Happier with Less Stuff: Escaping the Indulgence Trap

The Indulgence Trap is about the efficacy of efficiency. Energy efficiency is good, right? Sure, but consider: which of these statements is true?

• Energy efficiency decreases energy use.
• Energy efficiency increase energy use.

Both statements are true!

If I give you a more fuel-efficient engine, then hooray! The money you saved on gasoline can now be spent on a bigger vehicle. Or maybe, since miles are now cheaper, you’ll spend more time commuting so you can live in a bigger house in the outer suburbs. You’ve been given “free” money with which to indulge yourself. The indulgence trap says that you can’t efficient your way out of waste. Every penny you save on efficiency, you then re-invest in more energy use. This is sometimes known as the Jevons paradox. Jevons was the economist who noticed that every time steam engines became more efficient, England needed more, not less, coal. Efficiency drove consumption.

But the Jevons paradox isn’t a true paradox. Sometimes the technology changes to such a degree that you are gratified, your needs are fully satisfied with something that requires less to make. That is, you are truly doing more with less. You don’t need to indulge your way out of your savings. When this happens, the world gets a little better.

I recently read a book called, not coincidentally, More With Less. It’s a hopeful book. In it, author Andrew McAfee catalogues situations in which people are satisfying the same needs with considerably less stuff. He calls this “dematerialization.”

The simplest example of this is your phone. This one device, small enough to fit in your pocket, now performs the work of a seemingly endless list of devices. Phone, pager, camera, scanner, fax machine, radio, personal stereo, alarm clock, audio recorder, video camera, GPS device, calculator, metronome, guitar tuner, synthesizer, seismograph, reference library, and on an on. You don’t need to buy any of those now.

Reading the book made me think about how happy I am when I replace something old and big with something new and small. I love ditching stuff.

I love the fact that my TV now is basically a poster that I tape to the wall. My computer monitor is similarly thin. The last CRT computer monitor I owned was a frighteningly heavy monster. I genuinely worried about getting a hernia every time I moved it. And I’m old enough to remember when people would brag about how big their stereos were. (“Dude, my speakers are THIS tall”). My whole stereo cabinet is gone. No turntable, no cassette deck, no CD player, no tuner. These days I have a few Sonos speakers, and the rest vanishes into software. As these old devices depart, they take with them special dedicated furniture: the television hutch, the stereo cabinet, the speaker stands. These things used to be focal points in the living room. Now they are simply gone.

Another form of simplification comes in the form of electrification. Of course you still need to generate the electricity, but you save by having lightweight electrons travel the last miles to the house. I don’t have to take my electric car to a special station where I fill it with gallons of heavy energy liquid. My heat pump doesn’t require regular deliveries from the fuel oil truck. And one of my personal favorites is the electric lawnmower. Man, I hated dealing with my old stinky, hard-to-start gas mower. And I never liked storing gasoline in my garage. Life is better.

Having read the book, I now try to look at things and regularly ask myself the question: can I get rid of this or replace it with something smaller? Can I indulge myself and still decrease my impact on the world? It’s encouraging how often the answer is yes. Matter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.