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The death-drive and never having enough

“Life is about the early detection of the reversal point beyond which belongings start owning you.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

First, don’t buy it because there are 100 points left on your Bonus-Link card and you just GOTTA have the free gift that comes when you hit that reward threshold. Imagine the card to be a syringe stuck inside your veins, periodically sucking the life out of you.

Some people, when they go to casinos and (perhaps out of boredom) look under the tables, claim to see shining chains around the legs of the gamblers. Such stories may be total horse dung but the metaphor works. I’m good with loyalty cards if we can’t help paying for something (e.g. fuel) but not when they ‘spur’ us to buy something we don’t need.

Secondly, don’t buy it because your friends have bought it and you can’t bear being the only one not having it. This way we reproduce the classic neurotic syndrome of consumer society: Buy trash we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress dudes we don’t like or to obtain a superficial high we’ll be dissatisfied the moment the cashier scans it through.

Third, don’t buy it simply because it’s the latest model or edition.

There are the fourth, fifth and millionth reasons, but you get the point.

A man is given two choices. The first choice is a life of contemplation and contentment with no yearning for material things. The second is the ‘fast life’ of corporate success, fame and fortune. What does he do? He chooses the second option but – crucially - does so as a way of RESISTING the act of choosing. He goes for life in the fast lane because he knows this choice will so inundate him with the razzle and dazzle of society that he can no longer reflect on an alternative way of life.
In other words, he chooses in order to not have to choose.

Isn’t this similar to how Malaysians spend their cash (or, increasingly, credit)? Consumer debt is about to burst but every weekend the malls are still packing it. Try getting a car park at 1-Utama around lunch time on Saturday – it’s easier to look for a missing Boeing in the ocean. Personal budgets are as brittle as Isma’s manners but launch a new tech-gadget and there’ll be queues like you’re giving out free gold. As a society, we are financially fragile but we still have the IKEA mindset: Buy expensive things we can barely carry home but pay anyway since they’re so colourful and we feel smart because we acted like Interior Deco experts in the process.

Mother Teresa gets excited when she sees yet another newborn orphan who needs love. She perks up when another diseased and incurably sick person reaches out for help at her Home for the Dying Destitute. Now just compare her “marginal propensity to love” with our consumer society’s “obsessive craving for the marginally extra”. That’s my pseudo-economist way of saying that the heart of authentic humanity is filled with love, but the void of liberal free-market subjects is filled with more and more of nothing.

For folks to chuck aside their iPhone 4 and spend money on an iPhone 5 for absolutely no reason other than the fact that 5 is one integer more than 4, is like having a perfectly good plate of fried rice in front of you yet refusing it and preferring that OTHER plate of rice because it’s got extra cool-looking cucumbers on it.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting yet another iPhone or yet another nice dress or yet another shoe or a fancier car. Or is there? What about the waste created by all these obsolete but still functioning products hanging around? What about the "carbon footprints" produced by both the old and newer models (although I won’t pretend I know anything about eco activism)? What about the demon-like sense of ingratitude and dissatisfaction fostered by the buy-more-buy-now mentality? And wouldn’t it be ironic if the folks who consume the most are also those who have spent hours in business classes learning about Cost-Benefit-Analysis and continue to talk about long-term ROIs’ in their offices?

Newsflash: There is no “benefit” or “return” for the planet when making and spending money is its own raison d'etre. In English, that means “no damn point asking why” (pardon my French). It’s not just the reason to exist, it’s the reason for reason itself. To ask why Malaysians love flocking to malls to buy stuff we don’t need is like asking why chess pieces move the way they do or why royalty is royalty. You’ll either get “What’s wrong with you?” stares or, uh, get arrested.

But two weeks ago I wrote about education and how we must educate our children to think about the story they’re in, to interrogate the coordinates of their lives. Naturally, as adults and economic subjects we too need to ask if the unquestionable are truly beyond question.

So why DO modern consumers often buy unnecessary and pricey stuff like there’s no tomorrow? Here’s a guess: It’s because we enjoy consuming the infinity of nothing-ness.

Products, even useless ones, are like words. Just like there is no final word at the ‘end’ of language, there can be no final product to end desire. In this light, Google’s boast that its modular phone could be the last we’ll need to buy, whilst elegant, is misleading: Since when has smartphone purchase been a matter of calculated ‘need’? Do people switch phones the way they switch batteries? A phone which takes the world beyond the category of ‘phone’ will generate a lot of Facebook photos but has no impact on consumer desire, which will only be aggravated and displaced. It’s like moving starving prisoners from the kopi-tiam to a 5-star buffet.

There is a lethal pull here, a poisonous desire, a force fatal precisely because it tastes so sweet i.e. a death-drive. Like alcoholics who are cursed with deriving enjoyment from enlarging the hole in their lives with more and more liquor, today’s shopper is whammied by the pleasurable sickness of never possessing enough. We crave more and ooh it feels so good because it soothes some deep wound inside, except we don’t realise the bliss and the chasm is ONE AND THE SAME THING. The pleasure derived from "finally" owning a Nike shoe is the same force which drives the dissatisfaction of no longer craving to wear the same pair of boots Ronaldo does the moment we’ve bought it.

Lest we get more funny Jibby jibes about cut-price kangkungs and chickens, it’s time Malaysia reverse the trend: Buy only if you really need to. Buy less. Buy once. Buy for others who need it more. Buy little. Buy none.

Kill the death drive before it gives us something we neither need nor want but can’t help paying for. – June 1, 2014.

*This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.