Less stuff, more happiness

 

Founder of "TreeHugger.com" and owner of sustainable prototypes producing company "ExceptionLab"

Graham Hill (2011) presents an idea of "more is equal less", according to which less stuff leads to more happiness.

   So what is the point? In topic he considers cases regarding the joy of less: college room, hotel rooms during the traveling, also camping, when we basically have nothing besides bag and few means needed. But here arises a question, are we getting happy in these cases directly because of having less stuff? We could fell the same or maybe more happiness in those cases by having more things. He does not consider this point of view, and does not face the complexities of the question. He says that now in America people use 3 times more space than 50 years ago, because they need more space for keeping their stuff, but perhaps gives no data, source for checking. Also he presents some 2,2 billion square foot industry of personal storage, again with no additional information about it. And he raises a question regarding the above mentioned data, "where does this lead?", and brings consequences - more credit card dept, huge environmental damage, and less and less happiness. In my opinion sense of happiness in this assumption is relative, as lot of people are getting pretty happy by buying this or that stuff, otherwise they would not. What I will say about credit card dept? It is logical consequence that I can not disagree with. The same is environmental damage, but I would require to give more details about it, as the audience he is targeting is humanity all the people, with different professions, intellectual and educational levels etc. and according to this some part of us might not understand the issue, how does all this stuff generate CO2, accordingly environmental damage. Graham Hill suggests solution of these issues in form of outwork called "Life edited", which states that less stuff we have, less space we will be needing for it, accordingly less CO2 will be generated, more money saved, and more happy we will be. But does this solution answer complexities of issue? What about the economy? If less will be demanded, accordingly less will be produced, or in such low demand producers may even stop production, and what will happen to the world economy? It will get service industry based?
    One thing that I really liked in this presentation, is architectural and interior solutions for apartments, with help of which we can keep the stuff, presenting primary and secondary necessity, having much less space, than needed in standard way of keeping them. And solutions look pretty nice and user-friendly. 
     So what is the purpose of this presentation? To make people more happy or to save the environment, not paying much attention to people happiness? Because lot of things that really make us happy do damage environment, like driving good, fast car (which needs to be produced, which in it's turn damages environment), entertainments connected with it, lot of new dresses, technologies etc. requiring more space and generating CO2. 

   The topic is also presented in unfair way. Bases of such assumption are first of all points of view, arrangements and field of activity of  Graham Hill (2011), he is more disturbed by environmental issue, than to make people happy, accordingly he pays more attention to first one trough people happiness. Also there is no opponent  information or points of view considered in order to compare advantages and disadvantages relative to data, supporting this presentation. And connected to this issue he says that he does not force us to us this "Editing", but asks to consider this concept before buying or obtaining something, to move from large to small quantities.