I can’t stress enough that there is no one specific correct style of post-consumer lifestyle that I advocate for. Post-consumerism isn’t one specific lifestyle. It is an umbrella term that simply indicates what the new lifestyle has moved past.
All the term means is that it is someone who has rejected the notion that the infinite acquisition and consumption of more and more material goods and services, at the individual and societal levels, is THE key to human flourishing and the best operating principle for human society.
When a post-consumer is asked “what is the best organizing principle for human flourishing?” they will answer something OTHER THAN “to acquire as much material goods and services as possible before you die.” When you ask a post-consumer “how much money, material wealth, etc is enough?” they will have a definite answer to give or will not really understand the question because acquisitiveness is so far from their mental landscape that they don’t even have an adversarial relationship with it.
Now, few people would directly tell you that they think the key to human happiness and flourishing is to buy a bunch of stuff off the internet, or spend their lives consuming packaged commodity experiences. The key is not what people say, but what they do.
If someone spends most of their time engaged in activity that brings them few benefits other than money, and then they spend most of that money on consumptive goods, services, and experiences; if the amount of goods and services they consume keeps pace with increases in inflation-adjusted income; and if they have no definite answer to the question “how much is enough?”, then odds are good they have consumer ideology running in their heads.
On the other hand, if someone engages in income-earning activity only to the extent that they furnish for themselves the material goods and services they need; if they have, in other words, not just an answer but a way of life that is an example of “how much is enough?”; and if they spend an increasing amount of their time engaged in activity that is not aimed at, involved with, or aspiring to increasing consumption of resources, then chances are that this person has de-programmed consumer ideology from their lives.
They could live in the country on a homestead and grow most of their own food and use tools they built with their own hands. They could live in a city and make art or music. They could travel the world, engaging deeply in foreign cultures. They could be philosophers or flaneurs. Perhaps one is a soldier. Another might be an action adventure athlete. Another works in humanitarian aid. One lives on a boat and spends her time developing off-grid software, while another runs a surf bar on a beach and collects stories from patrons. Another tinkers with electromechanical inventions in her garage. Another has devoted his life to learning ancestral skills and spends most of his time in the mountains of Idaho. One is an urban polyamorous dumpster diver who makes all-brass punk music, and another is a devoted member of a conservative religious sect and lives in suburban Cleveland. Yet another is renovating an abandoned stone villa in rural Italy that he bought for one euro. Some are raising families, some are DINKs, some are solo. Some live in intentional communities, some live in apartments in the city or cabins in the woods by themselves, some are deeply integrated into their neighborhoods.
There is no one correct flavor of post-consumerism. There is no dogmatic Way of being a post-consumer. There ought not be just one.
One of the things that sucks the most about consumer society is how boringly monocultural it is. The emergent logic of consumerism presses human souls into one mold and extrudes them out like hyper-processed foodstuff. The vision of a post-consumer world is the vision of a garden world, teeming with wildly different personalities, cultures, and ways of being human.
With that understood, it should be clear that I’m not writing a manual for how to live one specific certain type of lifestyle. I have no opinion on whether or not you, as in you specifically, should live in the city or the country, or whether you should grow your own food or get it from the grocery store or out of a dumpster or the forest, or even whether or not you should own a car, to name a few trivial examples. Those are all details that you need to figure out for yourself.
Leave a Reply