Consumption As Narrative

How The Things We Buy Contribute To The Story Of Our Lives

One of the challenges of understanding consumer culture is that while we make purchases in metaphor, we forget that they resonate in reality.

We often buy things for the imagery they offer us in the moment, imagery that reflects our aspirations and perhaps flatters our self-image, but frequently the things we purchase shortchange us in getting what we really want, and perhaps even prevent us from understanding what it is that we truly need.

I was reminded of this by a comment I recently ran across in re-reading Todd May’s book, A Significant Life, in which May, a philosopher, notes “…a life of shopping, whatever its other merits, is not one of adventure.”

I find May’s book a simple and beautifully written discussion on the choices we face to live a meaningful life. He offers the caution that if we seek meaning in our lives, we cannot make choices based on the promise of happiness alone. It’s not that happiness is unimportant, but rather that it’s an inadequate substitute for creating meaning in our lives.

I keep returning to May’s observation on adventure because I suspect it has much to say about consumer culture and its role in our lives.

While shopping may support the illusion of adventure, and even echo some of its qualities such as a sense of discovery and excitement, it’s still no substitute for the experience of genuine adventure, which demands that we stretch ourselves to explore new endeavors with both the uncertainty and exhilaration that implies.

“It might feel adventurous to try on new clothes and to imagine different personas associated with different outfits. But that would be only the imagining of adventure, not an expression of the narrative value of adventure,” he says.

May advocates a narrative approach to living a meaningful life, especially when assessing its trajectory.

“Lives can be conceived as stories, with beginnings, middles, and ends. And like the stories, lives can be seen as having plots, themes, major and minor characters, and perhaps even leitmotifs.”

If our stories have themes of things never working out for us, he notes, we become people for whom things don't work out. So we need to create a new narrative, one that weaves our story together in a different way that supports us in becoming who we want to be.

What interested me is how this narrative includes the things we buy. These things, and the reasons why we purchase them, are a part of the story of our lives, and sometimes significantly so.

As we have seen, when we go shopping to experience the simulation of adventure we shortchange the value of real adventure in our lives.

When we believe curation, or organizing things into personally pleasing or meaningful patterns, is the limit of our creativity, we shortchange our understanding of what true creativity can be.

And when we conform to values-based performative purchases because we want to be seen as virtuous, we shortchange our understanding of genuine virtue.

In reducing meaning to its most transactional forms, we diminish its value in constructing an authentic personal narrative. Which is a way of saying, our choices have consequences, and not just through a series of isolated decisions, but cumulatively over the arc of our lives.

Ultimately, it calls for a more conscious approach to consumption, one that recognizes the deeper consequences of our choices and does not, as May points out, lead us into simply opting for happiness when we can choose meaning.