Overconsumption: Do I really need it?

The fact that people always want more, more possessions, more consumption, is treated like a natural law, as an anthropological constant that one has to reckon with, as a private individual, as an economist, as a politician, as an employer. Anyone looking for a job will go where they pay the most, anyone who can have 10 cows instead of 5 will want 10. But is that actually true? And why do you buy fun yourself?

Recently I was with Erich, a mountain farmer in South Tyrol, where I sometimes help out. Erich lives in a small crooked wooden house, he is 71 years old, his tractor is half a century old, and his clothes are bleached by the sun.

I've known Erich for four years and have never seen him buy anything other than the groceries he gets down at the village shop. I, on the other hand, spent my day off traveling to the flea market in Meran, four hours there and back, because I expected great things from the discarded possessions of the Merano high society.

I could say that my aim was to experience the atmosphere of turn-of-the-century stucco splendor, but that's not the case. I wanted to buy something, anything, somehow old, somehow special. Am I the version of Erich, deformed by capitalism, who only consumes when there is a need to? Or is Erich the exception, a freak of nature that designed us to be insatiable collectors who never have enough?

Of course, my question comes with one premise: consumption, or more precisely, the need for it, is bad. This view may be my Protestant heritage, but it also fits into the tradition of research, especially German, which sees consumers as seduced by a capitalist society, who follow like moths to the lights of the advertising mafia.

But in the last few decades the tone has changed, especially in Anglo-Saxon research: consumers are not primarily seduced people, but rather self-determined people who shape their lives through consumption. The historian Frank Trentmann teaches at Birkbeck College in London and traces 600 years of consumer history in his “The Rule of Things”.

In it he takes up the US psychologist William James' idea of ​​the "material self", which includes one's own body, the family, but also one's material possessions. For James and Trentmann, consumption is nothing less than the expression of one's own personality. This is initially intimidating for anyone who thinks about reducing consumption because it comes across as such an existential need.

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I wonder what Erich's material self is. I can't remember any item that I felt was particularly important to him. But of course I could be wrong. He never invited me into his house. The first time I was at his place I thought it was a shed.

Erich grew up there with his three brothers and parents. It was a meager life. The mother was the daughter of a shoemaker and the first son was an illegitimate child. To put it mildly, that must have been difficult 80 years ago in such a small town. Franz, the brother Erich loved most, became a postal worker.

Franz only had one arm, so he was slower than his colleagues, and at peak times Erich delivered the mail for him so that it didn't get too late. Erich himself would have liked to be a bus driver, but instead he took over the farm, caring first for his father and then his mother. He never married.

“You don’t have children, you have cats,” a neighbor recently said to him. “What does she know, what happened?” he said to me later and sounded – which is very rare for him – annoyed. Erich once said that his father had built a sleigh for him, the youngest. “Were you the favorite?” I asked, but Erich just smiled.

When I'm with Erich, I don't consume. In fact, there is hardly any time for it. Erich goes to the cowshed at six in the morning, I follow him at half past nine, and it's nine in the evening when he turns out the light in the stable. But there are no shops at all apart from the small village shop; Erich has neither internet access nor a computer. I have both, but I'm so tired after working on the farm that I barely use them. But that doesn't change the fact that I expect wonderful discoveries every time I go to the shops in neighboring towns.

When did Erich ever talk about consumption? Do objects mean something to him? He once talked about the feathers he collected for the son of a couple of helpers. Of his mother's pancakes, his favorite dish. About the vehicle for Franz, a kind of tricycle that they had tuned up so that it raced illegally up and down the mountain road.

Most of these things lead to Franz, who died suddenly two years ago: the vehicle and also the feathers. Erich says that Franz knew much better about feathers than he did. Erich once passed them off as lamb vulture feathers, even though they came from a crow. Feathers, pancakes and a tricycle: perhaps this is Erich's material self.

I consume differently than Erich: more status-related, because the flea market is supposed to set me apart from the Ikeaware and I take comfort in the moments in which my being is so far away from what I would like it to be - even if it's just because a text didn't turn out the one I wanted to write.

My consumption does not reflect what I actually lack: I don't need 8 sweaters, whether second hand or not. According to Frank Trentmann, the historian, all of this has always existed: status consumption, which Seneca already complained about in antiquity, and also the abundance among the wealthy, of whom Seneca also belonged.

What's new: Many people can now afford excess. According to Trentmann, mass consumption, which began with the years of the economic miracle, not only has something to do with more goods produced and cheap imports on the backs of producers, but also with equalization.

The welfare state has enabled more people to buy through transfer payments such as child benefit or insurance in the event of illness. The fact that the middle and upper classes can shop differently than the lower class and save at the same time is part of the fine print of consumer society. It has an aftertaste when educated middle-class academics call for people to tighten their consumption belts, but don't think about their own skiing vacation and holiday home in Italy lifestyle. Bad consumption is always someone else's.

But even an objective, ideology-free view cannot overlook one thing: there is too much consumption. Too much for the planet. And that's precisely why the question is relevant beyond my visit to the flea market: Where does the need to consume end? Does it even end anywhere?

I called consumer researcher Kai-Uwe Hellmann because in an interview he criticized the moralistic tone of the consumer debate in Germany. He'll think outside the box, I think. He tells me that my question has long been over and, to my ears, he doesn't sound particularly bright either. “In the 20th century it was repeatedly stated that, anthropologically speaking, humans appear to have no limits to the formation of needs,” he says. “When a certain level of saturation is reached, new needs develop.”

“Is that natural?” I ask. “There is no longer a simple natural determinism,” answers Hellmann. If the question of innateness is off the table, what can be found out about the social shaping of consumer needs - if you are so surrounded by overconsumption that there is no alternative?

Marshall Sahlins was a controversial American anthropologist. One of his targets was the concept of the utility-maximizing homo economicus. His 1972 essay “The Original Prosperous Society” is an academic text, but it is also a polemic. Sahlins was writing against the prevailing assessment of hunting societies as backward and precarious.

He used field research on the!Kung of Namibia and the Murngin of Australia to show that these societies are dispossessed not because they lack resources, but because material possessions represent loss rather than gain in their nomadic lives. Sahlins also describes the Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego, who refused to have more than one example of even frequently used utensils. “It is a sign of self-confidence,” he quotes a researcher who lived with the Yahgan.

The text is famous beyond academic circles, Time Magazine picked it up, and it was published again in Germany in 2024. I don't think it's just because it's short and clearly written, nor because of the verve with which it rejects anthropology's condescending view of hunting societies.

It is due to Sahlin's enthusiasm, the joy of having found an alternative model, and one that is not just utopia, but real life. Maybe it's a similar joy that I feel in Erich's presence: seeing someone who is freer from the pressure to consume than I am.

But how do I get there? Like an entire society that is torn between the joy of consumption and the stale aftertaste, for which there has long been a term, “shopping hangover”? Strange that this hangover never lasts long enough to prevent the next purchase. Why not? From a neurophysiological point of view: If dopamine is released when you consume it, a messenger substance that, among other things, creates anticipation, then why isn't the disappointed expectation also registered in the brain?

“An interesting question,” Marc Tittgemeyer from the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne answers me. He has studied how the brain perceives the need for food and generates behavioral responses that restore physiological balance. “We are only slowly beginning to understand the role that cognition plays in regulating needs,” he says. “There is a voluntary stop while eating,” I say. “Can this be transferred to other consumption?”

But Tittgemeyer doesn't agree with my initial thesis. With 53 percent of overweight people in Germany according to the body mass index, one cannot speak of successful regulation. He refers to the dessert that you still choose in the restaurant even though you are already full. Why? Let's imagine ourselves in an early hunting society.

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She ate a mammoth and is very full; dopamine levels are low. But the thought of sugar drives it back up, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because it gives you enough drive to escape any saber-toothed tiger that might come by. Except that this process has fatal consequences in a society with few saber-toothed tigers and a lot of sugar.

How can we put an end to consumption in a society where everything is always available? Can we learn something from the fight against obesity? Marc Tittgemeyer is cautious with his answer. “I’m not a clinician,” he says. Maybe this much: Prevention even in children is important. And that people learn best through positive feedback. Tittgemeyer remembers a study according to which the smileys that light up happily when you keep to the standard speed are more effective than the speed cameras. But how do you reinforce a void, a non-doing?

The question of consumption is not just about shopping or eating; leisure behavior is also an area in which we consume heavily. This became clear to me when I read a log from 1949 in Frank Trentmann's history of consumption that describes a typical Sunday in a working-class household in south London. This Sunday is spectacularly unspectacular: the family gets up, makes tea, reads the newspaper, makes more tea, eats lunch, reads, plays cards, makes more tea. She never leaves the house at any time.

Erich doesn't have a day off because he has to look after his animals. But still his life reminds me of the quiet Sunday in South London. What strikes me is the absence of fear of missing out. Admittedly, the leisure activities in England in 1949 were modest compared to today. Admittedly, what do I know about how voluntary the limitations of Erich's life are? But maybe that doesn't matter so much because what's more important is how he deals with them.

What I know: Erich watches TV in the evenings after working in the stables, and once he told me about a program about a 100-year-old Japanese woman who had started traveling the world with her grandson. I think he found it remarkable that she had started so late; but there was no mention of the fact that he himself would like to travel.

Erich never took a vacation. He once said that he would like to take the train from Meran to the Gotthard and look at the landscape. Erich, like few people I know, is in his own life and not in an imaginary, future one. Maybe that's one of the reasons why he's not prone to consumption: he doesn't have to buy props that will push him into a different, better life.

A few days ago I was so bored by my need to buy props that I decided to abstain from flea markets. I was dismayed at the effort it took not to go. As if I was trying to free myself from a long-standing addiction. Instead, I stayed at home and argued a bit with the family. It filled me neither with great joy nor with great peace. In the afternoon I invited people to an outdoor reading with a band, but because it was pouring rain, only four people came and I ended up reading surrounded by family in the singer's living room. It was a very good afternoon.

I don't know if I'm making myself happy, but I think that abstaining from the flea market served as a flavor enhancer for the afternoon. The energy that had not gone into searching for the extraordinary object was available to me to run through the rain with a music stand in a good mood.

My mind was somewhat calm because I didn't have to internally debate whether the new reading lamp would actually make me finish a book. So I had enough nerve to find it funny that the deluge stopped after just ten minutes. This effect reminds me of a typical visit to a museum: if you look at ten pictures, it's good. You really see them. I know this, but I often move on because I've already been there because the entrance fee was terribly expensive. In the end everything becomes a blur.

I believe that Frank Trentmann is right when he says that overconsumption cannot be solved individually. That there must be legal guardrails, from the obligation to repair and recycle to the aviation fuel tax. That the overconsumption of the overly rich must be taken into account. That the taz should finally give more vacation days to those who don't fly but take the train.

But I don't think that's enough: you have to smell that it's beautiful, the free life. That a voluntarily placed blank space illuminates the rest. In the context of a capitalist economy, it is challenging to make the less attractive. It is a kind of qualitative profit maximization: more profit with less investment. I'm just at the beginning myself - but I believe it works.

The last time I was with Erich, he often sat on the box with concentrated feed for the cows because his back hurts so much that he has to take breaks more often. The food is like a turbo agent for more milk. Erich gives his cows a few small doses of it, other farmers in the area give their cows much more. The equation is simple: more milk, more money. “Why don’t you do that?” I asked. “I don’t like how it drains the cows,” Erich said.