I’m not ashamed to admit that I get most of my article ideas from class readings. It’s not deliberate: Just when I start to feel as though I have a fair understanding of the world, a professor will expose me to another pioneer’s work. And that never fails to rock my boat.
I tend to find every new idea I’m exposed to mind blowing. Interestingly, I always have the feeling that these “discoveries” had already been brewing in my little grey cells. That’s to say, class readings put my thoughts — thoughts I barely knew I had — into words.
I ran across a blog recently that said that Thoreau valued his time more than money. According to Rosemary Washington, “his definition of wealth is how much free time is left after his basic needs have been met.” This was old news for me. I’d already written about time being our most valuable asset.
But something in Rosemary’s blog caught my eye. A quote from Thoreau’s “Walden,” which characterized a recent class reading — Sahlins’ chapter from “Stone Age Economics,” “The Original Affluent Society” — perfectly: “I make myself rich by making my wants few.”
That Tuesday, I repeated this line to myself over and over. “I make myself rich by making my wants few.” It’s nothing I hadn’t heard before. The Minimalist movement has been preaching this for the past seventy years.
In his novel, Sahlins argues that scarcity is a social construct. He holds that according to its definition, hunter-and-gatherer societies are more affluent than Western ones. They work only a few hours a day and have more than they need. To them, possessions are not a desire but a burden.
In contrast, we work more than we’d like to. We consume abundantly yet remain unsatisfied.
Imagine how liberating it would feel to walk into a close-to-empty home. The modern minimalism movement would agree: Even in our commodity-loving economy, there have been a few strong soldiers who resist the urge to overconsume. For a while, the trend of showing off one’s “underconsumption” even reached the younger corners of the internet.
But that wasn’t Sahlins’ point at all. To hunter-and-gatherer societies, owning fewer things is not a challenge but a privilege.
In a sense, it can be hard for us college students — especially us economics majors — to wrap our heads around this because we think of scarcity as it was sold to us in Econ 101. Unlimited wants - Limited resources = Scarcity.
It’s fair to acknowledge that there are only so many reservoirs, oil wells and plots of land on Earth. In that sense, our collective resources are copious but limited. But who ever decided that there are unlimited wants?
Certainly, left alone, humans don’t have “unlimited needs.” From nature’s perspective, that’d be unreasonable and unproductive. In fact, humans have very few needs — and they’re roughly the same for everybody: food, shelter, a feeling of security, and off we go.
If we take what we have and subtract what we can live off of, we’ll realize that we are privileged to live in absurd luxury. The scarcity mindset we adopt is wholly constructed. That’s good news: We should be able to (and want to) free ourselves from its shackles.
In a strange way, our wants are often a miscalculated way of fulfilling our needs. Think of the BMW sitting in your neighbor’s driveway or that Stanley Cup you might have asked for Christmas last year. Lots of what we consume isn’t meant to fulfill a functional need but instead serves to help us build status and “fit in.”
But there are other ways of doing the same that don’t require us to consume excessively.
Some have known this for years. In her blog "Our Beautiful Adventure," Rachael claims that by living somewhere that takes her breath away, spending as much time as possible in nature and slowing down, she truly lives in abundance.
We too can change our mindset and convince ourselves that we’re actually exceedingly rich.
Growing up in a commodity economy, we start seeing prices as indications of what something is worth. But there’s a catch. The price might indicate how much the market values that good — but that doesn’t necessarily reflect how much we value it ourselves. Seeing everything as a commodity with a price tag attached to it makes us undervalue free things and overvalue expensive things.
We actually have a very poor idea of how much things are “really” worth. For instance, a night on K-Ville in the snow might make us appreciate our modest dorm rooms more.
Furthermore, growing up in a competitive economy makes us believe that as long as someone out there has more money, wealth, status than us, what we have is scarce. But again, scarcity only compares what you have with what you need. It has nothing to do with the wealth of those around us.
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And lastly, growing up in a material world has convinced us that consuming more is always better. We should maximize our consumption subject to our budget constraint. Yet if consuming more goods doesn’t make us happier, it only makes us poorer.
We should know by now that the best things in life can’t be bought. And we should know by now that spending more doesn’t fulfill us. Yet thousands of packages flood student mailboxes and Amazon lockers daily. We just can’t get enough.
And yet we have so much. Our lives here at Duke are so rich: friends to hang out with, events to attend, projects to tackle, material to learn and memories to make. It’s enough to fill a lifetime.
While we’re still young and living “experimentally,” we should at least try stepping into the shoes of a nomad — to feel burdened by our material possessions. We should try to realize that this nagging feeling of scarcity has nothing to do with the stuff we own and everything to do with the relationships we build and maintain.
Anna Garziera is a Trinity sophomore. Her pieces typically run on alternate Sundays.