up happier.

That’s us! We’re setting the example! We’re making them think!

But would everyone stepping off the treadmill really make for a better society? Mackinnon, a journalist, looks to the fall of the Soviet Empire:

What is most extraordinary about the collapse is that civilisation did not, in fact, come to an end. We find neither massive starvation nor strikes and food riots, neither the destruction of society nor its explosion.

and:

92 per cent of the nation’s potato harvest came from dachas and gardens … By night, people would enjoy the fruits of their labour, playing cards, debating and drinking. In this extreme economic catastrophe, they were seized by the strange exhilaration of disaster. There were endless parties in the dachas. … There was hardship but also excitement,” [said someone who was there], “it was like they’d been let out of prison.”

A better life? Well, according to that one guy it was like being let out of prison.

JB Mackinnon is not saying that the fall of the Soviet Empire was a right old hoot. He’s saying that, even in such an extreme example, a mass exit from consumer society was not the end of the world. Today, in the West, nobody is planning to take away our consumer privileges in such a sudden and total way. It’s just an illustration that maybe, we can do perfectly well with less in pursuit of better lives individually and to save the world collectively.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.