Getting deeper into notions of family, travel and leisure

Thankfully, in the past few years we, as a society, have begun to question the materialist life story with increasing vigor and insight. Material assessing and criticizing the neo-liberal perception of social organization, and the stuff accumulation approach to living well have grown in quantity and quality. We’ve got American Beauty, Affluenza, Ted talks on work/life balance, superficial housewives with hysterical pregnancies in Glee, and Isabelle Allende’s ‘The Infinite Plan’ amongst other notable works unpacking the consumerist mode of being.

However, like much of the work done against capitalism, most of these pieces do not really offer any worthy alternative. Clive Hamilton and Nigel marsh, in very different ways, suggest downshifting – i.e. trading income for quality time – and we are often asked, what is more important, money and stuff or family, travel, sex, leisure? Obviously the answer most of us are going to give is the latter things. This is all good and well, but I am concerned that we are not actually taking the time to unpack what those things are. What does ‘family’ actually mean? What does good sex entail? How can I travel profitably? If I downshift in order to have more free time, how can I spend that time meaningfully? I imagine that in many cases, spare time would simply be spent drinking, which isn’t much of an improvement on working.

Obviously leisure is difficult to do unhappily. You rarely come across someone who returns from a holiday and says that it was shit and they wish they’d just stayed in the office instead. At the same time though, many people could travel better, especially people trying to get out of the materialist lifestyle. Take for example, people who go to Indonesia and stay entirely in Bali and mostly in their 5-star hotel, or who go on shopping holidays to Dubai or the Gold Coast. The same can be said of sex – it is hard to do badly, but it can take quite a lot of training and education to do really well. Family is a little more complicated. While many children are thrilled when there father leaves work early for the first time in months to spend an afternoon with them, I wouldn’t be surprised if these same fathers would be intolerable in regular doses. Nonetheless, even family time is unlikely to be unpleasant.

What I would like to see though, is more effort made to tease apart these general notions and get at the really good stuff inside them. Perhaps I have jumped the gun on this. We of course need to first convince people that the rat race is stupid, but it will be difficult to do so if our alternative is not attractive, and it won’t be if we aren’t able to paint a rich picture. Slogans like “the problem with the rat race is that if you win, you’re still a rat” are effective and hilarious, but they don’t bring us any closer to a deep understanding of what the good life is. We can’t get too bogged down in what the good life isn’t. More importantly, like in many things, we need to do some hard yard. At the moment, we are offering as simplistic an alternative to materialism as it itself is. We are suggesting that people replace “if you make shitloads of money, you will be able to get great stuff, and you will be happy” with “if you don’t get carried away with making money, you will have time for priceless things”. My impression is that if we are able to better nuance our conception of what makes these things priceless and how to gain access to their full value, our position will become much stronger and more attractive, to everyone’s benefit.