The Mindful Consumer | Paper

Mindfulness/flickr.com (CC BY 2.0)

Think-piece by Dr Alison Armstrong and Professor Tim Jackson—A contribution to Friends of the Earth’s ‘Big Ideas’ programme, which is examining potential high-leverage interventions towards justice and sustainability across a range of domains.

This paper forms part of the exploration of the topic of consumption and wellbeing, in which earlier consultation and deliberation identified a key question of how societies might reduce or replace the role of consumption and consumerism in supporting human identity. Here, Alison Armstrong and Tim Jackson bring their cutting-edge research and deep experience in sustainable consumption to bear on the topic. They suggest that mindfulness is a critical part of the answer: that by teaching mindfulness in schools, workplaces and other institutions we can weaken the social and psychological forces that encourage us (in modern Western societies at least) to find meaning, values and identity in consumerism.

The great value of this piece is not that it tries to replace one value system (consumerism) with another, but seeks to give people tools to recognise how such values systems gain sway, and to deliberately and deliberatively construct alternatives. Moreover it offers a change process which avoids paternalism and respects us as individuals, yet simultaneously challenges the negatives of individualism. In a complementary way to the ideas of empathy building advocated by Roman Krznaric, Armstrong and Jackson explain how mindfulness can enhance our individual identity and self-esteem in ways that help us recognise and value others, in and through full participation in society. In these ways mindfulness could also be expected not only to complement empathy education, but also to underpin the citizen participation called for by Eurig Scandrett in his Big Ideas essay on popular education in the city.

It appears that mindfulness can also have economic consequences, enabling the interpersonal connections that support the sharing economy advocated by Julian Agyeman and his colleagues in their Big Ideas paper on Sharing Cities, and enhancing people’s ability to cope with uncertainty – a key theme emerging in our work on responsible innovation. But Armstrong and Jackson caution wisely that we cannot expect miracles from mindfulness alone. To expect it to overturn the effects of unsustainable and exploitative economic systems would be like putting a ‘sticking plaster’ on a ‘gaping wound’. Interventions to transform marketing, as suggested by Victoria Hurth and her colleagues, making the case for a sustainable marketing paradigm would clearly help. Structural economic reforms will be needed too.

There is a further reason to see mindfulness as an invaluable tool in economic transformation, however. That is because it has ‘subversive potential’: the personal benefits of mindfulness mean it will be adopted by members of the powerful elites too, not just used to encourage employee compliance; and that prepares the ground well for a more constructive public debate over the nature and future of the economy.

Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth, September 2015