The Joy of Missing Out

The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess

Svend Brinkmann, Tam McTurk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509531592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

'Because you're worth it', proclaims the classic cosmetics ad. 'Just do it!' implores the global sports retailer. Everywhere we turn, we are constantly encouraged to experience as much as possible, for as long as possible, in as many ways as possible. FOMO – Fear of Missing Out – has become a central preoccupation in a world fixated on the never-ending pursuit of gratification and self-fulfilment.

But this pursuit can become a treadmill leading nowhere. How can we break out of it? In this refreshing book, bestselling Danish philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann reveals the many virtues of missing out on the constant choices and temptations that dominate our experience-obsessed consumer society. By cultivating self-restraint and celebrating moderation we can develop a more fulfilling way of living that enriches ourselves and our fellow humans and protects the planet we all share – in short, we can discover the joy of missing out.

1
The Sustainable Society

The first book I helped edit as a budding young researcher critiqued the demand for personal development and its tendency to spill over into more and more aspects of life. This has remained a leitmotif in much of my subsequent work: the fact that we live in a rampant development culture that knows no boundaries. It is a culture that manifests itself in the countless demands for flexibility, adaptability and willingness to change that we encounter at work and in our educational institutions.¹ A great deal more (critical) attention has been paid to this dimension in recent times, but the boundless aspect is also worth noting – the fact that it has become difficult ever to say that someone or something is good enough. We are all supposed to be engaged in lifelong learning processes, i.e. processes with no end. They never stop. Nobody can ever tell the boss at a performance review that they have reached the pinnacle of professional development. Political reforms never cease either, nor do they ever reach a final, finished form. In the 1990s, Philip Cerny introduced the concept of the competition state to describe the way that modern nations operate in a globalised market, and essentially think of themselves as businesses. In his book on the competitive state, Ove Kaj Pedersen talks of ‘never-ending reforms’, describing how the public sector has developed since the 1970s, with constant rounds of reorganisation of the state, its functions and its staffing needs.² Just think of the recent reforms of schools, universities, social security, etc., in many Western countries. The demands for skills enhancement and optimisation are constant and never-ending, which logically leads to a situation where nobody ever does anything well enough, because we all know that we will soon be instructed to do more and do it better. Everything is monitored, quantified and evaluated to facilitate ‘visible learning’ in education and at work. In our ‘learning organisations’, all progress has to be visible to inspire everybody to do ‘even better’.

On the one hand, it is a culture that knows no boundaries in the sense that its demands can never be met – the goalposts move every time you approach the penalty box. On the other hand, it also knows no boundaries in the sense that we are called upon to develop and optimise in absolutely every area of our lives. Workplaces demand not just professional but also personal development. Children are expected to perform well in the classroom, but also to be healthy, creative, musical and good at sports. This lack of boundaries is not only reflected in the purely temporal aspect of life (historians call this the diachronic dimension), but also transcends multiple areas of life at any given time (the synchronic dimension). We live in a rampant development culture with no brakes, nothing holding it back. Not only does this jeopardise our individual well-being (which was one of the themes of Stand Firm), but it is also unsustainable at an overarching level.

There is no doubt that humanity urgently needs to discuss sustainability and to make changes to many aspects of consumer society, but many people are already tired of the concept. I know the feeling. One day, I caught myself saying, ‘Isn’t sustainability just a buzzword that we tag onto everything without it really meaning anything?’ Sometimes. But in its simplest form, sustainability just means living in a way that does not squander and deplete natural resources. It means ensuring that the world we pass on to the next generation is in at least as good a condition as we found it. This is not some outlandish hippy ideal – it should be common sense. But are human beings actually capable of building a sustainable society? Is it already too late? Many scientists believe that we now live in a geological epoch called the Anthropocene (from the Greek antropos, meaning man), which refers to the fact that human impact on the planet is on a par with tectonic plate movements or volcanic eruptions. Humankind has become a force of nature – with global and devastating consequences.

A 2011 article that introduced the concept of the Anthropocene epoch to the Danish public explained that industrial society uses four or five times as much energy as previous agricultural communities, which in turn used three or four times as much energy as the previous hunter-gatherer cultures.³ The population of the world has risen from around 1 billion in 1800 to around 7.5 billion now. During the same period, energy consumption has risen forty-fold and production fifty-fold. The consequences are all too apparent, with greater CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere, higher temperatures and more extreme weather events. The number of people who have been displaced by climate change (climate refugees) is already twice as high as the number fleeing from war, even though wars are not exactly in short supply. Human activity is also having a detrimental effect on biodiversity, with almost two-thirds of animal species dying out in the last forty-five years or so.⁴ Sustainability may well have become a bit of a buzzword, but with good reason. There is no shortage of scientists pessimistically asserting that it is already too late, that the planet has passed its tipping point, that we cannot save it from climate change and we face the prospect of multiple horrific catastrophes in the not-too-distant future.⁵ Will that be the ultimate consequence of our rampant development culture?

It is probably too early to tell, but it certainly looks as if this alarmist, fear-inducing rhetoric has failed to persuade sufficient numbers of people to embrace sustainability. Concerned scientists are sometimes dismissed as attention-seeking doom merchants with a need for renewed funding for their research. Some reactions border on the apathetic – if it is too late, then we might as well enjoy life as much as possible for as long as possible. It is an attitude reminiscent of the Titanic – as the water flooded into the ship the orchestra played on, and people kept dancing and drinking until they drowned. However, my mission with this book is not to ratchet up the fear factor. I simply wish to present the concept of a modest, sustainable life within certain boundaries as an attractive alternative for individuals and society alike. As a way of life, it has a certain elementary dignity to it. As previously mentioned, it looks as if it will be imperative to break with the ‘more, more, more’ thinking that has held sway for centuries, but which critical voices have always challenged. Using ethical or psychological language, these voices have often claimed that failure to master the art of self-restraint is tantamount to inflicting self-harm. They have now been joined by other voices putting forward environmental and geopolitical arguments for a more sustainable society.

Climate change has not been the only cause of global crises in recent years. Many also believe that a runaway, unregulated form of capitalism has led to a problematic level of inequality and widespread fear, discontent and conflict around the globe. However, the good news is that the number of people living in absolute poverty has been falling steadily in recent decades. Many people are better off and better educated these days, and infant mortality has been reduced. Unfortunately, the other side of this coin is that the inequality gap has widened in many countries – it is now a well-known fact that the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population owns more than the rest of us put together, and that the eight richest individuals own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.⁶ It is not just between countries that the differences in economic prosperity have been exacerbated, but also within many of them. Social scientists of different political persuasions have discussed the consequences of this surge in inequality at great length, but the evidence suggests that greater inequality is statistically associated with more disease and crime and less social mobility and innovation – at least in the OECD countries studied by Wilkinson and Pickett for their controversial book The Spirit Level.⁷ One of the main points they make is that economic equality is good for everyone. When society is relatively equal, life improves for the most affluent too – they live longer, healthier lives, experience less stress, etc. A society that is sustainable, including in terms of economic equality, is a society in which all social groups feel they are doing well. Of course, this does not mean that it is desirable for everybody to own and consume exactly the same amounts. Only a totalitarian ideology would seek to impose a nightmarish scenario in which people lack the freedom to influence their own level of prosperity. But it does suggest that growing inequality needs to be taken seriously as a causal factor behind several societal problems. Analysts generally agree on this. For example, José Ángel Gurría, Secretary General of the OECD, recently warned that we have reached a ‘tipping point’ with regard to galloping inequality, and that the situation is analogous to climate change.⁸ Once both inequality and rising temperatures reach a certain point, it is difficult – if not impossible – to change course, because numerous self-perpetuating effects come into play. Even the OECD now accepts that greater equality would benefit everyone – including the richest.

What has caused the climate crisis and growing inequality? The answers lie in a combination of factors – it is not possible to identify a single engine of historical change that has triggered them. It is easy to point the finger at capitalism, but that is actually a rather general term that encompasses multiple social models. It would also be fair to say that attempts to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a different system have, in many cases, proven worse than the social disease they sought to cure (think of the Soviet Union, where revolution led to a totalitarian regime ruled by a narrow party elite). Capitalism has framed our way of thinking and acting for so long that it is hard to step out of the box and evaluate it objectively. Do we just have to live with it as it is? Possibly, but perhaps change has been afoot in recent years. According to Karl Marx, the development of technology played a major historical role in the development of society per se. The journalist Paul Mason, in his bestseller Postcapitalism,⁹ writes about how the capitalist system as we know it is being undermined by the very advances in technology that have driven the economy in the past. He argues that, in the first place, new (digital) technology reduces the demand for labour, as manifest in growing robotisation and automation, a process still in its infancy. Secondly, it leads to an abundance of non-material goods that make it difficult for the marke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction: Having It All
• 1 The Sustainable Society
• 2 Pursuing the Good
• 3 The Value of Moderation
• 4 Marshmallows and Treadmills
• 5 The Joy of Missing Out
• End User License Agreement