SLOWING DOWN THECONSUMER TREADMILL

BY RICK HELLER

SLOWING DOWN THE CONSUMERTREADMILL

IF SOLVING the climate change problem were as simpleas handing out light bulbs, we'd be all set. This April, threedozen humanists paired up like Mormon missionaries

and rang doorbells in Gambridge, Massachusetts—but not tospread a message of faith. Instead, they gave away free energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs to residents who sur-rendered their old-fashioned incandescent bulbs in exchange.Goming at the conclusion of the American Humanist Associ-ation's 2011 conference, this community service project col-lected a couple hundred energy-hogging bulbs for reuse inchildren's crafts projects.

Technological improvements such as better light bulbs arepart of the solution to the climate problem. But events like the2010 BP oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico and the disaster atJapan's Fukushima nuclear complex make it hard to place allone's faith in large-scale engineering projects. Furthermore,Boston Gollege economist Juliet Schor warns that the growthin consumption has been outpacing efliciency improvements."We get more efficient, but that makes people want to buy moreenergy, because it's effectively cheaper," she told me. "So youhave to control the demand."

But people typically don't want less; they want more. Thatmay be why some even deny the reality of climate change.What if we could offer the prospect oí more satisfaction, but ina different form that was less damaging to the planet? Peoplecould have more of what they really want—to feel good—whilepurchasing fewer things that depend on atmosphere-pollutingindustries. The poet Allen Ginsberg had this in mind, in a letterto the Wall Street Journal that commented on American acquis-itiveness, when he observed, "You own twice as much rug ifyou're twice as aware of the rug."

Gonsider this paradox. Although the real, inflation-adjustedincome of Americans doubled between 1960 and 1990, the pro-portion of Americans describing themselves as "very happy"remained at about one-third throughout that period. Yet main-stream economists aligned with both the Republican and Demo-cratic parties continue to assume that economic growth, even ona personal level, is the foundation of wellbeing. In the last thirtyyears Americans have even been increasing their work hours inorder to buy more goods, but as a group we feel no better off. Theirony might merely be amusing if manufacturing were pollution-free. Instead, this futile effort is heating up the world.

Psychologists call the phenomenon of chasing after rewardsthat don't provide lasting satisfaction the "hedonic treadmill."A classic example emerged in research showing that peoplewho won big lottery prizes gained an initial bump up in theirhappiness, but a year later were no happier than before. Whydoesn't more wealth bring more happiness? University of Gal-ifornia psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky writes in her 2007book. The How of Happiness, that among people who live inaflluent societies, happiness is due less to life events than togenes and habitual ways of looking at the world.

The compulsion to acquire possessions has often beencompared to an addiction. Just as addicts need more andmore of their drug to get the same level of pleasure, Amer-icans buy more and more stuff to maintain the same levelof satisfaction. This is more than a clever metaphor. Addic-tions are deformations of a brain system that governs rewardsand habits by releasing substances such as dopamine and theinternal opioids that are responsible for cravings and "highs."

Mindfulness generates noveltyto excite the dopamine neuronsnot by covering a lot of ground

fast, but by delving deeperinto familiar turf.

The reward system responds most keenly to novelty.When rewards become predictable, the habits system takesover to guide our actions. Just as factory workers doing rou-tine tasks can be replaced by machines, the brain turns overpredictable rewards to an "automatic pilot." So, for instance,if you were to move from a cramped apartment to a lovelyand spacious home, at first you would likely take pleasure inthe size of the rooms, the beautiful floors, and the extra pri-vacy. Over time, however, you'd become habituated to yourliving quarters. You would pay less attention to the things thatattracted you to it in the first place and take less pleasure inthem. That's when you think about taking out a home equityloan, redoing the kitchen, and buying a new rug.

Given the pervasive advertising culture that urges us tokeep on spending, is there any hope for getting us off thistreadmill of desire? Psychologists offer a few suggestions tohelp us reduce cravings and to simply want what we have.Lyubomirsky recommends the practice of gratitude. Wethink of the great things we already have and, instead of tak-ing them for granted, we express our thankfulness for them.This practice can be dicey for humanists, however. Unlike thetheist who thanks a Greator, it may be unclear to whom thehumanist should offer thanks.

A better approach may be to acknowledge the riches wealready have without necessarily expressing thanks for them.That is the approach we're taking at the Humanist Gontem-plative Group at the Harvard Humanist Ghaplaincy. Thegroup was inspired by a similar group founded by D.T. Strain,former president of the Humanists of Houston, and has beenmeeting regularly in Gambridge since 2009.

At the recent 70th annual American Humanist Associa-

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tion conference, I participated in a panel on secular medita-tion with Strain and Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar, whoseresearch has demonstrated that mindfulness practice leads toincreases in gray matter density in the brain. At that panel, Iannounced the Humanist Contemplative Group's new initiativecalled, "Seeing the Roses." This is a project to teach the practiceof mindfulness to counter the consumer treadmill. Sessionsconvey scientific information about mindfulness—defined asnonjudgmental attention to the present moment—and provideinstruction on how to achieve this state of mind. For those out-side the Boston area, short videos have been placed online atSeeingtheroses.org and YouTube in an attempt to convey thesame experience.

The idea of the Seeing the Roses project is to promote the atti-tude expressed by the familiar phrase, "stop and smell the roses,"but on a more continual basis and by engaging all the senses—especially sight. It involves slowing down, paying more attention,and taking more pleasure out of the ordinary world around us.

The economist Juliet Schor, in her 2010 book. Plenitude,advocates a path to sustainability in which people work shorterhours, so they earn less and spend less, but have more free timeto enjoy life. With less money, they'll have to spend their lei-sure time in a less resource-intensive and more leisurely way."In general, doing things faster tends to use more resources,"Schor said. "To truly get to sustainability, we're going to have toslow down." Schor spoke of a conversation she'd had with thelate Donella Meadows, lead author of the landmark 1972 book.The Limits to Growth, in which Meadows shared her sentimentwhen she noted that "the speed of human activity has gottenout of sync with the speed of ecosystems."

The only problem with this vision is that going fast is excit-ing and slowing down is boring—unless you're mindful aboutit. Mindfulness generates novelty to excite the dopamine neu-rons not by covering a lot of ground fast, but by delving deeperinto familiar turf. Unless we can learn to be mindful, we'll be atthe mercy of advertisers who crank up the consumer treadmillto run faster and faster.

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Mindfulness is a practice with roots in Buddhism but alsoin the Western psychological tradition going back at least toWilliam James. It is the cultivation of attention. When youpay close attention, you override the habit system's automaticpilot. Take a look around you. How many things do you seethat would have amazed King Louis XIV of France? You arerich already.

Mindfulness is often associated with meditation, becausemeditation quiets the inner dialogue that takes one out of thepresent moment into ruminations about the past or anxiet-ies about the future. When people emerge from formal sittingmeditation, they often report an inner stillness and a height-ened awareness to external sights and sounds. One's sense of

"Tefilah" (inward looking meditation), www.carolbuchman.net

distaste or aversion to the present moment drops away. Yoga,too, teaches mindfulness through the practice of attentiontoward one's posture and movements.

But one can be mindful without meditating. Consider thewords of pioneering ecologist Rachel Carson in her book. TheSense of Wonder ("published posthumously in 1965J:

Exploring nature with your child is largely a matter ofbecoming receptive to what lies all around you. It islearning again to use your eyes, ears, nostrils, and fin-ger tips, opening up the disused channels of sensoryimpression. For most of us, knowledge of our worldcomes largely through sight, yet we look about withsuch unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One wayto open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself,"What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew Iwould never see it again?"

This exquisite way of sensing the world is what mindfulnessis about, and what we need to cultivate in young people to keepthem off the consumer treadmill.

Ellen Langer is a Harvard psychologist with an office in theschool's psychology building, which happens to be named Wil-liam James Hall. Langer's first academic paper on mindfulness,published in 1978, approached it from the Western academictradition. Langer said that most people don't know the rightway to pay attention—they confuse it with staring.

At a talk at MIT's Media Lab, she asked those of us presentto hold out a finger and pay attention to it. "Is this boring orwhat?" Langer quipped. "Now mindfully attend to your finger.

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and that means notice different things about it," she instructed."You should feel the difference. Attending mindfully is easy."

If mindfulness produces a sense of freshness and novelty,why is it so hard to pay attention? Langer says she's asked stu-dents and teachers what it means to pay attention. "They all say,hold the image still as if you're looking through a camera.' It'sthe wrong instruction," she adds gruffiy.

Staring leads to boredom. Paying mindful attention meanslooking at the same old thing in new ways—examining over-looked details or glancing at it from a different angle. "Mind-fulness is energy begetting, not consuming," says Langer. "It'sthe way you are when you're at leisure, when you're traveling."

It is also the artist's way of seeing. In her 1979 book. Draw-ing on the Right Side of the Brain, art teacher Betty Edwardsprovides an exercise in which students are asked to copy anupside-down portrait of the composer Igor Stravinsky. It'seasier to make accurate copies from upside-down originalsbecause when viewing an image upside-down, we observe thelines and shadows as they actually are. When viewed from afamiliar vantage point, in contrast, our habitual expectation ofwhat something should look like influences how we portray it.We might, for instance, draw a swimming pool as a rectangle,failing to notice that its far end appears narrower to the eye dueto perspective.

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A theory is emerging of how mindfulness gets done in thebrain, down to the microcircuit level. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegellays it out in his 2007 book The Mindful Brain. Siegel's ideasrely on the work of cognitive scientists like Stephen Grossbergof Boston University, whose model drills down to the way indi-vidual neurons in the cerebral cortex are organized into hori-zontal layers stacked in columns. Briefly summarized, our per-ceptions are the outcome of a battle between lower layers thatpush up what our senses take in and higher layers that pushdown signals that modulate them. "The top-down signals arebasically learned expectations," Crossberg told me.

Expectations are a stabilizer. Without them, we'd feel dis-combobulated all the time as we try to make sense of the kalei-doscope of sights and sounds assaulting our senses. Accord-ing to Grossberg, expectations shape and modify perception.We see what we are in the habit of seeing, unless the mismatchbetween our expectations and reality is very significant.

The level of mismatch we tolerate is controlled by the neu-rochemical acetylcholine. As we pay attention with greater vig-ilance, we notice more mismatches between expectations andreality. Mismatches mean we're experiencing something novel.Because our habit system's automatic pilot can't handle theunexpected, mismatches get kicked up to consciousness. Asthey're novel and unexpected, these mismatches likely get thedopamine neurons in the reward system going. Life becomesmore vivid and engaging.

This model is in line with the work of University of Michi-gan psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who have stud-ied the restorative effects of being in nature. They theorizethat because of its inherent variety and novelty, nature grabsour attention and promotes the bottom-up flow of sensations.This is what Rachel Carson was referring to when she wrote of"opening up the disused channels of sensory impression."

Siegel, who is co-director of the Mindful Awareness ResearchCenter at UCLA, has connected these ideas about bottom-upand top-down flows to mindfulness. When I interviewed him, Iasked how people variously perceive a rose. "Depending on therelative dominance of each flow," he responded, "you can lit-erally not bother to even experience an awareness of the scentand just think 'Rose. Who cares? I'm late for work,' or you canmindfully let the top-down not imprison you and spend evenjust five seconds with as pure a connection with the scent andsights of the rose or the thing that's in front of you as possible."

Siegel even thinks that mindfulness can be an antidote toconsumerism: "It's going to take a huge paradigm shift, andmaybe mindfulness is the key, to let people lower their mate-rialistic treadmill tendencies, to awaken their minds to simplepleasures and meaningful connections in life and then to refo-cus their energies in ways that are truly meaningful—helpingother people, building communities, finding a way to preservethe environment."

Once you learn it, mindfulness can be fun, even enthralling.It can restore a sense of freshness to the things you have, so thatyou feel fewer cravings to replace them with brand new models.But is there really evidence that it results in less consumption?

Kirk Warren Brown is a psychologist at Virginia Common-wealth University in Richmond, Virginia, who studies mind-fulness. He is the co-creator of the Mindful Attention Aware-ness Scale, which measures how predisposed a person is to bemindful. One's score is based on answers to a series of ques-tions such as, "I find myself listening to someone with one ear,doing something else at the same time." Brown and his col-leagues have found mindfulness to be more prevalent amongpeople who adopt a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, choos-ing not to maximize earnings but to focus instead on simplepleasures. Brown found these simplifiers to be just as happy astheir more materialistic peers, matched by age and zip code.More recently. Brown studied whether a four-week mindful-ness training program lessened financial desire—the wish to"keep up with the Joneses." He found that to the extent partici-pants learned to be more mindful, they were happier and feltless financial desire. The results seem promising. Some peoplecan shift onto a path of mindfulness, simplicity, and reducedmaterialism that actually increases their happiness.

Brown defines mindfulness more broadly than simpleawareness of one's immediate environment. "Someone can bevery mindful of their thinking," Brown told me. "It's like thereis this observer who is watching the show as well as part of theaction." Being mindful of your purchasing habits, for instance.

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34 THE HUMANIST I July • August 2011

SLOWING DOWN THE CONSUMERTREADMILL

is a crucial step in making them more ecologically sustain-able. But first, one must enjoy simplicity, because withoutthat, one won't embrace it voluntarily.

Juliet Schor advocates a more leisurely consumer societythan the one we have now, but not an impoverished society.Nor does Schor advocate anti-growth legislation that wouldmire the economy in recession. In fact, she says her programis one of cultural change that could be led by young peo-ple insisting on the freedom to limit the length of their ownworkday and to consume responsibly. American consumertrends, she observes, are models emulated throughout theglobe. "In south India, where my husband is from," she said,"the middle classes there are mad for organic vegetables."

I firmly believe that mindfulness can play an essen-tial supporting role in a move toward a slower paced andmore sustainable society. The question is, can we get peopleto adopt it? Some, like Rachel Carson, have a natural afiin-ity toward a contemplative outlook. But others may have adifferent disposition, and gadgets like the iPhone and Xboxmay well be training young people to have shorter attentionspans.

Still, all it takes to get a taste of mindfulness is twentyminutes of meditation—best done initially with others whocan provide training and tips. That's quicker than some sit-coms, and a lot quicker than trying to understand the sciencebehind climate change. Scientific research on mindfulness isjust getting rolling, so further research may uncover easierways of attaining a mindful state—just the thing for peoplewho can't sit still for twenty minutes.

Perhaps we can think of technological change morebroadly—not just more efficient wind farms but also cogni-tive methods that help us achieve happiness while relying onfewer material resources. Humanistic values that put com-passion and empathy ahead of acquisition may be critical inavoiding the worst scenarios of climate change, but they willonly prevail if we can apply insights gained from scientificresearch to endow them with greater appeal than the ephem-eral pleasures of the marketplace. ¡ïi

Rick Heller is the editor of the online magazine, the NewHumanism, a publication of the Humanist Chaplaincy atHarvard University. He is also a facilitator of the HumanistContemplative Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hiswriting has appeared in Free Inquiry, UUWorld, Buddhadharma,and Fantasy & Science Fiction magazines, and in the BostonGlobe and Lowell Sun. He holds degrees from Boston University,Harvard, and MIT

www.americanhumanist.org