A Life Less Throwaway: The lost art of buying for life

Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Tara Button 2018

Tara Button asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: ISBN 9780008217716

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Version: 2018-12-23

Dedication

For my great makers:

My parents, who made me,

Mark, the one making dreams come true,

Juliet, the best maid of honour,

and Howard, who makes me happy every day

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: Or why I want my grandmother’s tights

List of Exercises

PART I

BROKEN BEHAVIOUR

1 Mindful Curation: Or how to resist a world that’s trying to make us broke and lonely

2 Planned Obsolescence: Or why they don’t make ’em like they used to

3 Psychological Obsolescence: Or why no one wants their parents’ old settee

4 Advertising: Or how many people does it take to sell a lightbulb?

5 Marketing: Or the ten tactics that make us spend

6 Fashion and Identity: Or why everyone should dress like my friend Ben

7 Faster and Faster Fashion: Or how to get off the trend treadmill

8 Born to Shop: Or how our monkey brain influences what we buy

PART II

LIVING A LIFE LESS THROWAWAY

9 Becoming a Curator: Or how to begin buying with purpose

10 Taking Stock: Or where did all this stuff come from?

11 Before You Shop: Or ‘A Tale of Two Shoppers’

12 Out at the Shops: Or how scents, shelves and salespeople get us spending

13 The BuyMeOnce Buying Guide: Or how to find the best stuff on the planet

14 Keeping and Caring: Or how to hold on to the things you love

15 On Money and Happiness: Or how to be happy in a cash-mad world

Conclusion: Or what does success look like in a life less throwaway?

Ten Steps to Master Mindful Curation

Appendix I: Care and Repair

Appendix II: Choosing Materials for Clothing

Appendix III: Brand Values

Appendix IV: Know Your Warranties

Endnotes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Publisher

Introduction

or

Why I want my grandmother’s tights

My grandmother’s tights used to last forever. They were so strong, people could tow cars with them, and did! Granny got two pairs – one to wash and one to wear. But then the manufacturers decided to change the way their stockings were made, and not for the better. So today, when I reach for a pair of tights, it’s like playing pantyhose Russian roulette. Which pair will break this morning?

It may not seem like a crisis to have a drawer stuffed with half-laddered hosiery, but I see it as a very small glimpse into a much larger problem. Our whole houses, our whole lives, have become stuffed full of things that let us down, cause our stress levels to skyrocket and our bank accounts to empty. But precisely because these things are poorly made or faddy, perversely we are compelled to buy more of them.

But couldn’t life be different? What if we decided to surround ourselves with beautiful, well-made things that lasted forever, instead of ‘for now’ objects that soon need replacing?

That was the seed of an idea that came to me in 2013.

Before then I was a paid-up loyalty-card-carrying member of the impulse-shopper club who never questioned the things I bought. I’d always been a spendthrift. My mother says that as a child it never much mattered how much pocket money I was given, I was always broke, and this behaviour carried on into adulthood. Once I’d decided I wanted something, I ‘needed’ it right away, and so my life and home became filled up with stuff that was ‘almost but not quite right’. Longevity wasn’t one of my criteria, so I owned temporary things, poorly thought-through and soon-regretted clothes or hobby and fitness equipment bought in fits of short-lived enthusiasm.

My habitual impulse buying eventually caused credit card debts of thousands of pounds, leaving me feeling out of control, childish and angry with myself. I would come home to a chronically cluttered house, which was exhausting to tidy or clean, and stare blankly at my piles of fast-fashion clothes, wondering why I felt I had nothing to wear.

Like many people, I was stumbling through life believing that ‘when this happens or when I have that, then I’ll be happy’. Without a clear sense of self, I’d unconsciously mould my character into whatever I thought my partners wanted me to be. When my last relationship failed, therefore, I was left so lost, I had to spend some time on antidepressants. With my thirties looming, I felt as though I’d screwed my life up and chucked it away like a free hand wipe.

At the same time I’d managed to fall into the moral wasteland that is the advertising world. My job was now to write adverts for some of the world’s biggest brands, trying to persuade people like me to buy more stuff, whether they needed it or not. Five years ago I had a full-on breakdown in front of my friends on holiday, and in the plane toilet on the way home, I looked in the mirror and vowed to make a change. I just wasn’t sure what form that change would take.

The change came in the form of a pot – a baby blue Le Creuset casserole pot given to me for my thirtieth birthday. It came with a reputation for lasting for generations, and when I held it, it just felt like an heirloom. It was startlingly beautiful, and I reflected that owning it meant I potentially never had to buy another pot again. ‘If only everything in my life was like this,’ I thought.

Enthused, I set out to find more objects that I would never have to replace – objects that would work with me and grow old with me; beautiful, classic objects worth committing to and taking care of.

I assumed there’d be a website that sold a collection of lifetime products, but when I went looking for one, it didn’t exist. ‘Maybe I could be the one to build it,’ I dared to think.

I had zero web-design skills, but the more I thought about it, the more powerful the idea seemed. If this website could release people from the constant pressure to renew and replace, it could solve some of the biggest problems the world was facing. It could ease the clutter, unhappiness and debt that came with overconsumption, it could lessen the environmental impact of our throwaway society and it could save us all money in the long term.

I started to make changes in my own life and uncovered the surprising practical and emotional benefits that come with choosing to bring only those objects into your life that reflect your values and will be with you for decades to come.

I knew that if I didn’t at least try to build the website, I’d always regret it. So in 2015 I started a company, BuyMeOnce, and began hunting for lifetime items in my spare time. I cut my salary in half and lived on a minimum wage so I could split my time between work and building my business.

Painfully slowly, and after several false starts, the site started to come together. It was very basic, it wasn’t monetised, and I had no idea if anyone would ever visit it. Most likely, I thought, it would remain a cluster of lonely pages on the sixth page of Google.

Then, in 2016, miraculously and quite unexpectedly, the world found it. The site went viral, thousands of e-mails flooded in, BuyMeOnce was featured in almost every major newspaper in the UK and I was suddenly being asked to be on TV in America. I hadn’t realised it, but I had tapped into something that people all around the world were feeling. They were tired of our throwaway culture.

By this stage, my life had completely turned around. My spending was under control because I was living by my new-found philosophy. I sadly hadn’t morphed into a ‘naturally’ tidy person, but after giving away over half of my wardrobe and countless boxes of clutter, any mess I made was easily dealt with in a couple of minutes. Owning items I loved for the long term also meant I naturally started caring for them better and lost things less regularly. I’d also stopped worrying about keeping up with the Joes or Janes, and reconnected with the person I really was. This, together with doing something I truly believed in, had raised my self-worth and allowed me to enter into a relationship based on a joyful connection rather than neediness. I had found my best friend – a kind, funny, bespectacled man who made me happier than I had imagined possible. As I write this, I’m looking forward to marrying him in six weeks’ time.

I’ve now been given the opportunity to share with you what I believe is a life-enhancing way of thinking and behaving. My hope is that this book can be helpful to you on a personal level and, if it falls into the hands of enough people, helpful to the planet.

WHAT CAN ONE LITTLE BOOK DO?

This book tells the story of how we’ve sleepwalked into a world where our lives are focused on a constant churn of items with little lasting value.

I’ll also reveal how we’re being manipulated to feel that our current possessions (and by extension ourselves) are inadequate, and how this drives us to constantly upgrade our wardrobes, homes and technology. After ten years in the advertising world, I’m able to take you behind ad-land’s glitzy curtain to reveal the tricks of the trade and arm you against its devious tactics.

Overbuying habits are often linked to low self-worth, so this book also contains sections to help you to value yourself. No object can make you more or less of a person. Once you’ve truly understood that possessions don’t have that power, you’re able to choose which ones to bring into your life with much greater ease. As an added bonus, by the time you’ve worked through the exercises of this book I would expect the clutter of your home to be greatly reduced, along with your stress levels. ‘A life less throwaway’ becomes simultaneously a simpler and richer life, because the focus is off consumption and on what really matters.

As my company name, BuyMeOnce, suggests, living a life less throwaway does involve buying certain things, but this lifestyle isn’t about buying beautiful stuff to gloat over, it’s about buying only those items that will support a functioning and fulfilling life.

MINDFUL CURATION

I call my method ‘mindful curation’, which might sound as pretentious as bringing your own tablecloth to KFC, but is the best term for it. It is ‘mindful’ because it is done with purpose and thought. And it is ‘curation’ because, like a curator putting together a collection in an art gallery, it’s about picking only those things that will work together to form a home and a life that uniquely reflects you and your needs.

It is comprised of several steps:

1. Understanding the benefits of mindful curation. (Chapter 1)

2. Understanding the pressures that promote mindless buying and developing tactics to free yourself from them. (Chapters 2–8 and 12)

3. Investigating your life’s purpose and the long-term priorities that will help you meet this purpose. (Chapter 9)

4. Identifying which items you need to fulfil those priorities and to live comfortably without being swayed by status. (Chapters 9–11)

5. Identifying your true tastes and sense of style so you can buy future-proof items. (Chapters 3 and 7)

6. Identifying your values and the brands that reflect those values. (Chapter 9)

7. Taking stock of the items you already have to understand your present tastes, priorities and buying habits. (Chapter 10)

8. Letting go of the clutter and the superfluous. (Chapter 10)

9. Developing a healthy attitude towards money. (Chapter 15)

10. Choosing each new item with your long-term priorities and tastes in mind. (Chapters 7, 12 and 13)

11. Developing the skills to take care of and keep the things you’ve chosen to bring into your life. (Chapter 14)

This book contains practical exercises on how to put all these steps into action. Skipping straight to the exercises may leave you with a shallower understanding of why they are important. However, if time is short and you just want to get cracking, go ahead – there’s a list of exercises on the next page, or simply flick through the book for them.

This is above all a book on how to be happy in the ultra-commercial world we live in right now. It’s meant to be useful, so please use it in the way that’s most helpful to you.

Let’s get started!

List of Exercises

Persuade yourself of the importance of non-material actions

Sign up for BuyMeOnce mantras

Simple ways to combat materialism every day

Identifying your homeware aesthetic

Generating empathy

Free yourself from celebrity influence

Make your own adverts

Ad-blocking

Separate lifestyle and product

Finding your fashion identity

Dressing up for the roles you play

Shape up

Find your true colours

The mindfully curated capsule

Turning necessities into luxuries

If you were the last person on the planet

Refusing to feel ashamed

How to increase your sense of being valued by your tribe

Digging deeper to find purpose

Discovering your passions

Kill yourself off (metaphorically)

Bringing it all together to find your ‘42’

Your purpose and your purchasing

The common threads of taste

Where your values and brand values meet

An exercise in commitment

The life-less-throwaway challenge

Write your own unwish list

Nourishing your self-esteem

Identifying impulse-buying triggers

Preventing lost property

Memory training for glasses

Saying goodbye to an object

Prioritising where your money goes

Find your freedoms

Connect with your special people

Find your tribe

Grow every day

Tell yourself a better story

Have a purposeful weekend

Be a friend to yourself

Improving your home’s mood

PART I

Broken Behaviour

1

Mindful Curation

or

How to resist a world that’s trying to make us broke and lonely

Our relationship with ‘stuff’ may sit squarely at the centre of this book, but I should be clear from the outset that the purpose of it isn’t to make you obsess over material things. In fact, it’s to help you do the opposite. I want to give you the tools to understand what you need and don’t need, and how to make the objects in your life work for you in the long term.

THE BENEFITS OF MINDFUL CURATION

We only have a limited amount of money, headspace and time to spend as we frolic on this planet and we can very easily waste a huge amount of each on meaningless stuff. Mindful curation helps us to free up all three, so that we can spend them enjoying the things we find most meaningful.

Being more mindful about what we buy protects us from impulse spending and gives us more resilience to advertising and marketing manipulation. So we find that we start saving money over time. Crucially, though, it doesn’t feel as though we’re making a sacrifice. Savings come naturally out of a better understanding of what we need and what best serves us, which is usually much less than the average person buys.

When we practise mindful curation, we’re also releasing ourselves from the trivial, the bland and the shoddy, and living a life where the objects around us perfectly match our needs, pull their weight, reflect our values and put a smile on our face. This frees up our time and energy for the things that matter most, like family, friends, pursuing our passions and finally finding out who wins Game of Thrones.

THE BENEFITS OF LONGER-LASTING PRODUCTS

Not all products are made equal, and I believe we’ve left longevity out of our decision-making for far too long. The commercial world does everything it can to tempt us away from longevity, but that only serves its ever-hungry self, not us, the people who have to deal with the broken zips, rattling washing machines and rips in the crotches of our jeans.

When I started to buy for the long term, I found myself thinking far more deeply about what I wanted out of my life in the future. This meant that the possessions I ‘curated’ automatically started to reflect the deeper and more stable elements of my character, values and personal style. This has brought a lovely natural harmony to my home, creating an atmosphere in which I feel refreshed and calm because it is authentically ‘me’.

My home had previously been a stressful one. Every time I’d walked through my little kingdom and seen the toaster that wouldn’t pop, the wonky flat-pack drawers, dried-up biros and dodgy dishwasher, I’d feel anxiety rise up. Once I started surrounding myself with objects I could trust, my home became a much more relaxing and nurturing place to be.

Another delightful side effect of buying fewer things and not replacing your items so regularly is that you can afford to buy higher-quality, better-crafted products, so your quality of life can actually feel higher.

IS IT MINIMALISM?

Mindful curation definitely has its roots in the minimalist movement. However, while minimalism tends to be quite clear on what we should cut out of our lives (as much as possible), it can leave us hanging when it comes to deciding what to bring into them and how to bypass the pressures to buy more than we need.

With mindful curation, we aren’t trying to reduce our possessions down to a magic number of objects or compete to see who can live with the least. Instead, we’re finding out much more about ourselves and our values and using that knowledge as a shield against clutter and the tricks and temptations of marketers. So with mindful curation we’ll end up owning exactly the right amount for us – no more and no less – and this will be different for everyone.

MINDFUL CURATION VS MINDLESS CONSUMPTION

‘The best things in life aren’t things.’

Art Buchwald, satirist

Mindful curation is a simple idea, but it can be challenging at first because there are so many forces trying to get us to think in the opposite way – the way of ‘mindless consumption’.

Mindless consumption sounds free-spirited and potentially quite fun. It’s the unwritten hashtag for every photo uploaded by the ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’, the hidden subtitle on every ‘haul video’.

The danger of mindless consumption though is that it makes us morbidly materialistic, meaning that a huge amount of our attention is focused on our wealth, our stuff and our status. And materialistic people have been shown to be (deep breath) less generous, less agreeable, less healthy, less likely to help others, less satisfied with their lives, less satisfied with their jobs, less caring about the environment, more likely to gamble, more likely to be in debt, lonelier, worse at keeping friends and less close to the friends they do have. Oh, and materialistic kids do less well at school.¹

In short – it’s really bad!

Yet advertisers, the government, our friends, and even our kids surround us with messages and put constant pressure on us to focus on materialistic things. On top of this, on average we see more than 5,000 marketing messages a day.²

Unsurprisingly, this takes its toll. Research shows that briefly subjecting someone to photos of luxury objects or even just words such as ‘status’ or ‘expensive’ can trigger a more depressed mood, feelings of wanting to outdo others and less willingness to socialise.³

Tim Kasser, who has been studying the effects of materialism for almost two decades, describes the impact as a ‘see-saw effect’. When we see ourselves as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘people’ (which is easily triggered through marketing messaging) we focus more on materialistic urges, such as our status and competitiveness. This causes an upswing of negative materialistic thoughts and a downswing of positive urges towards community, connection, generosity, trust and cooperation – all the things that have been proven to make our lives more fulfilling and happy.

So, when your grandad says that people were nicer in the ‘good old days’, in this aspect, it’s true. Our materialistic tendencies have increased so much in the last few decades that our sense of community, our trust in others and our ability to be happy have been gravely reduced.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT NOW?

I’m not going to spend too much time pressing this point, because I think we all know that mindless consumerism is pushing our poor planet to a crisis point. We need to save it, and dropping the ball isn’t really an option. We live on the ball, and we don’t have another one to move to.

But it isn’t just the planet that should concern us. The trend towards materialism is also increasingly taking its toll on our day-to-day lives because it tricks us into losing the personal connections that make us happy.

A study of 2,500 consumers over six years concluded that no matter how much money you had to spend, materialism was linked to an increase in loneliness and loneliness in turn increased materialism.⁴ In the Seventies and Eighties, only 11–20 per cent of Americans reported that they often felt lonely; in 2010 that figure rose to between 40 and 45 per cent.⁵ The Mental Health Foundation in the UK also reported in 2010 that 46 per cent of us felt that society was getting lonelier.⁶

Relying on social media for connection is like trying to live off multivitamins – they might be a nice add-on, but they don’t feed us in the way we need. Research has shown that increasing your friends on Facebook has no effect on your well-being at all, but increasing your ‘real world’ friends from ten to twenty people results in a significant life-altering improvement – the equivalent of a 50 per cent pay rise.⁷

How does materialism make us lonelier? The messages we see in ads and social media channels perpetuate a myth that having things or looking a certain way makes us worthy of love and admiration. It’s very natural to want to feel special and appreciated, so we start to focus on our looks and achievements and buy high-status items that others will admire. However, any admiration or connection we gain is on a shallow level, and because it isn’t based on anything authentic, it leaves us feeling disconnected and unsatisfied. So we try even harder to get the love we need by showing the world our possessions, our status and our achievements, never guessing that the constant focus on the self means that the connection to others isn’t going to happen.

Sadly, materialism and narcissism are on the rise. A study published in 2012 tracked the values of graduates since 1966 and found that the importance given to status, money and narcissistic life goals like ‘being famous’ had risen significantly, whereas the importance given to finding meaning and purpose in life and a desire to help others had fallen.⁸ In addition, a study of students over the last thirty years has found that college kids today are about 40 per cent lower in empathy than the students of twenty or thirty years ago.⁹

We have become ‘all about me’ rather than ‘all about we’. The irony is that self-focused people hurt themselves more than anyone else. I don’t feel that it is a coincidence that the use of antidepressants has gone up 400 per cent in the USA¹⁰ and doubled in Britain in the last decade.¹¹

To add insult to injury, marketers know how much we crave the connections that are the cornerstone of our happiness, so their adverts are full of family bonding and friends having great times – all to sell us goods that in reality are driving us apart.

IS OUR STUFF GETTING IN THE WAY OF WHAT’S IMPORTANT?

In March 2010, a group of five Pacific Islanders who had lived all their lives with practically no possessions were flown to the UK to be part of a TV programme where they looked at British life.¹² As they walked around their hosts’ houses and explored London, they were surprised by all the ‘useless extra things’ they saw, saddened that busy commuters wouldn’t stop and talk to them, and shocked at seeing homeless people. This would ‘never be allowed to happen’ in their community.

The tribesmen’s simple lives meant that they hadn’t lost sight of what was important: love, respect and enjoying each other’s company. When they first arrived, they were all given their own room in their host’s big house. Later, when they stayed at a more modest place and all four of them were put together in a small bedroom, they declared themselves happier because now they were ‘able to talk to each other’.

It’s easy to romanticise the ‘noble savage’ life. There are of course many downsides, including lack of healthcare, gender equality and Ben & Jerry’s. But it is interesting to explore how our own society’s values might change if materialism was reduced.

In 2016, my fiancé, Howard, and I were invited to be on a TV show running an experiment to try and discover this very thing. The idea was that all our possessions, including our clothes, would be taken away from us.

‘No bloody way,’ Howard said before I was halfway through explaining the idea. Howard is not a naked person. Not ever. Not even with himself. So Life Stripped Bare went on to be made without us.¹³

Six people were stripped bare. Literally. Crouching-beneath-your-window-sill-so-the-neighbours-don’t-see-your-dangly-bits bare. All their stuff was locked away and each day they were able to choose one possession that they most wanted to have back in in their lives. Then (to get as much flesh wobbling as possible), they had to run half a mile up the road to a shed to get it back.

One of the volunteers, Heidi, a 29-year-old pink-haired fashion designer with thirty-one bikinis, sobbed as the removal vans arrived in her trendy area of London. ‘I feel my stuff defines me,’ she said. ‘I want people to like me, think I’m cool, think I’m nice, and if I don’t have my hipster coat, if I don’t have my nails painted or my rings on, I don’t think they will like me …’

On Day 2, after a gruelling night on the floor, she reflected, ‘Yesterday I was crying because I wanted everything. Today I just want my mattress.’

In fact she got more than that. Out on the street, two passing girls stopped to help her carry the mattress back to her house and they bonded over the funny situation.

Almost in tears, Heidi said to camera, ‘Now I’ve got some friends, I honestly feel I’ve got everything … When you have nothing, people make the whole world of difference.’

I’d like to turn this on its head and say, ‘When you’ve got people, there’s nothing much else you need in the world.’

All the participants of Life Stripped Bare found that once their basic comfort levels were met, they became less and less bothered about picking up new items from the shed. We can be happy with very little, yet due to materialism, the average home has 300,000 items in it …

So how can we reverse this trend? Let’s start with some exercises to break free of materialism.

exercise

PERSUADE YOURSELF OF THE IMPORTANCE OF NON-MATERIAL ACTIONS

You may think you don’t need persuading that there’s more to life than materialism, especially after reading this chapter, but write an e-mail to yourself about it anyway. This may seem a bit twee, but has been proven by professor and clinical psychologist Natasha Lekes to have a tangible impact on your happiness.¹⁴ I’ll even start you off: