"Luxury carmaker Aston Martin's share price sank more than 20% after it said profits will be lower than expected this year," the BBC reported earlier this week. A serenade of tiny violins. What the world needs now is fewer cars, smaller cars, and cars that don't harm the planet so much. The use of a car to project one's status is increasingly being seen as a waste of one's wealth. Could Aston Martin's financial woes reflect society's rising wisdom? Over the past weeks, the YouTube algorithm has been suggesting to me videos about how to become rich by looking poor. Lots of YouTubers have reached the same conclusion as me – that pissing away money on a new car every few years to impress your neighbours is dumb-ass stupid.
But it's not just new cars. It's new clothes, new furniture, new tech, new any shit. I've got off the materialist treadmill (if indeed I was ever on it) years ago, realising that the consumer lifestyle hurts your wallet and hurts our planet. Result? I feel financially comfortable – not through busting a gut in the corporate rat-race, but by decades of not wasting money on fripperies and foibles.
Being comfortable is a noble aim; there's no virtue in suffering hunger, cold, ill-health or stress. Do I need luxury? No I do not. Do I need surfeit? I don't, and the planet simply could not cope with even two billion of us striving to live in surfeit or luxury.
But should we worry that if a billion of us suddenly saw the light and stopped spending mindlessly – wouldn't it hurt the economy? I wrote back in June about the effects of a generation holding back on consumption. What would happen if Aston Martin would go bust? Not a whole lot. Or all luxury-car makers? Ditto. Several thousand skilled workers would (briefly) be out of work. Engineering and craft vacancies are hard to fill these days.
If supply of new cars suddenly dried up worldwide, we'd all become like Cuba. Used cars would gain in value, folk would take care of them more, knowing they are irreplaceable. We could go on for decades. The US embargo of Cuba was imposed in February 1962 by JFK; the youngest American car in that creaking, repressive socialist paradise is over 62 years old. There are an estimated 60,000 of them still in daily use, with some dating back to the late 1930s. Dragging iron ore out of the earth, smelting it and stamping out car bodies out of the resulting steel when it's not necessary, only something driven by individual egos, is not right. [Though I would argue that it's not anybody's business to ban car-making – people just need to reach that conclusion one epiphany at a time.]
But buying unnecessary products creates jobs and generates taxes. Squaring the circle through a top-down policy of de-growth would be destructive – it would hit education, healthcare, infrastructure, security and defence. But I feel that we in the Western world are seeing a gentle form of de-growth; more and more people waking up to the need to spend less. Tough policy decisions are needed, in particular regarding immigration and accelerating green transformation.
Another birthday, another moment for reflection about the arc of my life. I'll keep on working into the foreseeable future (my father worked until three months' shy of his 70th birthday, giving up work to take up grandfathering duties). No great desire to travel, though Stella-Plage calls me back to revisit sometime.
Health and fitness report: better in every metric than the 66-year-old me – the result of stronger willpower rather than muscle power.
This time last year:
The Ego, the Soul and the Individual
This time two years:
In which I reach the Age of Maturity
This time three years ago:
Golden Autumn, Golden Years
Last embers of summer
It's that Day of the Year again!
Health at 60
In search of vectors for migrating consciousness
This time ten years ago:
Slipping from late summer to early autumn
This time 11 years ago:
Turning 56
This time 12 years ago:
Turning 55
This time 13 years ago:
Turning 54
This time 14 years ago:
Turning 53
This time 17 years ago:
Turning 50
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