Stop Buying Stuff
Transcriber: Yuankai Gu
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I would like to tell you a bit
about an unusual New Year’s resolution
that I made a couple of years ago.
On New Year’s Eve 2015,
I decided to stop buying stuff.
Now, I hadn’t run out of money,
and I wasn’t planning
to spend a year in a cave meditating,
and I also hadn’t any problems
thinking about things
that I would love to call my own.
So what had happened to me?
Well, what had happened was this:
I had just come back
from a holiday on Bali,
which, you know, is being
advertised as a paradise.
But instead of pictures
of gorgeous tropical nature,
endless beaches and deep blue skies,
the pictures that I remember
that I still had in my mind
were pictures of burning rubbish,
of fire and smoke and heaps of plastic,
and shorelines
so deeply covered with waste
that it was hard to tell where the beach
was ending and where the ocean began.
Both of them, the beach and the ocean,
were covered beneath an endless blanket
woven of all the thousands of colors
that industrial materials can take,
from the pink of brand new flip flops
to the neon colors of children’s toys
to the green and brown of plastic bottles.
It was a huge wasteland of plastic,
and I only saw the surface,
the things that happened to stay afloat.
Now, as I waded through this wasteland,
I was both shocked and disgusted:
shocked by the sheer amount of stuff
and disgusted by the lifestyle
that produced it -
a lifestyle that happened to be my own.
As a matter of fact, much of what
washes up on the shores of Bali
doesn’t actually
have its origin on the island,
but it finds its way there
from every corner of the world
where people can afford to throw it away.
It was this holiday on Bali
that made me want to stop buying stuff.
Now, I’m no ascetic, I am not an activist,
and I’m not against the market economy,
but I couldn’t just turn away and pretend
that I wasn’t responsible for this mess.
I knew I was, and in fact, we all are.
And it was back in Switzerland,
a friend came visiting
with three pairs of shoes
that she had bought but never worn,
and she was wondering whether maybe
my girlfriend would like to try them on.
Around the same time, another friend
had just bought the new iPhone twice
because he couldn’t quite decide yet
which screen size he preferred.
And yet another friend was trading his car
for the third time in three years.
Crazy, but I myself, I wasn’t any better;
I had just bought the same coat twice,
once in olive green and once
in a fancy color called “slate gray,”
which wasn’t too different
from olive green after all.
So I couldn’t help but wonder,
“Have we gone completely insane
and was there a way to stop this madness?”
What would happen if I just stopped it?
I decided to give it a try.
So for the next 12 months,
I promised myself I wouldn’t buy anything.
But I did allow myself two exceptions:
Exception number one -
I was still allowed to buy
what I needed in order not to die.
Rule number one, don’t die.
Exception number two -
I was still allowed to buy
what I needed in order
not to start stinking.
That was rule number two, don’t stink.
Or in other words,
I was still allowed to buy food,
which is rather helpful
if you plan to do this for a year,
and I was still allowed to buy things
like soap, shampoo, toothpaste, etc.
All the rest had to stay on the shelves.
Now, was it difficult to do that?
Was it difficult to do this
with just these two exceptions?
The surprising answer: “Not at all.”
I quickly came up with two strategies
that helped me avoid
even the most attractive stuff:
Strategy number one -
instead of seeing offers as invitations,
I started treating them as attacks,
as personal attacks on me.
So instead of saying, “Hey, look at this,
this is great, I have to have this,”
I tried to reframe the situation and say,
“Wait a minute,
they’re trying to trick me.
They’re trying to sell me something
that I don’t really need.”
So every offer was, in fact, a trap,
and my job was to to say, “No.”
To not not fall into these traps:
say no, no, no, and no again.
That was strategy number one,
and to put this strategy to a stress test,
I decided to go to Zurich
and walk down Bahnhofstrasse;
you know, that street -
it’s like a miracle mile of consumerism.
And so I was walking down Bahnhofstrasse,
and the first shop window that caught
my attention was a sports gear vendor.
They had skis in the window,
and I love skiing.
I love skiing more than
almost everything else.
So I saw those skis; they were awesome,
but I also realized that they
were exactly the same pair of skis
that I already had at home,
just in a different design.
They just put on a different
design every year.
So I said, “No thanks,” and walked on.
Next shop that I can remember
was the Diesel store selling jeans.
I was quite fond of that brand back then,
so I looked at the jeans in the store,
and I also began to wonder,
“Did Lucky Luke?” -
Are you familiar with Lucky Luke?
My great childhood hero
really is kind of -
“Did Lucky Luke really own
more than one pair of jeans?”
And I don’t think he did.
So I said, “No thanks,” and walked on.
Next stop was the Apple store
selling that new iPhone
that my friend had bought twice,
and about half the people I knew
were already on it, on the latest version,
and I was wondering
whether I should be too.
But then I asked myself,
“Can this new phone really do
anything that my old phone can’t,
something that really matters?”
and the obvious answer was no,
so I said, “No thanks” and walked on
Now, with this mindset,
dishing out “nos” left and right,
every little “no”
started feeling like a victory.
“You want to sell me this?
No, thanks. Yes.”
“You want to sell me that?
No, thanks. Yes.”
So after a while of practicing,
I was walking the streets
in constant triumph,
which felt good.
And also, I realized that I suddenly
had quite a bit of money left.
Which brings me to strategy number two:
When I felt like rewarding myself
for my heroic persistence
or to be honest,
when I couldn’t fight the urge anymore
to finally spend some of that money,
I spent it on services instead of goods.
So instead of buying a new t shirt,
I decided to get a new haircut,
or instead of buying a CD,
which was still a thing back then,
I decided to go to a concert.
Instead of purchasing
whatever happened to be “in,”
I started to go out more often.
Now, you could say,
“OK, but this strategy number two,
isn’t that just a cheap trick
or a rather expensive trick?”
Actually, I wasn’t really spending less;
I was just spending it differently.
And that’s true.
But I can also assure you
that this strategy number two,
buying services instead of goods,
doesn’t just work psychologically
because it feels great
to support your local services,
it also works philosophically
because as an economic activity,
offering services is much,
much more sustainable
than the production of superfluous goods.
Most services hardly produce any waste.
And also, as an economic activity -
it’s actually the economy
that we all have to support
if we want to decouple
our growing prosperity, which we all want,
from growing resource consumption,
which is something that we should avoid.
You could say that services
are the economy of the future,
if we choose to have one.
And also, services foster
social interaction.
It makes a huge difference
whether you sit at home
and buy a new pair of shoes
in front of your computer alone,
or whether you go in
to your local shoemaker,
have your old boots repaired,
and maybe have a chat with him or her.
And last but not least, services
do make us happier than goods.
This may sound a little wishy-washy,
but it’s actually
well-proven scientific fact.
The happiness we get from an experience,
like a day on a mountain hiking,
maybe using the service
of a cable car,
lasts much, much longer
than the kick we get
out of a material purchase,
like that extra pair of hiking boots
that you actually know
you don’t really need.
So you could say
buying goods is like eating sugar,
but experiences are much
more nourishing for the soul.
So after a year of buying nothing
or almost nothing,
I came to a conclusion
that was both simple and surprising:
buying less turns out to be a gain
for yourself, for the environment,
but also and even for the local economy.
Now, did I eventually go back
to buying stuff again? Yes, I did.
It was the lack of socks
that forced me to;
I simply didn’t have any socks left
that didn’t have any holes in them,
and the situation
started to get uncomfortable.
But it also did provoke a new rule
that I’ve been following ever since
and that I would like
to recommend to all of you.
It goes like this:
Whenever you buy something new,
replace something old with it,
and important, something old
that is either used-up or broken,
and if neither of those two things apply,
then you don’t buy the new thing.
That’s the rule.
Following this new rule, I eventually
had to give in and bought new socks,
these very nice red ones
that I’m still wearing today,
which also taught me another lesson,
maybe the most important one:
Good things can last a very long time.
Thank you.
(Applause)