Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power—of the income or of the accumulated wealth of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status. The development of Thorstein Veblen's sociology of.
The sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term 'conspicuous consumption', and was a co-founder of the institutional economics movement.
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Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxurygoods and services to publicly display economic power—of the income or of the accumulated wealth of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status.[1][2]
The development of Thorstein Veblen's sociology of conspicuous consumption produced the term invidious consumption, the ostentatious consumption of goods that is meant to provoke the envy of other people; and the term conspicuous compassion, the deliberate use of charitable donations of money in order to enhance the social prestige of the donor, with a display of superior socio-economic status.[3]
History and evolution[edit]
The economist and sociologistThorstein Veblen (1857–1929) introduced the term 'conspicuous consumption' in 1899 in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. Veblen described the behavioural characteristics of the nouveau riche (new rich) social class which emerged as a result of capital accumulation during the Second Industrial Revolution (c. 1860–1914).[4] In that nineteenth-century social and historical context, the term 'conspicuous consumption' applied narrowly in association with the men, women, and families of the upper class who applied their great wealth as a means of publicly manifesting their social power and prestige, either real or perceived.
In the twentieth century the significant improvement of the material standard-of-living of societies and the consequent growth of the middle class saw the term 'conspicuous consumption' broadly applied to the men, women, and households who possessed the discretionary income that allowed them to practice the patterns of economic consumption—of goods and services—which were motivated by the desire for prestige, the public display of social status, rather than by the intrinsic, practical utility of the goods and the services proper. In the 1920s economists, such as Paul Nystrom (1878–1969), proposed that changes in the style of life, made feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced in the mass of society a 'philosophy of futility' that would increase the consumption of goods and services as a social fashion – i.e. an activity done for its own sake. In that context, commentators discuss 'conspicuous consumption' either as a behavioural addiction or as a narcissistic behaviour, or as both, emphasising the psychological conditions induced by consumerism—the desire for the immediate gratification of hedonic expectations.
Sociologically, conspicuous consumption was thought[when?][by whom?] to comprise socio-economic behaviours practiced by rich people; yet economic research indicated that conspicuous consumption is a socio-economic behaviour common to the poor social-classes and economic groups, and common to the societies of countries with emerging economies. Among such people, displays of wealth are used to psychologically combat the impression of poverty, usually because such men and women belong to a socio-economic class society perceives as poor.[5] In The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy (1996), Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko reported that Americans with a net worth of more than one million dollars are likely to avoid conspicuous consumption, and that millionaires tend to practice frugality - for example, preferring to buy used cars with cash rather than new cars with credit, in order to avoid material depreciation and paying interest for a loan to buy a new car.[6]
Conspicuous compassion, the practice of publicly donating large sums of money to charity to enhance the social prestige of the donor, is sometimes described[by whom?] as a type of conspicuous consumption.[3] This behaviour has long been recognised and sometimes attacked—for example, the New Testament story Lesson of the widow's mite criticises wealthy people who make large donations ostentatiously while praising poorer people who make small but comparatively more difficult donations in private.[7]
Consumerism theory[edit]
As proposed by Thorstein Veblen in the 19th century, conspicuous consumption (spending money to buy goods and services for their own sake) explains the psychological mechanics of a consumer society, and the increase in the number and the types of the goods and services that people consider necessary to and for their lives in a developed economy.
Supporting interpretations and explanations of contemporary conspicuous consumption are presented in Consumer Culture (1996), by C. Lury,[8]Consumer Culture and Modernity (1997), by D. Slater,[9]Symbolic Exchange and Death (1998), by Jean Baudrillard,[10] and Spent: Sex, Evolution, and the Secrets of Consumerism (2009), by Geoffrey Miller.[11] Moreover, Hiding in the Light (1994), by D. Hebdige, proposed that conspicuous consumption is a form of displaying a personal identity,[9][12][13] and a consequent function of advertising, as proposed in Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture (2000), by A. A. Berger.[14]
Each variant interpretation and complementary explanation is derived from Thorstein Veblen's original sociologic proposition in The Theory of the Leisure Class: that conspicuous consumption is a psychological end in itself, from which the practitioner (man, woman, family) derived the honour of superior social status.
Distinctions of type[edit]
Definitions – The term conspicuous consumption denotes the act of buying many things, especially expensive things, that are not necessary to one's life, done in a way that makes people notice the buyer's having bought the merchandise.[15] In the article 'Veblen, Bourdieu, and Conspicuous Consumption' (2001), A. Trigg defined conspicuous consumption as the behaviours whereby a man or a woman can display great wealth, by means of idleness—expending much time in the practice of leisure activities, and spending much money to consume luxury goods and services.[16]
Self-worth – In the book Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (1949), J.S. Duesenberry proposed that a person's conspicuous consumption psychologically depends not only upon the actual level of spending, but also depends upon the degree of his or her spending, as compared with and to the spending of other people. That the conspicuous consumer is motivated by the importance, to him or to her, of the opinion of the social and economic reference groups for whom are performed the patterns of conspicuous consumption.[17][18]
Aggressive ostentation – In the television report 'Aggressive Ostentation' (2009), Dick Meyer said that conspicuous consumption is a form of anger towards society, an 'aggressive ostentation' that is an antisocial behaviour, which arose from the social alienation suffered by men, women, and families who feel they have become anonymous in and to their societies, which feeling of alienation is aggravated by the decay of the communitarian ethic essential to a person feeling him or herself part of the whole society.[19]
Shelter and transport – In the U.S., the trend towards building houses that were larger-than-needed, by a nuclear family, began in the 1950s. Decades later, in the year 2000, that practice of conspicuous consumption resulted in people buying houses that were double the average size needed to comfortably house a nuclear family.[20] The negative consequences of either buying or building an oversized house was either the loss of or the reduction of the family's domestic recreational space—the back yard and the front yard; the spending of old-age retirement funds to pay for a too-big house; and over-long commuting time, from house to job, and vice versa, because the required plot of land was unavailable near a city.
Oversized houses facilitated other forms of conspicuous consumption, such as an oversized garage for the family's oversized motor vehicles or buying more clothing to fill larger clothes closets. Conspicuous consumption becomes a self-generating cycle of spending money for the sake of social prestige. Analogous to the consumer trend for oversized houses is the trend towards buying oversized light-trucks, specifically the off-road sport-utility vehicle type (cf. station wagon and estate car), as a form of psychologically comforting conspicuous consumption, because such big motor-vehicles usually are bought by people who reside in a city, an urban nuclear family.[20]
Prestige – In the article 'Status Consumption in Consumer Behaviour: Scale Development and Validation' (1999), J.K. Eastman et al. said that status consumption is based upon conspicuous consumption; yet, the literature of contemporary marketing does not establish definitive meanings for the terms status consumption and conspicuous consumption.[21][22] Moreover, in the article 'Status Brands: Examining the Effects of Non-product-related Brand Associations on Status and Conspicuous Consumption' (2002), A. O'Cass and H. Frost said that sociologists often incorrectly used the terms 'status consumption' and 'conspicuous consumption' as interchangeable and equivalent terms. In a later study, O'Cass and Frost determined that, as sociologic constructs, the terms 'status consumption' and 'conspicuous consumption' denote different sociologic behaviours.[23] About the ambiguities of denotation and connotation of the term 'conspicuous consumption', in the article 'Conspicuous Consumption: A Literature Review' (1984), R. Mason reported that the classical, general theories of consumer decision-processes do not readily accommodate the construct of 'conspicuous consumption', because the nature of said socio-economic behaviours varies according to the social class and the economic group studied.[24]
Motivations – In the article 'Status Consumption in Cross-national Context: Socio–Psychological, Brand and Situational Antecedents' (2010), Paurav Shukla said that, whilst marketing and sales researchers recognise the importance of the buyer's social and psychological environment—the definition of the term status-directed consumption remains ambiguous, because, to develop a comprehensive general theory requires that social scientists accept two fundamental assumptions, which usually do not concord. First, though the 'rational' (economic) and the 'irrational' (psychologic) elements of consumer decision-making often influence a person's decision to buy particular goods and services, marketing and sales researchers usually consider the rational element dominant in a person's decision to buy the particular goods and services. Second, the consumer perceives the utility of the product (the goods, the services) as a prime consideration in evaluating its usefulness, i.e. the reason to buy the product.[25] These assumptions, required for the development of a general theory of brand selection and brand purchase, are problematic, because the resultant theories tend either to misunderstand or to ignore the 'irrational' element in the behaviour of the buyer-as-consumer; and because conspicuous consumption is a behaviour predominantly 'psychological' in motivation and expression, Therefore, a comprehensive, general theory of conspicuous consumption would require a separate construct for the psychological (irrational) elements of the socio-economic phenomenon that is conspicuous consumption.
Criticism[edit]
High levels of conspicuous consumption may be seen as socially undesirable on two grounds; firstly, as it is often associated with high relative income, high levels of conspicuous consumption may be an indicator of high levels of income inequality, which may be found intrinsically or instrumentally objectionable; secondly conspicuous consumption differs from other forms of consumption in that the main reason for the purchase of positional goods is not due to the additional direct utility provided by the goods alleged high quality, but rather the social prestige associated with the consumption of that good. One downside of this search for status is that individual purchases of positional goods may at a social level be self-defeating due to external effects. In this case, the externality is status anxiety, the loss of social status suffered by people whose stock of high-status goods (positional goods) is diminished, in relation to the stocks of other conspicuous consumers, as they increase their consumption of high-status goods and services; effectively, status-seeking is a zero-sum game—by definition, the rise of one person in the social hierarchy can occur only at the expense of other people. Therefore, the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods and services (positional goods) is an economic loss—like competitive military spending (an arms race), wherein each country must match the military expenditures of other countries in the arms race, or suffer a loss of relative military power. In the case of conspicuous consumption, taxes upon luxury goods diminish societal expenditures on high-status goods, by rendering them more expensive than non-positional goods. In this sense, luxury taxes can be seen as a market failure correcting Pigovian tax—with an apparent negative deadweight loss, these taxes are a more efficient mechanism for increasing revenue than 'distorting' labour or capital taxes.[26]
A luxury tax applied to goods and services for conspicuous consumption is a type of progressive sales tax that at least partially corrects the negative externality associated with the conspicuous consumption of positional goods.[27] In Utility from Accumulation (2009), Louis Kaplow said that assets exercise an objective social-utility function, i.e. the rich man and the rich woman hoard material assets, because the hoard, itself, functions as status goods that establish his and her socio-economic position within society.[28] When utility is derived directly from accumulation of assets, this lowers the dead weight loss associated with inheritance taxes and raises the optimal rate of inheritance taxation.[29]
In the 19th century, the philosopher John Stuart Mill recommended taxing the practice of conspicuous consumption.
In place of luxury taxes, the economist Robert H. Frank proposed the application of a progressive consumption tax; in the article 'The Big City: Rich and Poor, Consumed by Consuming' (1998), John Tierney said that as a remedy for the social and psychological malaise that is conspicuous consumption, the personal income tax should be replaced with a progressive tax upon the yearly sum of discretionary income spent on the conspicuous consumption of goods and services.[30] Another option is the redistribution of wealth, either by means of an incomes policy - for example the conscious efforts to promote wage compression under variants of Social corporatism such as the Rehn–Meidner model and/or by some mix of progressive taxation and transfer policies, and provision of public goods.[31][32][33] Because the activity of conspicuous consumption, itself, is a form of superior good, diminishing the income inequality of the income distribution by way of an egalitarian policy reduces the conspicuous consumption of positional goods and services. In Wealth and Welfare (1912), the economist A. C. Pigou said that the redistribution of wealth might lead to great gains in social welfare:
Now the part played by comparative, as distinguished from absolute, income is likely to be small for incomes that only suffice to provide the necessaries and primary comforts of life, but to be large with large incomes. In other words, a larger proportion of the satisfaction yielded by the incomes of rich people comes from their relative, rather than from their absolute, amount. This part of it will not be destroyed if the incomes of all rich people are diminished together. The loss of economic welfare suffered by the rich when command over resources is transferred from them to the poor will, therefore, be substantially smaller relatively to the gain of economic welfare to the poor than a consideration of the law of diminishing utility taken by itself suggests.[34]
The economic case for the taxation of positional, luxury goods has a long history; in the mid-19th century, in Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), John Stuart Mill said:
I disclaim all asceticism, and by no means wish to see discouraged, either by law or opinion, any indulgence which is sought from a genuine inclination for, any enjoyment of, the thing itself; but a great portion of the expenses of the higher and middle classes in most countries . . . is not incurred for the sake of the pleasure afforded by the things on which the money is spent, but from regard to opinion, and an idea that certain expenses are expected from them, as an appendage of station; and I cannot but think that expenditure of this sort is a most desirable subject of taxation. If taxation discourages it, some good is done, and if not, no harm; for in so far as taxes are levied on things which are desired and possessed from motives of this description, nobody is the worse for them. When a thing is bought not for its use but for its costliness, cheapness is no recommendation.[35]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
^Veblen, Thorstein (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Project Gutenberg.
^The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition, Alan Bullock, Stephen Trombley, Eds., 1993, p. 162.
^ abWest, Patrick (2004). Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes It Really Is Cruel To Be Kind. London: Civitas, Institute for the Study of Civil Society. ISBN978-1-903386-34-7.
^Veblen, Thorstein. (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: Macmillan. 400 pp., also: 1994 Dover paperback edition, ISBN0-486-28062-4, 1994 Penguin Classics edition, ISBN0-14-018795-2.
^Virginia Postrel, 'Inconspicuous Consumption', The Atlantic, July/August 2008. 'Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It's a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group.'
^Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko, The Millionaire Next Door at Google Books, Simon and Schuster, 1998.
^Robert L. Payton and Michael P. Moody (2008). Understanding Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission. p. 137. ISBN978-0253000132.
^Lury, C. (1996) Consumer Culture. London: Polity.
^ abSlater, D. (1997) Consumer Culture and Modernity. London: Polity.
^Baudrillard, J. (1998b) Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage.
^Miller G, Spent: sex, evolution and the secrets of consumerism, Random House, London, 2009 (ISBN9780670020621)
^Hebdige, D. (1994) Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge.
^Wilson, E. (eds.) Chic Thrills. A Fashion Reader. London: HarperCollins
^Berger, A. A. (2000) Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
^Longman American Dictionary, 2000, p. 296.
^Trigg, A. (2001). 'Veblen, Bourdieu, and conspicuous consumption'. Journal of Economic Issues. 35 (1): 99–115. doi:10.1080/00213624.2001.11506342. JSTOR4227638.
^Duesenberry, J.S. (1949), Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
^Shukla, P. (2008), 'Conspicuous Consumption Among Middle age Consumers: Psychological and Brand Antecedents', Journal of Product and Brand Management, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 25–36
^Cosgrove-Mather, Bootie; Meyer, Dick (2009-02-11). 'Aggressive Ostentation'. CBS News. Retrieved 2011-10-20.
^ abLloyd, Carol (2005-10-14). 'Monster Homes R Us: American homes are monuments to conspicuous consumption'. SF Chronicle. Retrieved 2011-10-20.
^Eastman, J. K.; Goldsmith, R. E.; Flynn, L. R. (1999). 'Status Consumption in Consumer Behaviour: Scale Development and Validation'. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice. 7 (3): 41–51. doi:10.1080/10696679.1999.11501839.
^Shukla, Paurav (2010-01-09). 'Status (luxury) consumption among British and Indian consumers'. Paurav Shukla (Podcast). International Marketing Review. Retrieved 2011-10-20.
^O'Cass, A.; Frost, H. (2002). 'Status Brands: Examining the Effects of Non-product-related Brand Associations on Status and Conspicuous Consumption'. Journal of Product & Brand Management. 11 (2): 67–88. doi:10.1108/10610420210423455.
^Mason, R. (1984). 'Conspicuous Consumption: A Literature Review'. European Journal of Marketing. 18 (3): 26–39. doi:10.1108/eum0000000004779.
^Shukla, P. (2010). 'Status Consumption in Cross-national Context: Socio-psychological, Brand and Situational Antecedents'. International Marketing Review. 27 (1): 108–129. doi:10.1108/02651331011020429.
^Ng, Yew-Kwang (1987). 'Diamonds Are a Government's Best Friend: Burden-Free Taxes on Goods Valued for Their Values'. American Economic Review. 77 (1): 186–91. JSTOR1806737.
^Sámano, Daniel (2009). 'Optimal Linear Taxation of Positional Goods'(PDF). Working Paper. University of Minnesota.
^Kaplow, L. (2009). 'Utility from Accumulation'. doi:10.3386/w15595.
^Cremer, H.; Pestieau, P. (2011). 'The Tax Treatment of Intergenerational Wealth Transfers'. CESifo Economic Studies. 57 (2): 365–401. doi:10.1093/cesifo/ifr014.
^Tierney, John (1998-11-30). 'The Big City; Rich and Poor, Consumed By Consuming'. The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-10-20.
^Micheletto, L. (2011). 'Optimal Nonlinear Redistributive Taxation and Public Good Provision in an Economy with Veblen Effects'. Journal of Public Economic Theory. 13 (1): 71–96. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9779.2010.01493.x.
^Boskin, Michael J.; Sheshinski, Eytan (1978). 'Optimal Redistributive Taxation When Individual Welfare Depends Upon Relative Income'. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 92 (4): 589–601. doi:10.2307/1883177. JSTOR1883177.
^Aronsson, Thomas; Johansson-Stenman, Olof (2008). 'When the Joneses' Consumption Hurts: Optimal Public Good Provision and Nonlinear Income Taxation'. Journal of Public Economics. 92 (5–6): 986–997. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2007.12.007.
^Pigou, Arthur Cecil (1912). Wealth and Welfare.
^John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, book 5, ch. 6, pt. 7 (W.J. Ashley, ed., Longmans, Green & Co. 1909) (1848)
Further reading[edit]
Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen' at Project Gutenberg
Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption, 1902 at Fordham University's 'Modern History Sourcebook'
The Good Life: An International Perspective, a short article by Amitai Etzioni
External links[edit]
Look up conspicuous consumption in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Conspicuous consumption at its worst ... shooting at Toys R Us on Black Friday (2008), Los Angeles Times
Wal-Mart employee trampled to death by shoppers hungry for deals (2008), New York Times
10 obscene displays of wealth (Sept 2016), MarketWatch
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conspicuous_consumption&oldid=899406032'
I hate minimalism.
I hate it as the incredibly tedious piece of personal performance art it has come to be in our society, but I also hate it as an aesthetic: your white-on-white-on-white life and meticulously crafted wardrobe of only the most wispy products Everlane and Aritzia have to offer are, frankly, a saltine cracker’s idea of what a Cool Girl would wear.
In terms of its visual merits, or as a capital-S style, the hyper-curated minimalism really only conveys one thing: “I wanted to take the very safest route to chic, cut away every possible misstep or risk. I saw the French Girl Chic articles and I was like … that’s pretty damn homogenous, but smoking tests poorly in focus groups and those occasional striped shirts are too bold. Time to reduce my look even further until literally every item I purchase tells people ‘I could get something more interesting, but I have enough money to choose not to’.”
Because let’s be clear about what the minimalist aesthetic, at least as a personal style choice, actually is: it’s a way of aping the connotations of simplicity and even, to a degree, asceticism, without actually having to give up those sweet, sweet class signifiers.
Being minimalist in this way – “Stop wasting money on all that IKEA nonsense! With this $4,000 dining table hand-whittled by a failed novelist in Scandinavia, you will never need another piece of furniture!” – really just means having enough upfront disposable money to “invest” in your wardrobe and surroundings. Reducing a wardrobe down to a few painfully elegant cashmere-cotton blend tops is only really possible if you can put down at least $1,000 in one go for the creation of your “capsule wardrobe”.
The visual cues and undercurrents of moral superiority it apes, the “no-makeup makeup” because you’ve bought $250 worth of nigh-invisible Glossier products, the vaguely Japanese home decor because we assume literally anything that isn’t crowded with color and pattern is somehow automatically Japanese – it’s all about spending an incredible amount of time and attention to look as if you hadn’t thought about it at all.
And these are all fine things! You are allowed to enjoy having precisely 10 sweaters in slightly different shades of taupe, or meticulously keeping your all-white dining set on white open shelves, despite the fact that it clearly implies at least once-weekly dusting of your entire kitchen, but what is #problematic about it is pretending that this is somehow a noble or morally positive way to spend your money.
It is just another form of conspicuous consumption, a way of saying to the world: “Look at me! Look at all of the things I have refused to buy, and the incredibly-expensive, sparse items I have deemed worthy instead!”
And we are entitled to buy whatever we like, but to pretend that the intentional and costly upfront implications of a minimalist-chic life are anything but privileged posturing is ridiculous. But I believe that we feel these things because the minimalism-as-luxury-good phenomenon is extremely caught up with the minimalism-as-faux-spiritualism phenomenon, which is its own can of farm-to-table, artisanal worms.
Long story short, the past 10 years or so has sold us one of the most oddly logical, yet no less cloying, answers to our hyper-consumerist late capitalism: minimalism as a secular kind of religion, an add-on to the cultures of yoga and green juices and general living well by putting together a tapas platter of cultural and spiritual practices without ever fully committing to one.
The premise of minimalism in this way is very vague, and ever-shifting to accommodate the tastes and stomach for consistency of the individual practitioner, but the overall theory is the same: by paring your life down as actively as possible, you are almost guaranteed to appreciate what remains more, and are likely to pick up some serious wisdom in the process, which usually makes for excellent self-serious Medium content down the road.
There are a million variations – fitting all your belongings into a single box, small-house or van living, radical de-cluttering, extreme purges of technology or social activity, etc – but they all hold the same vague, usually unspoken level of superiority.
They all imply that they are in some way a moral upgrade from the life of “mindless consumerism”, and as a bonus, allow you to take on some of the desirable aesthetics and morality of poverty without ever having to be poor. You’re not homeless, you’re on the road, doing some chic van-living and following the good weather! You’re not unable to afford basic home goods, you’re choosing to pare everything down to a single cardboard box! If life were a video game – and there are some scientists who seem to believe it may be – minimalist spirituality is a great way to get all the gold coins of poverty without ever having to be one of those icky poor people.
The implication of this kind of minimalism is obvious, and yet it somehow never seems to get addressed: the only people who can “practice” minimalism in any meaningful way are people upon whom it isn’t forced by financial or logistical circumstances.
You cannot choose to “declutter” if you are already living in a sparse home you cannot afford to furnish. You cannot “reduce” the food you consume if you are already only able to put one good meal on the table per day. And when nearly half of Americans would be unable to pay their bills if they missed a single check, this “forced minimalism” is much, much more common than we would like to imagine. We cannot pretend that performative reduction in consumption, or choosing to only consume in certain ways, is not one of the most gratuitous displays of privilege out there, and to frame it as in any way a moral choice is more than a little offensive.
But the truth is that, as with so many other social phenomena that insufferable white dudes have co-opted, this spiritual minimalism has essentially become yet another competition for who can be the best at whatever you’ve chosen, even if that “whatever” is literally “having less shit”.
Even ignoring the class angles, this idea that any “decluttering” in your life is automatically a positive thing is simply an aesthetic choice being reframed as a moral one because, let’s be honest, it’s really easy to look at a lot of what (mostly) women own as being totally frivolous. Makeup, more-elaborate wardrobes, cozy home decor, art, supplies for hobbies, nice home goods – it’s not a coincidence that most of the stuff we’re being told to flush away from our lives happens to be stuff that women mostly accumulate.
And, yes, there is a very strong capitalist-critical argument to be made about buying in more intentional and ethical ways, but color me shocked that very few of these minimalist troubadours ever really take things to an economic or class-based argument. It’s about reducing for personal enlightenment and pompous blog posts, it’s not about arguing for a more equitable society in which people consume proportionate to their needs. (If you need a perfect example of this, note the fetishization of the curated “simplicity” of the ultra-rich: their clean loft spaces, their designer capsule wardrobes, their elaborately reduced diets. These people are still conspicuously consuming in mind-boggling ways, they’re just filtering it through the convenient prism of simplicity, and that allows their million-dollar wardrobes to somehow be aspirational for someone advocating for “minimalism”.)
The point is, the points being made by the minimalism crew are neither truly spiritual nor truly socioeconomic. They’re another style, as superficial as anything else that might come down the runway at Fashion Week, just with an added layer of condescension. At the end of the day, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: this kind of “minimalism” is just another boring product that wealthy people can buy.
This piece was originally published on The Financial Diet