Money

The Problem with Modern Consumer Culture

November 20, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The problem with modern consumer culture is that it makes people want things they don’t need. It encourages us to stay on the ‘hedonic treadmill.’ We never tire of pursuing more and more stuff, especially when those around us have more than we do.

A life of excessive consumerism is not the one to choose.

The engine of a consumer society is discontentment. Consumerism and materialism promote dissatisfaction because if people are happy and appreciative of what they’ve got, they’d be less concerned about getting more.

Modern advertising is manipulative. It’s no longer about telling people that a product exists. It’s not about helping consumers respond favorably to an existing need they have. It is now about creating false desires such as for absurdly priced Louis Vuitton products—wants and needs for something they weren’t probably aware of before seeing the advertisement.

Discontentment is the motivation for our restless desire to spend.

Consumerism encourages the relentless accumulation of positional goods.

Goods, often cheaply and readily available to us, are sold not because of their utility but because of the image that they carry (think Marlboro Man.) Advertisers suggest what we’ll be saying to others about ourselves. As soon as we have purchased one thing, the next thing is dangled.

Idea for Impact: Consume Less. Live More.

Folks, be aware of how consumerism touches your life and footprint on the earth’s resources. Ignore advertising. Live the life you want, not the one others would like you to live. More and more is not better if it can never be enough.

Having What You Want

May 16, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Wanting is different from having.

Wanting is in the future. Having is here; it’s now.

Wanting is based on what could make you happy in the next minute, next week, or next year.

When you don’t let yourself have what you already have, you’re in a trap of your own making. You’re perpetually restless and disengaged. You aren’t present—you’re pursuing a happiness that’s always somewhere else.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be so occupied wanting the next thing that you don’t allow yourself to enjoy what’s in front of you now. You’ll become more content if you look harder for something to be grateful for in the here and now.

Is Dave Ramsey Wrong? Pay Off Your Mortgage as Quickly as You Can?

November 29, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Sure, personal finance guru Dave Ramsey’s advice has encouraged thousands of devoted followers to get out of debt and stop living paycheck to paycheck. Yet, depending on your circumstances, he may be dead wrong on paying off your mortgage early.

A generation ago, mortgage rates were 6–10%. With interest rates that high, paying off your mortgage was a no-brainer. Today, however, interest rates are 2.5–4%, making a different story. You could pay off your mortgage quicker if you’d like. But with the low-interest rates today, you may want to consider investing instead of paying off the low-interest debt. The average stock market return for buy-and-hold investors over the long term is about 7% annually, even after considering inflation.

In sum, Dave Ramsey’s advice just doesn’t make as much sense today with how low-interest rates are comparatively.

But some nuance is in order: Ramsey promotes financial stability. He accepts the risk of missed investment returns in exchange for the guarantee of reduced financial obligations. On balance, investing in the market while carrying a mortgage is tantamount to leveraging debt.

Idea for Impact: Ramsey measures opportunity cost as the difference between paying down your mortgage and the worst-case stock market investment scenario. So, unless you’re extraordinarily risk-averse and can’t take the risk in the market, you shouldn’t pay off your mortgage early. Invest in a low-cost index fund, and don’t let short-term movements sway your decisions.

Marie Kondo is No Cure for Our Wasteful and Over-consuming Culture

February 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I recently watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019,) the popular Netflix series featuring the Japanese decluttering evangelist. The show is based on her bestselling manual, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011.)

In each episode, Kondo cheerfully proclaims, “I love mess!” With certain calm, she calls on various families and goes about clearing their tat-filled homes and bringing order to their chaos. Her trademark sense of minimalistic bliss is informed by Japanese aesthetic and a Zen-sense of orderliness.

Apparently, Marie Kondo isn’t attuned with Christianity.

Interestingly, Kondo has clients kneel on the floor and “ask” their dwelling for “permission” and “cooperation” before they get started. “I’d love for you to picture your vision for your home,” she pleads. “Communicate that to your home.” She encourages saying “thank you” to their piles of clothes as they sort and fold them. She daintily treats inanimate objects as living things and speaks to them. She encourages her show’s audiences to do the same.

That’s Buddhism/Shinto in force. Some flavors of native Japanese spirituality focus on inanimate objects’ sacredness. Several of Kondo’s critics in America have insisted that her methods aren’t compatible with Christianity. Kondo’s rituals of treating objects as if they have feelings, these critics have declared, is to be discouraged because her ways invoke animism, the religious notion that objects possess some sort of spiritual essence.

“Kondo-ing” Has Become a Verb.

With a translator in tow, Marie Kondo never treats her patrons as victims, and that’s exceptionally impressive.

By eschewing a victim mentality, Kondo encourages and empowers people in a way that actually brings about lasting change. Audiences particularly love her advice on organizing wardrobes and storage spaces and routinizing tasks into maintainable systems.

Kondo emphasizes prioritizing joy. She doggedly insists upon keeping only those objects that “spark joy” (she uses the Japanese intransitive verb “tokimeku,” roughly, “to flicker.”) Her “if in doubt, throw it out” commandment has helped millions of people ward off hoarding tendencies.

Kondo has become a cultural sensation, appealing to all sorts of homes bursting with cheap consumer goods. The “Marie Kondo Effect” is directly responsible for increasing donations to thrift stores and charity shops worldwide.

Keep what sparks joy. Own less stuff. Pursue what’s meaningful.

If you’d like to downsize or declutter without letting go of things you love, take the KonMari method to heart. But don’t go too far. Be careful about shedding items to which you have a deep sentimental connection. Put it into operation earnestly to get rid of clutter. Find joy, significance, and sacrament in simple everyday objects and tasks. Simplifying your priorities and refocus on things that you tend to overlook in the busyness of life.

Only Consume What You Need. Supplement the Konmari method of paring down your belongings with the ongoing strategy for minimizing additional purchases. Buy only those things that will “spark joy” and continue to do so for many years. Never mind that the economy depends upon endless undifferentiated consumption.
Reduce, but Don’t Refresh. If you have a bunch of empty space, be selective in how you fill it up. Cutting down your possessions isn’t an invitation to revert to a situation where decluttering again becomes necessary after a while. Restrain that impulse to acquire the new and the shiny—that’s what overwhelmed Kondo’s clients in the first place.

The real magic of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is in shedding anxiety, living in the moment, and being your best self. Your happiest moments come when you’re lost to a conversation or an experience. You’ll avoid the helter-skelter of life has the power to deny and neglect what’s most important in your life.

Will the Marie Kondo Effect alleviate haywire consumerism?

The more profound significance of decluttering and minimalism is to help make better choices when making purchases in the future.

And beyond the individual convenience, it would be more productive to build up collective awareness and confront the modern consumption economy. It only presents overwhelming incentives to mass-produce and overconsume superficially appealing items.

Collectively, humanity needs to start questioning whether we should be pursuing growth at all. The economic system we have now can’t sustain forever. Our ecological systems can only sustain so much life. We’ve grown so much as a population, and we’ve started consuming so much that we’re straining the earth’s ability to support us. Hyperconsumerism needs to stop.

Idea for Impact: Negligent hyper-consumerism is shameful and embarrassing, even to this “card-carrying” capitalist.

Ironically, after making us get rid of everything, Marie Kondo has started peddling such things as therapeutic tuning fork and crystal ($75,) compost bin ($175,) and food storage container ($60) that are guaranteed to “spark joy.”

At any rate, I hope Marie Kondo and her ilk inspire a collective self-loathing at how much we consume. Utility should be the principal criterion for what we buy and keep.

I urge you to make strides towards more mindful consumption and consciously differentiate wants and needs.

Buy what you need. Buy the best quality stuff you can afford, and keep them for longer. Choose things that can be easily repaired—if possible, repurposed and recycled. Encourage businesses that peddle goods that are manufactured as responsibly and mindfully as possible.

Here’s the #1 Lesson from Secret Millionaires

January 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Ronald Read (1921–2014) of Brattleboro, Vermont, worked as a gas station assistant and a custodian at a J. C. Penney store. He was a thrifty man, and he even held his coat together using safety pins. Upon his death, he left $2 million to his stepchildren, caregivers, and friends, and another $6 million to the local library and a hospital. Read had built up a secret wealth by starting small, studying businesses that he understood, buying their stock, and holding them for the rest of his life.

Grace Groner (1909–2010) of Lake Forest, Illinois, lived a frugal life in a small one-bedroom cottage near Chicago. She got her clothes at hand-me-down sales, didn’t own a car, and worked most of her life as a clerk for Abbott Laboratories. Groner willed a $7 million scholarship endowment at Lake Forest College. The money came from three Abbott shares she had purchased in 1935 and let grow, reinvesting the dividends.

Agnes Plumb (1905–95) of Los Angeles left a $98 million estate to four hospitals. Plumb had amassed that fortune after liking cornflakes when they were first marketed and having her dad buy her Kellogg’s shares during the company’s early days. She allowed her investment to compound, and by the time she died, she had accumulated 1.3 million shares of the Kellogg Company. She was collecting some $437,000 just in dividends every three months.

Jack MacDonald (1915–2013) was a coupon-clipping, bargain-hunting Seattle lawyer. He even wore sweaters with holes in them, and people assumed that he was broke. When he died at age 98, he left a surprising fortune worth $187 million to various causes, including Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Kathleen and Robert Magowan (1925–2011, 1925–2010) of Simsbury, Connecticut, died within a year of each other. These twins lived as hermits throughout their lives and built up a fortune through wise stock market investments. They left $10 million worth to various civic institutions.

Curt Degerman (1948–2008) was a can-collecting street bum living in Skelleftea in northern Sweden. For three decades, “Burk-Curt” (‘Tin-Can Curt,’) as he was called, roamed the streets of his town in tattered clothes. In between collecting cans, Degerman spent much time in the town library studying business media and examining the stock market. He used his tin-can incomes to buy mutual funds and gold. When he died, he left more than $1.4 million to his cousin.

Time in the Market is a Great Compounder.

There’s one thing not apparent in these live-modestly-and-invest-prudently anecdotes. The fortunes of these seemingly ordinary, generous folks became so big due in no small part to their age.

With time, money has the chance for a heck of a lot of compounding. Money grows 10.83 times every 25 years if you consider a 10% historical mean return on equities. To take a prominent example, Warren Buffett, who’s now 90 years old, has made 99.7% of his fortune after 52.

Idea for Impact: Time in the stock market is infinitely more important than timing the market. Start investing early. Watch over your health. Live a long life. Grow your money. A long time horizon will enable your investments to grow through the “magic” of compounding.

The Extra Salary You Can Negotiate Ain’t Gonna Make You Happy

October 13, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

This well-cited study shows that people with high incomes aren’t actually that much happier than their less-earning brethren. This is something many people know empirically. Never mind that subjective happiness is a nebulous condition that’s not easy to measure.

The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory … People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities.

Of course, there’re situations wherein more money can make a real difference in your well-being: nirvana from living paycheck-to-paycheck, freedom from debt, and adequate savings for retirement. Yes, being poor makes people miserable.

But, beyond a reasonably upper-middle-class living (better health care, lavish-enough vacations and celebrations, affording one partner who could stay at home, the ability to buy conveniences, and so on,) additional income doesn’t create enough incremental happiness to justify all the compromises the extra income entails.

Even people who had big wins in the lottery winded up no happier than those who had bought lottery tickets but didn’t win. Sure, these people will be more content with their new toys for a short time, but that delight typically fades away quickly. After that, they’ll seek out yet another indulgence. Soon, that’ll wear off too, at which point they’re already on the hedonic treadmill.

Idea for Impact: Be mindful of what you’re trading away in the pursuit of a higher salary. Wealth and status are false gods.

Never Enough

February 10, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life (2008,) mutual fund pioneer John C. Bogle puts emphasis on the virtue of contentment:

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails …

We chase the false rabbits of success; we too often bow down at the altar of the transitory and finally meaningless and fail to cherish what is beyond calculation, indeed eternal. That message, I think, is what Joseph Heller captured in that powerful single word, enough.

American entrepreneur Seth Godin describes the never-ending ratchet of consumption:

It used to be that a well-tended lawn of 50 by 100 feet was wasteful indeed. Today, it’s in the by-laws of the local housing association. You could impress the neighbors with a new Cadillac, now you not only need a Tesla, but you need a new Tesla. And you could show off by flying first class, but then you needed to charter a plane, then charter a jet, then charter a bigger jet, then buy a fractional share, then own the whole thing, then get a bigger one and on and on.

Conspicuous consumption is not absolute, it’s relative.

It’s sort of a selfish potlatch, in which each person seeks to demonstrate status, at whatever the personal or societal cost, by out-consuming the others.

It’s a lousy game, because if you lose, you lose, and if you win, you also lose.

The only way to do well is to refuse to play.

In times of yore, the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger counseled about the excesses of desire in his Ad Lucilium epistulae morales (Moral Letters to Lucilius; tr. Richard M. Gummere; 1917):

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. What does it matter how much a man has laid up in his safe, or in his warehouse, how large are his flocks and how fat his dividends, if he covets his neighbour’s property, and reckons, not his past gains, but his hopes of gains to come? Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough.

Our consumerist society encourages us not to be grateful for what we have.

Consumerism encompasses dissatisfaction—if people are happy with what they’ve got, then they are less concerned about getting more.

Idea for Impact: Why is more and more always better if it can never be enough?

I’ll Be Happy When …

October 19, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It is fallacious to let life slip away in the pursuit of the illusion that, “When I achieve something, I will be free to live in happiness.”

If you pursue a job, a relationship, a house, a material possession, or the settlement of a debt, happiness will never come because there is always another “something” that will follow the present one. The circumstances that you thus wait for do provide a transitory elation, but, too soon, they withdraw into the dull and mundane, only to be replaced by the next fantasy of happiness.

The Art of Simple Existence is One of the Most Difficult to Master

According to Buddhism, the art of simple existence is one of the most difficult to master. If you aren’t living in peace and happiness at this moment, you’ll never be able to. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise, there is only the aspiration of peace “someday when I accomplish something.”

The experience of pleasure, freedom, and love are available now, whatever your circumstance. The American clinical psychologist John Welwood reminds us of this in Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path:

Our society would have us believe that inner satisfaction depends on outer success and achievement. Yet struggling to “get somewhere” keeps us perpetually busy, stressed out, and disconnected from that essential inner resource—our ability to be fully present—which could provide a real sense of joy and fulfillment. Our life is unsatisfactory only because we are not living it fully, but instead we are pursuing a happiness that is always somewhere else, other than where we are right now…

Cultivating the capacity to be fully present—awake, attentive, and responsive—in all the different circumstances of life is the essence of spiritual practice and realization. Those with the greatest spiritual realization are those who are “all here,” who relate to life with an expansive awareness that is not limited by any fixation on themselves or their own point of view. They don’t shrink from any aspect of themselves or life as a whole.

Idea for Impact: When One Lives, One Must Live Entirely

However difficult your circumstances, however uncertain the times, peace is not to be earmarked for a future time. The definitive source of happiness lies in the quality of your thoughts. Real sustainable peace springs from a healthy and nurturing relationship with yourself. Let nothing and nobody take that away from you. Don’t postpone being at peace.

Why I’m Frugal

October 1, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Frugality Over the Ages: Frugality as a Virtue

Frugality Over the Ages

From Socrates to Thoreau, from Franklin to Gandhi, philosophers, moralists, and spiritual leaders have identified frugality as a virtue and associated simple living with wisdom, integrity, and happiness. The Cynics were the first to reject wealth, power, sex, fame, and other desires in favor of a simple life free of all possessions. Diogenes the Cynic (portrayed in image) famously lived in a wine barrel and had no worldly goods.

For the Puritans, the love of material consumption was an evil; their spiritual doctrine stressed, in the words of the American historian Edmund Morgan,

A man was but the steward of the possessions he accumulated. If he indulged himself in luxurious living, he would have that much less with which to support church and society. If he needlessly consumed his substance, either from carelessness or from sensuality, he failed to honor the God who furnished him with it.

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, a doyen of the self-improvement movement, listed frugality as one of the 13 virtues he followed as a young man. Between 1732 and 1757, Franklin published such famous aphorisms in his Poor Richard’s Almanack as “be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich,” “beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,” and “he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.”

For the American philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, frugality or “transcendental simplicity” was a means to a higher end. In Man the Reformer (1841,) Emerson wrote, “Economy is a high, humane office, a sacrament, when its aim is grand; when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practiced for freedom, or love, or devotion.” For Thoreau, “high thinking was preferable to high living;” he wrote in Walden (1854,) “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor”.

Thoreau inspired the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. After suffering a mental breakdown in the late 1870s, Tolstoy, who was born into Russian nobility, rejected his family’s estate and serfdom. He renounced his decadent, racy lifestyle and engaged in a revolutionary brand of Christianity based on spiritual and material austerity.

Tolstoy’s philosophy showed the way for the creation of utopian communities of simple, self-sufficient living—the most famous example being the “Tolstoy Farm” ashram that Mahatma Gandhi established in South Africa. Gandhi was the quintessence of simplicity and sported austere homespun clothing. He famously said, “you may have occasion to possess or use material things, but the secret of life lies in never missing them,” and “our civilization, our culture, our [nation] depend not upon multiplying our wants—self-indulgence, but upon restricting our wants—self-denial.”

Frugality is a Moral Virtue

The distinguished career coach Marty Nemko once wrote, “I even take care to tear-off single sheets of toilet paper. Because I’m cheap? No. Because it’ll help the environment? No. I just think wasting is wrong.” That, in a nutshell, is why I’m frugal.

For me, frugality suggests an appropriate limit on individual and collective desires; it denies the materialistic expectations that the modern society imposes upon us.

Frugality is not some form of world-denying asceticism or austerity. It is a part of principled stewardship of not only the resources I’ve been blessed with but also of myself.

Frugality is about forgoing a subset of desires—as part of a quest for an abundant life. In other words, frugality restricts my indulgence of materialistic appetite, with the intention that I leave space for the cultivation of diverse forms of pleasure.

When I started to work while still in college, frugality was an element of my quest for financial independence. It became the lynchpin of a deliberate set of lifestyle choices and values. But my focus on achieving financial freedom never let me pining for the pleasures I might have had.

Six years ago, I gave up a corporate job and significant earnings in favor of a simpler life with plenty of discretionary time and money for world travel, leisure, learning, culture, and meaning.

Idea for Impact: Enjoying a rich life is more important than zealously stewarding one’s savings and investments.

Living frugally, with the particular intention of achieving financial freedom, requires a good measure of renunciation. This renunciation is easiest when one regards it not as deprivation, but as a deliberate choice in a trade-off for an enriched life.

Conspicuous Consumption and The Era of Excess // Book Summary of ‘Luxury Fever’

July 3, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Superrich Influence the Standards for Desirability in Consumer Goods: The Less Rich Emulate Them

The core argument of Cornell economist Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (1999) is that the extravagant consumption of the most affluent in our society has a ripple effect on everyone’s spending.

According to Frank, the desire for many to indulge in luxury “possessions” is motivated less by the gratification they may bring than by what others are buying or want to buy. We try to achieve happiness by improving our relative social status. For example, if your neighbor didn’t buy his new Mercedes Benz, you wouldn’t probably feel the need for the latest-and-greatest Jaguar, and you’d both work less, and spend more time with your loved ones and invest in meaningful experiences that bring you joy.

It is not just the rich who have gone on a spending spree. Middle- and lower-income earners have been spending more as well. The prime mover in this change may have been the increased spending of the superrich but their higher spending level has set a new standard for the near-rich to emulate, and so on down the income ladder. But although middle- and lower-income families are spending much more than in the recent past, the incomes of these families have not been growing.

While the rich have the money to indulge their whims, the rest of us tend to finance our wasteful spending through reduced personal savings or through increasing debt. To substantiate this trend, Frank describes burgeoning household debt and a remarkable increase in personal bankruptcies.

Luxury Fever summarizes persuasive biological and psychological evidence that suggests how human nature is such that we measure our success in relation to what others have. In other words, we tend to spend money on luxuries to appear to be more successful than others are. Frank concludes, “Evidence from the large scientific literature on the determinants of subjective well-being consistently suggests that we have strong concerns about relative position.”

Relative Consumption, Not Absolute Consumption, Affects Consumers’ Happiness

Much of the increased luxury spending is wasteful, given that consumers could get the same benefits by consuming non-luxuries with lower price tags. Research has proven that money doesn’t buy happiness,

Behavioral scientists find that once a threshold level of affluence is reached, the average level of human well-being in a country is almost completely independent of its stock of material consumption goods.

Frank’s thesis on runaway consumption and extravagant luxuries seems as valid now as it was in 1999, when his book was published at the height of the dot-com boom. The era of excess has now proliferated to India, China, Russia, and other developing countries that are facing not only widening economic inequalities between their rich and poor, but also mushrooming appetites for luxury goods among their affluent middle classes.

Can a Progressive Consumption Tax Challenge the “Luxury Arms Race”?

Based on the solid evidence he provides, Frank’s thesis on runaway consumption of extravagant luxuries and this era of excess is hard to dispute. Consumers have indeed been saving less, working longer hours, and spending more per capita on luxury goods. However, his claim that the spending patterns of the super wealthy has incited luxury fever among the non-wealthy lacks substantial evidence.

The Luxury Fever‘s solution to this problem is to come down hard on lavish consumption and to encourage more savings. To this end, Frank presents policy proposals that are reasonable in the abstract, but will face serious political and cultural hurdles. Frank promotes a tax exemption for savings and a steeply progressive consumption-based tax as a substitute for income and sales taxes. If Americans expend less on luxury goods, he argues, we’d collectively work less, and make more money available “to restore our long neglected public infrastructure and repair our tattered social safety net.” However, economists have argued that a progressive consumption tax would burden the non-wealthy more than the wealthy because the latter tend to save much larger percentages of their incomes.

The Good and Bad Sides of Consumerism: How to Clamp Down on Conspicuous Consumption and Encourage More Saving

Despite its flaws, Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever is a valuable read in behavioral psychology and behavioral economics. Luxury Fever offers an appealing compendium of interesting case studies, anecdotal evidence, and statistics on society’s current “wants-not-needs” and “more is better” materialistic way of life, and its harmful impact on our lives, relationships, and societies.

Complement with The Millionaire Next Door (1996, read my summary,) a bestselling exposition on the surprising secrets of America’s wealthy.

Money

A life of excessive consumerism is not the one to choose.

Discontentment is the motivation for our restless desire to spend.

Idea for Impact: Consume Less. Live More.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

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Apparently, Marie Kondo isn’t attuned with Christianity.

“Kondo-ing” Has Become a Verb.

Keep what sparks joy. Own less stuff. Pursue what’s meaningful.

Will the Marie Kondo Effect alleviate haywire consumerism?

Idea for Impact: Negligent hyper-consumerism is shameful and embarrassing, even to this “card-carrying” capitalist.

Wondering what to read next?

Time in the Market is a Great Compounder.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

The Art of Simple Existence is One of the Most Difficult to Master

Idea for Impact: When One Lives, One Must Live Entirely

Wondering what to read next?

Frugality Over the Ages

Frugality is a Moral Virtue

Idea for Impact: Enjoying a rich life is more important than zealously stewarding one’s savings and investments.

Wondering what to read next?

The Superrich Influence the Standards for Desirability in Consumer Goods: The Less Rich Emulate Them

Relative Consumption, Not Absolute Consumption, Affects Consumers’ Happiness

Can a Progressive Consumption Tax Challenge the “Luxury Arms Race”?

The Good and Bad Sides of Consumerism: How to Clamp Down on Conspicuous Consumption and Encourage More Saving

Wondering what to read next?