First things first, thanks very much to Chris Navarro for a recommendation for this. Chris is on our year long implant course and is a referring practitioner of the practice.
It’s a cracker this book (for the most part) and if you like the blog then you must read the book.
You’ll be able to guess the concept of this book from the title, it’s one that was lauded by Chris Evans both on his radio show and on the cover of the book and it has many great reviews and followers.
Before I start, it is another attempt to create a movement and I guess somebody who wants their idea to spread as widely as possible to make the biggest impact but there is nothing wrong with that.
James Wallman is a futurist, he analyses trends going forwards to advise companies and organisations what might happen and has applied everything to stuffocation. It probably comes from a highly personal experience and his Grandfather is mentioned several times in the book and is quite significant but the concept is quite simple:
We are over the top of the bell curve with stuff and the more stuff we’ve got, the more stressed we become. We will try for a while to accumulate more and more stuff thinking that it makes us more and more happy but we are only increasing unhappiness with more stuff. In essence the punch line is this: materialism is over and experientialism is here. Spend your money on experiences and not material objects; it’s better for everybody.
There are tests in the book to see whether you are already there or how far you are, it was quite bizarre when I did the test in the first twenty pages and got 20/20 which classified me as an experientialist but actually it shouldn’t be a surprise when you see me dressed like a tramp with a care with the door kicked in. That said, one of my legs is still way too stuck in the materialistic world but it’s a fascinating concept with some intriguing potential options to try out. I particularly like the idea of packing up your belongings into boxes and bags and placing them in one room, only removing what you need for a month and anything left in the boxes after a month you get rid of. I honestly think my life would be better if I did that but would probably struggle to convince my kids at least to follow that plan. We are so, so emotionally attached to pieces of plastic, metal and cloth.
The other one is to play the ‘Brewster’s Millions’ games. People of a certain age will remember the film but the book was actually from the 1930s. Really the concept is this: try to spend £100million in a month and have nothing to show for it at the end. If you can do this you win £2billion or so (that was the concept of the film) the idea though is to spend the money on things you experience and not things that you own in the material fashion. The book explains countless ways in which the experiential world is exploding, not least secret cinema. http://www.secretcinema.org Look at this, it looks fantastic. My wife is actually going with her friends to the Dirty Dancing one soon (although that would make my ears bleed). Another concept is the ability to hire a car for the weekend from a pool of cars, so not to own it overall but just hire it when you want it. That is a concept that I would buy in to and on that I would probably invest in.
I could write a lot more about this but I think perhaps I better get my life in order as far as stuffocation is concerned first before I go any further. Read the book though, it’s good.
Blog Post Number - 968
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