I’ve found it. The perfect expression of modern consumerism, and perhaps of modern life itself. It is rewarding yet empty; meaningless yet philosophically fascinating. It is the purchase of a new smartphone.
God, I love a new phone. A shiny new luxury, a new toy, perfectly packaged. Onyx screen, gleaming metal. Owning this, you feel, you are one step closer to actually being Steve Jobs, or perhaps living in a penthouse in Dubai. It slips smoothly from the box. You set it up so as to best replicate the experience of your last one. Whereupon, effectively, it disappears.
What have you got out of this? Why did you bother? Perhaps phones don’t do it for you. Consider, instead, shoes, bags, watches, whatever. Once in a while, sure, you might experience the lasting pleasure of ownership. Usually, though? Much as you may deny it, even to yourself, you don’t really want to own these things. You want to get them; to experience that flashing orgasmic hit of moving between not having and having. But why? Fundamentally, what’s in it for any of us?
Philosophers aren’t very comfortable with this question. Those rare philosophers who try — those in the tradition of Adam Smith, say — tend to make an argument on societal grounds: that your acquisitive-ness represents a broader social good, leading to technological advancement and economic prosperity. Very obviously, though, you don’t buy an iPhone thinking “this makes me happy because it will help Apple’s profits and make a marginal difference to offering continued employment to downtrodden workers in Xinjiang”. So really, they’re answering a different question altogether.
Most philosophers, though, approach these questions from the other end. As in, they wish to tell you that even if this process does make you happy, it shouldn’t. Probably it was Plato who got the ball rolling here in his Phaedrus, dividing the soul into three parts, roughly corresponding to reason, emotion and desire. We can quibble whether the last two are really that different. Either way, Plato argues strongly that the best life is one in which reason rules over both. As in, sure, it’s natural to want a phone you don’t need, but Plato is pretty damn sure you shouldn’t give in. Not, of course, that Plato even had a phone. Although if he had one, I’m sensing a Nokia.
Two thousand years later, not much had changed. For Karl Marx and later Antonio Gramsci, people wanting stuff they didn’t need was likewise a problem. Both, in different ways, dealt with this through the notion of “false consciousness”: the idea that we are somehow duped into acting against our best interests.
Marx considered this a sort of bondage, likening the budding revolutionary held in thrall to capitalism to Prometheus, the Titan who was chained to a rock for eternity by Zeus as punishment for trying to give mankind the gift of fire. Every day, an eagle would come along and eat his liver. Honestly, it sounds pretty grim. Does Marx have a point? Sure. Although if I was going to be chained to a rock for eternity, even without the vulture thing, then I’d definitely want a phone.
This, for me, is the problem with Plato too. In the Republic he posits two kinds of city. One is the “healthy city” where people are ruled by logic and live simply and well. The other is the “luxurious city” where people are vain and hedonistic and let their appetites run wild. The first is long-lasting, solid, noble, true. The second, mad and doomed. This is a brilliant metaphor, utterly undermined for me by a nagging absolute certainty about which one I would rather visit for a long weekend.
I prefer Spinoza’s theory of desire. This is a bit headscratchy, but ultimately boils down to us wanting new things as a way to remind ourselves that we exist. Inherently futile or not, in other words, a purchase is an act of agency. True, Spinoza also wished we could live in a world in which better acts of agency were available to us. It fell to Nietzsche, who was frankly more realistic about such things, to acknowledge with a shrug that we simply don’t. “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired,” he wrote, “that we love.”
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This may be a hopelessly self-serving thing to write in a luxury magazine, but I’ve always been something of a Nietzschean in this regard. Plus, Plato may be simply wrong. Even in his healthy city, after all, you’re going to have more fun going for a smug run if you’ve swapped your Socratic sandals for a pair of top-end running shoes, and your crown of thorns for some Bluetooth headphones.
Sure, money is finite and the planet is dying, so it makes perfect sense to fight these urges when we can. In the end, though, we are not always sensible beasts. We are my dog, who delights in a new soft toy, even if all he is ever going to do with it is rip the stuffing out, like he did with the old one. We are like crows, captivated by shiny new things, even when they’re not that different from the shiny old ones. Anyway, my old phone had a crack in it. So there.