For my 15th birthday, I received a bicycle - a Raleigh Sportsman 10. I remember the price - £33. This was 1972, so according to the Bank of England's Inflation Calculator, the value of that money today would be £364.63. An entry-level road bike retailing today in the UK for between £350-£370 is vastly superior to my old Raleigh, with its gas-pipe mild-steel tubing and crappy gears that would quickly go out of alignment, throwing the chain into the spokes. It was so carelessly prepared that riding it home from the shop, the brakes wore a groove into the amber sidewalls of the rear tyre. It was replaced in 1986 by a vastly better bike - a Saracen Kili Flyer, 531 alloy frame, Suntour groupset, Brooks saddle.
Once upon a time, things were more expensive and of poorer quality than what we have now. Globalisation (ie getting poor people from poor countries to make things for poor people in rich countries) and technology (computer-aided design and manufacturing) have made bicycles and pretty much everything else cheaper, better, lighter and more durable.
Result? We are awash with stuff. We want want want, our wants driven by manipulative advertising that hooks onto our whims and desires. Learning to say 'no' to the blandishments of consumerism isn't easy, but not saying 'no' leads to debt and a lifestyle predicated by paying off loans.
Stuffocation affects us all; even with my highly ascetic lifestyle, the disposal of stuff is still an issue for me. In away, technology has streamlined our stock of possessions. Here is a list of things I no longer need because they are in my smartphone: fixed-line telephone, watch, stopwatch, step-counter, portable radio/Walkman/iPod, pocket torch, compass, snapshot camera, calculator, dictaphone, a whole drawer-full of maps, and a new pocket diary every year.
But not only things - the digital revolution has dramatically cut the amount of money I spend on media. Other than my subscription to The Economist, I no longer buy newspapers. I don't own a TV, so no TV licence fee. I don't buy or process several rolls of film a month, nor do I buy CDs or DVDs or LPs or music cassettes. I once estimated that back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I'd be spending up to one quarter of my disposable income on media. Today, it's all rolled into my YouTube Premium and Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions and the plethora of free online services available through my laptop and smartphone.
The costs of things in proportion to food and shelter is shifting. Once, humanity did nothing but hunt and gather. Agriculture and civilisation led to increased specialisation; today, only 2% of people in the rich world make a living growing and processing food. And as food and clothing became cheaper, housing has become more expensive. So we're living in smaller premises with more things, and disposing of them becomes an issue. Selling them online is time-consuming; precise description of the state of wear of a given item, answering emails from time-wasters, meeting potential buyers for whom the goods are not quite right, puts many people off. Charity shops are an answer, but Poland still has only a tiny handful.
The real answer is to scale back one's purchases. Buy less. Separate needs from wants. Cutting out junk food, salt snacks, confectionery, biscuits and cakes is not only good for your health - it saves money that over time becomes significant in scale. Impulse buying is unwise. And it tends to end up in landfill sites, having wasted precious natural resources. Below: the Buyerarchy of Needs, by Sarah Lazarovich
I'd attribute my current financial comfort to the fact that I jumped off the treadmill of consumerism a long time ago. Where one lives is vastly more important that what one drives or what one wears. Car ownership and clothes are a massive waste of money. My mother used to say, "Nie ważna miarka, tylko szafarka", roughly meaning that it's not how much you have of anything that counts, but how you use it. The person who earns £80,000 a year (averaged across the span of their career) and spends £75,000 a year ends up after 40 years' work ends up much less wealthy than the person who earns £60,000 and spends only £40,000. Look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves.
This time last year:
Post-Lenten photo catch-up
This time two years ago:
Qualia memories - Edwardian railways
Lublin - pearl of Poland's East
This time ten years ago:
70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
This time 11 years ago:
Tarkovsky's Stalker: a zone of my own
This time 12 years ago:
Warsaw's big billboards
Pace of development falters
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