I watched Local Hero the other night, a fantastic little Scottish comedy from 1983. It was kind of a cult-favorite of my parents and for some reason I don't remember having ever seen it. I think I refused to watch it as a teenager out of some kind of protest. If they liked a movie, the only way you could get them to stop trying to get you to see it, was to watch it (and love it). I held out for 24 years but turns out, it's a great film - simple and totally ahead of it's time. A rally cry for what makes us happy in this world; it isn't money, it isn't power, it isn't prestige. It's friends, love, nature and a sense of belonging in the world.
I've never been much of a consumer. My dad was the king of what we didn't need, he actually had his priorities straight in a lot of ways. He spent money on travel and experiences for us, but we never got the jeans we wanted, the toys we wanted and we were were the last ones on the block to get a microwave, VCR and a host of other things deemed necessary by our neighbors. That dialogue ran in my head to the extreme until the last couple of years when I've let myself buy things that make my life better. But I still question my need for everything. Even things I already own.
In 1998, I made a decision that I couldn't live my life making people buy stuff. That's when I moved to LA to be an actress. One of the pinnacles of success in that pursuit is getting a commercial agent. Imagine my surprise to realize even in this endeavor, I was hoping to make a living off of selling stuff. It's nearly impossible, working in the U.S. to NOT have a job that makes people buy stuff, because that's what we do. A friend of mine sent me a short film to watch, The Story of Stuff, that while it sounds like it's made for seventh graders (and maybe it is) makes a really good point: We made this culture and this economy and we can unmake it.
Then I heard an interview on the radio with Judith Levine, who published Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping about the year that she and her husband decided not to be consumers. It reminds me of the day in Seattle, more than ten years ago, that my boyfriend and I decided to try not eating for a day. It was a spontaneous thing, we woke and up and said, let's fast! We lasted about three hours. We wandered around town and literally couldn't think of anything to do that didn't involve eating. So we went to our favorite vegetarian cafe and had our usual lunch but it tasted better that day than it ever had. See, even going without for a short period of time raises our enjoyment level when we do consume. Clearly our national hobby of consumption has not made us the happiest nation on earth.
I don't think we need to stop purchasing altogether but I do think we can should be much more conscious of what we think we "need" and recalibrate. Even "green" has become consumerized and we're being encouraged to offset our guilt by green things that we clearly don't need. It's like they've just replaced the heroin with morphine. The catch for me is that I love marketing. I think I'm good at sharing information and changing people's perceptions and behaviors and it's easier to make a living using that skill in advertising than anything else. One of these days, though, I would like to try my hand at marketing for something good.
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