Accused again recently of embracing what my accuser called Post-capitalism.
Having a reputation for someone who wants the end to hyper-consumerism and the form of capitalism that we find ourselves in at the moment, I had to smile.
When I was 23 years old I travelled to Nottingham with my wife in my car and pitched up at the Doctors residence at Queens Medical Centre to start work.
Two years later I started vocational training in Dentistry and took a 25% wage cut and vividly remember a conversation with my boss about how much money I wanted to earn as a Dentist.
I set my ceiling (aspirationally) at £60,000 a year and told him that if I could ever earn that much in Dentistry that I would reduce my working days and maintain my income at that level.
Somewhere along the line I lost my way and was swept up on a 20-year tide of ratcheting hyper-consumerism and satisfaction gained from buying stuff.
I always felt I had an insight into this and was maybe better at it than other people but I’m not sure that was the case and it perhaps took the past four weeks to reintroduce me to the concepts and the ideals that I had when I was 23.
And so I started to reuse tea bags recently (having not drank tea at all and done as many Nespresso capsules a day as I could possibly manage – sometimes 9).
Nine Nespresso capsules is about £3.60 a day, that’s about £100 a month which is about £1,200 a year spent on coffee that you don’t actually want to drink.
The way I drink tea I can get four cups out of a Yorkshire tea bag! I know the tea snobs out there will scream out loud but it is ridiculous what we waste because if you multiply that outside of my tea bag you start to get a sense of why we went wrong.
There is no happiness in excess, there is only the wanting of more excess.
That is absolutely fine is you’ve set your life up in that way and you’re able to convince yourself that you’re satisfied, but when you take the time to look back at it I suspect you will not be.
The things that gave you joy during the lockdown and in the continued lockdown very rarely have anything to do with buying other stuff.
This is not about Post-capitalism, it’s about returning to what capitalism was supposed to be when Adam Smith defined it in ‘The wealth of Nations’.
Capitalism was brutalising and bastardised by people in the 1970’s and pushed into something called hyper-consumerism where growth and globalisation were the main features regardless of the effects to anyone else.
It is possible to do things in a different way, it is possible to have different businesses to the ones we had before, it is possible.
My suspicion is that after this is over (whatever that means) very few people will think about changing the way they live and altering the habits that they had before, but some will, and I will look for them.
Blog Post Number - 2341