I thoroughly enjoyed our class discussion of consumer wisdom and the five facets of Professor Luchs’ consumer wisdom theory. I think it made our discussion super easy to engage in – with a professor who is passionate about his research and takes the time to teach his students what he’s publishing, I think that made the discussion that much more stimulating. I enjoyed learning about the intentionality aspect of consumer wisdom – I think because this tenant of wisdom is hardest for me to implement in my everyday life, I enjoyed reading about other consumers who had embodied this facet.
I think Lifestyle Envisionment is an important part of this definition, as it’s the “opportunity and accountability to define and pursue their own virtuous pattern of living.” I think the accountability part of this definition is key. As people usually, myself included, tend to shift the burden of sustainability to others around them, I think that holding yourself accountable is an integral part of intentionality. Our class discussion made me reflect on my personal consumption habits, especially with regard to clothing. I love to shop, and have amassed quite the closet; ever since I started working in high school, I have always allocated part of my income to buying myself new clothes. However, it’s not sustainable to keep buying new cheap clothes, and cycling things through your closet, only to do the same thing a season later. I think that’s something I want to start looking into, investing in nice clothes made of materials that will last me a long time. This goal ties into personal resource management, another facet of being a “wise consumer” I should start implementing in my own life – being levelheaded and planning resources to a lifestyle you aspire to be, rather than what you’re currently living.
With regards to design, I think the concept we learned in class is interesting, definitely a dimension my group should keep in mind for its final product – with regards to a sustainable design, a company should choose only a few features that are necessary to the product and advertise them as such, as opposed to trying to get everything perfect and failing. If you have consumers who deeply care about two things, then it’s important that the product does those two things, and you can maybe choose to forego the other features in order to have a superior price, or look.
Another interesting concept we learned about in class is the lose/lose of consumption, as both ends of consumption can lead to poor health, stress, and isolation. This paradigm paints a grim picture of the capitalistic world we live in — we have people with too much, others with too little, each feeling equally as unfulfilled; additionally, people in the middle are constantly striving to make more money to buy more/nicer things, which will only lead them to unhappiness! I explored this topic a lot this summer in an anthropology course I took abroad in Cape Town; as we were studying abroad in a city with an extreme wealth disparity, it was really interesting to meet people living in the townships (very low income) vs. professors at universities and students we were going to school with (presumably, a high income). It was crazy living in a city with billionaires living next to families that were living in shipping containers in a township. Learning about the lose/lose of consumption made me think about the families my program met in Cape Town — where these richer people looked far happier and better off than the people in the townships, but it makes you question, are they really that much better off?