Scientific studies are helping to reveal why. It’s our primitive brains. They got us down from the trees and around the world, through ice ages, famines and plagues, into our era of abundance. But they never had to evolve an instinct that said, “enough”. Instead, our old wiring subliminally urges us: “Want. More. Now.”
Western civilisation constrained this urge for thousands of years with an array of cultural conventions, from Aristotle’s Golden Mean (neither too much nor too little) to the old Edwardian family table-saying, “I have reached an elegant sufficiency and anything additional would be superfluous.” Consumer culture marginalised all that and created ever-more sophisticated ways of prodding our primitive desire circuits into overdrive. It got us to the point where we created everything families need as a basis for contentment. Now it’s rushing us past the tipping point, where getting more makes life worse rather than better.
Our alternative route lies in learning to practise the comfortable art of “enough” in this overstuffed world. There is an armoury of strategies we can adopt to proof our brains against pressure to pursue and consume too much. Building and maintaining strong family relationships is among the most important. Modern culture, with its emphasis on individualism and inter-generational alienation, puts huge pressure on families. But conversely, family ties can help us to resist the social rip-tide that draws us into overconsumption and over-striving.
Take food. One of the most obvious manifestations of our overconsuming society is overweight and obesity, particularly among youngsters. An array of cures, in the shape of diets and drugs, has been proposed. But one significant way of curbing consumption lies in the humble family meal. Its social aspect may be particularly beneficial for adolescents. Research shows that those who regularly eat with their families have healthier weight levels.
The mindful ritual of shared meals may help to ease the angst of fast-paced teenage life and reduce the urge for teens to take refuge in comfort calories.
Eating slowly in convivial settings has benefits for all members of the family. Studies show that eating in the company of other calm eaters can cut our calorie consumption significantly. When we scoff hurriedly and inattentively in front of TVs and PCs, our brains don’t have the mental space to appreciate the mouthfuls we are bolting. In tests, people who are encouraged to eat slowly and attentively consume a third fewer calories and feel fuller for twice as long afterwards. Their brains have had a chance to track what they are consuming. One effective way to encourage calm eating is to be among other calm eaters. We don’t actually have an independent mental gauge of how much food is ample, so we tend to gauge it by mimicking those eating around us. At the family dinner table, setting good examples really can pay dividends.
Family self-constraint also appears to work in the shopping malls. By contrast, shopping amid strangers tends to foster wasteful and extravagant buying. Jennifer Argo, an assistant professor of marketing at Alberta University, employed mystery shoppers to stand by a rack of batteries, and found that the mere presence of her stooges made unwitting battery buyers pick the most expensive brand. If no one was there, they’d choose cheaply. But that peer pressure works both ways. The research shows that we tend to buy fewer and cheaper things when visiting stores in the supportive company of family members (or, at least, under their eagle eyes).
But there are further ways in which family links can moderate consumption. A less obvious but more insidious problem is in the realm of media. This may be particularly harmful for children. Video screens and fast-action children’s shows are now also being blamed for a whole range of modern conditions, including obesity, premature puberty, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and clinical depression. Developing an ability to be cautious consumers may prove crucial for our children, who have never known anything other than a life enveloped in media.
Parents are up against peer pressure and consumer propaganda, too. Sue Eckstein, an academic administrator from Brighton, is trying to strike a healthily enoughist balance for her kids. Ms Eckstein is partial to watching TV costume dramas on Sunday nights, but tries to avoid the box on weekdays. Imposing her values on her children, 14-year-old Anna, and Sebastian, 11, however, feels like quite another moral dimension. The telly became a serious issue when Sebastian started at a Steiner school. It opposes letting children see TV for fear that it will fry their attention spans and expose them to insidious adverts. ‘Some of the more, shall we say, extreme parents ban telly outright,’ says Eckstein. ‘I think a balanced approach is better, so we just restrict it.’
Sebastian seems happy with the compromise. ‘I know that television is quite bad for your brain, but some people at Steiner school seem to think it will kill you,’ he says. ‘One of my friends has hardly seen any in his life. I only really see two programmes a day, Neighbours and Hollyoaks. At the weekend I’m allowed to watch Top Gear. And I love Top Gear.’ Sue hopes her regime will forestall any mutinies. ‘If you ban TV, it will only be much more attractive. And if you make access to all that lovely media hard, you have more opportunities for bribery. Sebastian had to sign a contract saying that if I allowed him to buy some inappropriate games console, he would do ten minutes of reading to me each evening without fuss.’
Another family pressure point exists in the world of employment. We spend ever more time at work and commute ever further, to create ever more unnecessary things. Why? One reason is that we are in a vicious cycle: the industrious frenzy of modern work offers many of us an emotional escape from family lives made difficult and unrewarding by the fact that both partners feel anxious, tired and alienated... through overwork. This sort of avoidance strategy helps to explain why divorce lawyers are busiest just after the summer holidays. Pent-up emotional forces can burst destructively free when spouses suddenly have to spend a significant period of shared time together within the pressure-cooker atmosphere of ‘must have maximum holiday fun’.
One German psychologist claims that modern life swirls us into a cycle where we work too much because we don’t have enough sex - and then we don’t have sex because we’re working too much. Ragnar Beer, of Göttingen University, says his survey of 32,000 men and women reveals that the less sex you have, the more work you seek. He says that people who are sexually deprived need outlets for their frustrations. Beer found that a third of interviewees who have sex once a week take on extra work to compensate for not having sex quite as often as they would like. The problem is that the work increasingly consumes time and energy that could be employed for relationship building purposes, to the point where couples no longer make love at all. So they work more.
But there is an opposite trend afoot. The calmed-down family unit may create a bulwark against our never-enough world. For example, in 2004, Muffy Mead-Ferro, an American copywriter, balked at reading the pile of parenting books she had been given for the birth of her first child. The prenatal library, she realised, was a primer for meeting the expectations of alpha-motherhood - a corporately correct regime of the perfect baby, the perfect nursery room and the perfect yummy-mummy image.
Rather than flagellate herself with unattainable expectations, Muffy wrote Confessions of a Slacker Mom, an homage to the messy world of just-OK-parenting. ‘One reason we’re caught up in hypercompetitive parenting is because of marketing,’ she says. ‘You feel like a loser if your kid isn’t learning to play the violin or reading before kindergarten.’ Her daughter, Belle, did fine without having to listen to Mozart while floating in the womb. So did her second child, Joe. Muffy’s book sold quietly. The world took little notice.
But in the past two years, Muffy has ceased to be a lone voice. She’s in peril of getting stampeded by a rush of ‘beta mum’ authors. Among others, Rene Syler, has published Good-Enough Mother: the perfectly imperfect book of parenting, while Katie Allison Granju, has just published Let Them Run with Scissors: how over-parenting hurts children, parents and society. In Britain, the newspaper columnist Fiona Neil has published The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy. There’s also a slacker-lifestyle monthly for mothers, Hybrid Mom magazine.
Maybe something is in the ether: if mothers are starting to rebel against pressure to infect their children with never-enoughness, then perhaps we may be seeing the first rumblings of an “enoughist” shift, of people opting for the sanity of ‘just fine’. Parenthood is the most pressured fault-line in our more-more society. If we’re ever to shift towards seeking calmer, more nourishing family lives, then this may be where it starts. It might spread from these beta mums to their beta kids and onwards, even inspiring beta dads to find satisfaction in beta working hours. The family fightback against spiralling overconsumption might just be underway.
