The stuff we’re made of

When I was a little kid, I loved having lemonade stands. I carefully collected the revenue — nickels, dimes and quarters, mostly — in an empty baby wipes box, and every so often, I traded the fruits of my enterprise for Spice Girls stickers or Bonne Bell lipsticks.

These first forays into commerce, and the resulting trips to Claire’s Boutique at my local mall, introduced me to the practice of using physical objects to present my identity to the world. The Spice Girls stickers told my elementary school classmates that I bought into the iconic pop group’s “girl power” message. The kiddy lipsticks helped me navigate the awkward onset of adolescence (a sad statement on the stealthy pervasiveness of conventional beauty culture, but that’s a discussion for another day).

In a few days, I’ll be joining about a thousand other people from around the world to innovate on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UNLEASH Lab in Denmark. My focus area will be on SDG 12: Sustainable Production and Consumption.

I suspect the conversations will center largely on technological innovations that can tighten the resource efficiency of manufacturing, make supply chains more green and transparent, and help bring circular economy ideals to reality. But equally important, I think, are the structures — both psychological and financial — that prop up consumer culture as we know it. Without changing these structures, we can’t really change the culture of consumption.

Here are a few that have been particularly on my mind as I get ready to make my way to Denmark:

The need to quell, or indulge, our emotions

Although we may not admit it, all of us who can spare a few dollars now and then have done it: we’ve had a horrible day and just needed a [insert your comfort product of choice here…a pint of ice cream? a beer? a new electronic gadget?]. Physical objects have become the first line of impromptu emotional companionship for many of us, especially urban transplants who may not always have easy access to family and friends.

To change consumer behavior and ultimately shrink global consumption to a level the earth’s resources can handle, we’ll have to face the messy world of feelings to think about how people can express or assuage their emotions in ways that don’t always involve buying material goods. This could mean thinking about how to strengthen social ties, especially in cities where everyone seems to be from somewhere else. Or it could mean helping people access psychological tools to handle overwhelming emotions in a more effective way than using temporary material comforts.

The need to construct our identities

For many of us, modern life means living in a fast, often impersonal world. We generally only have a few seconds to convey who we are, what we stand for, and how we want people to perceive us. The objects we adorn ourselves with may be the only things that can speak for us during those first impressions or brief moments in passing. A leather jacket is meant to say something. A tie clip is meant to say something. A flowing scarf or athletic shoes or oversized headphones are all meant to say something.

The symbolism of these objects is dictated through our screens and magazines and unspoken agreements in real life that yes, these objects should mean those things. The insidious part, of course, is that our perception of meaning is often shaped by the unattainably aspirational — the perfectly curated Pinterest weddings, the over-the-top luxury of some “reality” TV. The gulf between the lives we live and the lives we feel we should live, and by extension the personas we feel we should convey, often feeds an insatiable appetite for material things. Buying can feel like the only way to close the gap. To reduce consumption, we’ll have to learn how to erase that gap without reaching into our wallets.

The ability to access (maybe a little too much) revolving credit

Until the advent of credit cards, loans were generally given for a specific purpose. To buy a house. To buy a car. To start a business. And so on. But credit cards ushered in the era of revolving credit, a loan that replenishes as soon as it’s repaid and can be used for pretty much anything. It’s no secret that credit cards often leave people deep in debt. The United States alone has $1.02 trillion in outstanding credit card debt, which is its all-time high.

Of course, not all of this $1.02 trillion ended up at the mall or in Amazon’s pocket. Credit cards can be a lifesaver when emergency strikes, especially in a country like the U.S. where people are often left without protection from paying sticker prices at the doctor’s office. That said, credit cards (and other forms of loans that may lend more than a person can afford, like subprime mortgages) do feed the pursuit of those seductive aspirational lifestyles that bombard us every day. As collective credit card debt and resource depletion swell, we might want to take a long, hard look at the abundance of revolving credit.

I received my first unsolicited credit card offer when I was 18, a decade after my lemonade heyday. Those envelopes were as much an annoyance then as they are now, not least because I recognized even as a high schooler that my nickels and dimes and part-time retail paychecks weren’t really enough to justify giving me access to that kind of money. Looking back, while that first offer was undoubtedly about preying on the young and naïve, it also perhaps sent a subconscious message that the most important part of my transition to adulthood was my budding role not as citizen, but as consumer.

I’m grateful to have this rare opportunity to discuss important issues with hundreds of people from across the globe, and I have no doubt that I will learn about countless different cultural relationships to consumption. I’m looking forward to working with my fellow UNLEASH participants to think about how we can reorient our societies away from the compulsive need to consume.

I’m not sure what my time at UNLEASH will bring, but I look forward to working with people from across the globe to think about how we can reorient ourselves and our societies away from the compulsive need to consume.