Covid & the End of Consumerism

We need this crisis.

I recognise that’s a confronting, callous thing to say when people are dying and families are struggling. It’s a hard thing to hear when we feel vulnerable.

But crisis has a way of gripping us by the neck and forcing us to look in the mirror. It demands that we reflect on our lives and choose what to keep, and what to leave behind. We did it this as a nation in defining our essential services and Kiwi families are doing it now as they cut and recut household budgets.

Forced to press pause, a few things have become clear. We’ve added layers onto our lives that we just don’t need. The absurdity of the daily commute, jam-packed malls on sunny Sundays, processed food, online shopping and next-day delivery, piles of cheap plastic junk, fast fashion, regular takeaways.

If anything, the crisis has paused the chaos of crap in our lives and forced a return to the real normal. Spending time with family, home cooking, gardening, reading, walking, exploring the neighbourhood, checking in on people, rekindling friendships, clean air, seeing the stars, stillness.

The simple truth is that the road we’re on leads to ruin. Excessive consumption in the industrialised world is overshooting our planet’s boundaries and making us lonely, sad and sick. Modern society kills far more than Covid ever will and ecological collapse more still – 4.6 million people die each year from air pollution alone. The economic model we’re now desperately trying to save, is dependent on ever-growing GDP using finite resources and wholly blind to the social and environmental consequences of ever-more stuff.

So yes, we need this crisis to pull the handbrake on a way of life that must change. But where do we go next? Now is the time for big, bold ideas grounded in the best parts of our humanity and our true-blue Kiwi values - community, care and creativity (as coined by Max Harris in “The New Zealand Project”.) Here’s two ideas I’m holding onto in the search for something better.

Retrosuburbia is a people-powered movement to refit our suburbs for simplicity. Centred on a guidebook-come-manifesto that’s now available online for a Koha (donation), it’s a complete guide to building household and personal resilience. Think food production at home, cost-effective DIY improvements for efficiency and personal upskilling, budgeting and lifestyle advice for greater self-reliance. It’s central call-to-action is to design our lives around simplicity, nature and the things that really matter. Because building stronger, more sustainable communities starts in our homes.

If Retrosuburbia is the how-to guide, the Sufficiency Economy is the vision. It’s a world in controlled slow-down and a rejection of consumerism. It reframes ‘the good life’ away from the bach, boat and beamer – because if we all attained that lifestyle, the planet would fry. Instead, we strive for an economy delivers ‘enough, for everyone, forever’. That world looks pretty different to today. Food is grown at home and in the community, luxury loses its appeal, we repair things and care less about convenience. We voluntarily buy less, so work less and invest that time in relationships and our passions. It flips the outsourcing equation that runs our lives now – instead of working jobs we may or may not like to pay others to look after our children, care for our grandparents, grow our food and maintain our homes, we find the joy in those things ourselves and take ownership of them again. In this economy, those that can afford to drawback from the formal ‘work’ economy do so by choice, freeing up resources and contributing to social infrastructure (like community gardens, playcentres or repair hubs) to support others to live ‘the good life’ too. It’s about adding layers of real meaning and purpose onto our lives - the kind we’ve glimpsed these last few weeks - instead of slogging through to the weekend and buying more stuff.

Many will dismiss all this as a utopian daydream. Let them. The same was said for religious freedom, social mobility and democracy before their own crises made them inevitable too.

Already, we can see the new economy shining through the cracks of the old. Community Supported Agriculture feeds more every year, government funded organisations like Gen Less are championing voluntary simplicity, Greenpeace is calling for a Covid response package that warms up our 600,000 under-insulated homes and there is serious talk of a Universal Basic Income.

History, it’s been said, has a habit of happening all at once. That certainly feels true right now. But we’re not flying blind. Bold ideas like Retrosurburbia and the Sufficiency Economy have been incubating on the side-lines of society, just waiting for us to look in the mirror and see them.