Invest in a new lifestyle

First published: Monday, December 6, 1999

SICK of your boring old life? Want a change? Got a spare few hundred grand to spend?

Invest in a new lifestyle.

That’s what the sign outside a proposed new multi-storey apartment block around the corner from our house in North Melbourne says.

“Trade the lawn mower in for a cappuccino machine’’.

It’s that easy. Apparently.

I even saw a portable Lavazza espresso counter set up on the footpath outside one of these new apartment display suites the other day.

What next? How low will these greasy pushers stoop?

It pisses me off that they want to destroy my neighborhood with towering Nonda Katsalidis-inspired apartment buildings, jutting into the sky like post-modern concrete and steel phalluses.

But what pisses me off even more is the type of people they want to attract to my neighborhood — and the advertising pitches they use to bring them here.

North Melbourne is a gritty suburb full of gritty people.

There’s a homeless men’s hostel at the end of our street, and another one around the corner.

Drunks and hardfaced young men turning old fast, in grubby tracksuits and hand-me-down sneakers hang out in the streets during the day.

Not your typical cappuccino drinkers. And not the kind of people who can easily choose a new lifestyle.

I’m worried that the latte lifestylers will take over the suburb, spreading their intolerance and Gucci-inspired value systems around like a plague.

The broken bottles and syringes, the vomit in the gutters and the fights outside the TAB. This isn’t the type of lifestyle they were thinking of when they splashed out $250,000 for the new off-the-plan pad in Victoria St.

So, something will have to give. And you can bet the old hobos won’t get a say in how the neighborhood ends up.

But it’s this aspirational marketing — the line that you are the type of clothes you wear, coffee you drink, car you drive — that I find really scary.

We live in an aspirational society, a society where the possessions you own — or the type of place you live in — determine the type of person you are.

What’s inside doesn’t really matter. What’s important is the shell you present to the world. Apparently.

Of course, this type of thing has been around ever since a shonky property developer in ancient Rome convinced young urban couples a marble aqueduct made them a better person.

The problem with this crowd is they’ll sell the lawn mower, buy the cappuccino machine and the new apartment, settle down on their new couch in front of their 60-inch Bang & Olufsen digital TV, and then wonder: “What next? What do we do now Hey, Hey It’s Saturday! isn’t on telly any more?’’

You can’t change your values, beliefs, cultural reference points and your lifestyle as easily as changing your jumper — or your lawnmower.

This diatribe was first published on a now defunct blog called Rant.