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A Life Less Throwaway: The lost art of buying for life
Tara Button
Now more than ever, we live in a society where we covet new and shiny things. Not only has consumption risen dramatically over the last 60 years, but we are damaging the environment at the same time. That is why buying quality and why Tara Button’s Buy Me Once brand has such popular appeal.Tara Button has become a champion of a lifestyle called ‘mindful curation’ – a way of living in which we carefully choose each object in our lives, making sure we have the best, most classic, most pleasing and longest lasting – kettles, desks, pots & pans, scissors, coats and dresses, instead of surrounding ourselves with throwaway stuff and appliances with built-in obsolescence. Tara advocates a life that celebrates what lasts, what is classic and what really suits a person.There are 10 steps to master mindful curation and each is explained in this book, from understanding and using techniques to freeing yourself from external manipulations. Finding your purpose and priorities and identifying your core tastes and style. Learning how to let go of the superfluous and how to make wise choices going forwards.Mindful curation is a lifestyle choice that will make you happier, healthier and more fulfilled spiritual as well as helping save the planet.
Copyright (#ulink_f650fd0d-4920-5af1-b128-b5f6a313f2cc)
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.
This book reports information and opinions which may be of general interest to the reader. Neither the author nor the publisher can accept responsibility for any accident, injury or damage that results from using the ideas, information or advice offered in this book.
Thorsons
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
FIRST EDITION
© Tara Button 2018
Tara Button asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: ISBN 9780008217716
Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008217723
Version: 2018-12-23
Dedication (#ulink_5e74e639-5b97-5f9d-b0e1-d8ef6d50e309)
For my great makers:
My parents, who made me,
Mark, the one making dreams come true,
Juliet, the best maid of honour,
and Howard, who makes me happy every day
Contents
Cover (#u2b06c2ba-52b5-5aa8-9ab7-bd7fbd3ea8f9)
Title Page (#u785068ee-6a21-5acf-b744-70b89f2d932c)
Copyright (#ulink_04acf7e1-4fa0-5c86-b183-cb1b959e168f)
Dedication (#ulink_69b77712-9355-5b1b-bc8c-aca4f857e34b)
Introduction: Or why I want my grandmother’s tights (#ulink_c7424c50-e4de-5b3d-a30d-abc89b2525f3)
List of Exercises (#ulink_56848b85-2ace-5b19-9b9e-edc0a2be9835)
PART I (#ulink_12491786-d94c-5c86-805b-91ff7513671d)
BROKEN BEHAVIOUR (#ulink_12491786-d94c-5c86-805b-91ff7513671d)
1 Mindful Curation: Or how to resist a world that’s trying to make us broke and lonely (#ulink_b839a5e8-c2d3-519a-baee-8723e50caa72)
2 Planned Obsolescence: Or why they don’t make ’em like they used to (#ulink_af8a36b8-ca8b-59c5-b923-969ef3e47d34)
3 Psychological Obsolescence: Or why no one wants their parents’ old settee
4 Advertising: Or how many people does it take to sell a lightbulb?
5 Marketing: Or the ten tactics that make us spend
6 Fashion and Identity: Or why everyone should dress like my friend Ben
7 Faster and Faster Fashion: Or how to get off the trend treadmill
8 Born to Shop: Or how our monkey brain influences what we buy
PART II
LIVING A LIFE LESS THROWAWAY
9 Becoming a Curator: Or how to begin buying with purpose
10 Taking Stock: Or where did all this stuff come from?
11 Before You Shop: Or ‘A Tale of Two Shoppers’
12 Out at the Shops: Or how scents, shelves and salespeople get us spending
13 The BuyMeOnce Buying Guide: Or how to find the best stuff on the planet
14 Keeping and Caring: Or how to hold on to the things you love
15 On Money and Happiness: Or how to be happy in a cash-mad world
Conclusion: Or what does success look like in a life less throwaway?
Ten Steps to Master Mindful Curation
Appendix I: Care and Repair
Appendix II: Choosing Materials for Clothing
Appendix III: Brand Values
Appendix IV: Know Your Warranties
Endnotes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Publisher
Introduction (#ulink_fa5061fd-e4b8-5400-870f-996111279eb8)
or (#ulink_fa5061fd-e4b8-5400-870f-996111279eb8)
Why I want my grandmother’s tights (#ulink_fa5061fd-e4b8-5400-870f-996111279eb8)
My grandmother’s tights used to last forever. They were so strong, people could tow cars with them, and did! Granny got two pairs – one to wash and one to wear. But then the manufacturers decided to change the way their stockings were made, and not for the better. So today, when I reach for a pair of tights, it’s like playing pantyhose Russian roulette. Which pair will break this morning?
It may not seem like a crisis to have a drawer stuffed with half-laddered hosiery, but I see it as a very small glimpse into a much larger problem. Our whole houses, our whole lives, have become stuffed full of things that let us down, cause our stress levels to skyrocket and our bank accounts to empty. But precisely because these things are poorly made or faddy, perversely we are compelled to buy more of them.
But couldn’t life be different? What if we decided to surround ourselves with beautiful, well-made things that lasted forever, instead of ‘for now’ objects that soon need replacing?
That was the seed of an idea that came to me in 2013.
Before then I was a paid-up loyalty-card-carrying member of the impulse-shopper club who never questioned the things I bought. I’d always been a spendthrift. My mother says that as a child it never much mattered how much pocket money I was given, I was always broke, and this behaviour carried on into adulthood. Once I’d decided I wanted something, I ‘needed’ it right away, and so my life and home became filled up with stuff that was ‘almost but not quite right’. Longevity wasn’t one of my criteria, so I owned temporary things, poorly thought-through and soon-regretted clothes or hobby and fitness equipment bought in fits of short-lived enthusiasm.
My habitual impulse buying eventually caused credit card debts of thousands of pounds, leaving me feeling out of control, childish and angry with myself. I would come home to a chronically cluttered house, which was exhausting to tidy or clean, and stare blankly at my piles of fast-fashion clothes, wondering why I felt I had nothing to wear.
Like many people, I was stumbling through life believing that ‘when this happens or when I have that, then I’ll be happy’. Without a clear sense of self, I’d unconsciously mould my character into whatever I thought my partners wanted me to be. When my last relationship failed, therefore, I was left so lost, I had to spend some time on antidepressants. With my thirties looming, I felt as though I’d screwed my life up and chucked it away like a free hand wipe.
At the same time I’d managed to fall into the moral wasteland that is the advertising world. My job was now to write adverts for some of the world’s biggest brands, trying to persuade people like me to buy more stuff, whether they needed it or not. Five years ago I had a full-on breakdown in front of my friends on holiday, and in the plane toilet on the way home, I looked in the mirror and vowed to make a change. I just wasn’t sure what form that change would take.
The change came in the form of a pot – a baby blue Le Creuset casserole pot given to me for my thirtieth birthday. It came with a reputation for lasting for generations, and when I held it, it just felt like an heirloom. It was startlingly beautiful, and I reflected that owning it meant I potentially never had to buy another pot again. ‘If only everything in my life was like this,’ I thought.
Enthused, I set out to find more objects that I would never have to replace – objects that would work with me and grow old with me; beautiful, classic objects worth committing to and taking care of.
I assumed there’d be a website that sold a collection of lifetime products, but when I went looking for one, it didn’t exist. ‘Maybe I could be the one to build it,’ I dared to think.
I had zero web-design skills, but the more I thought about it, the more powerful the idea seemed. If this website could release people from the constant pressure to renew and replace, it could solve some of the biggest problems the world was facing. It could ease the clutter, unhappiness and debt that came with overconsumption, it could lessen the environmental impact of our throwaway society and it could save us all money in the long term.
I started to make changes in my own life and uncovered the surprising practical and emotional benefits that come with choosing to bring only those objects into your life that reflect your values and will be with you for decades to come.
I knew that if I didn’t at least try to build the website, I’d always regret it. So in 2015 I started a company, BuyMeOnce, and began hunting for lifetime items in my spare time. I cut my salary in half and lived on a minimum wage so I could split my time between work and building my business.
Painfully slowly, and after several false starts, the site started to come together. It was very basic, it wasn’t monetised, and I had no idea if anyone would ever visit it. Most likely, I thought, it would remain a cluster of lonely pages on the sixth page of Google.
Then, in 2016, miraculously and quite unexpectedly, the world found it. The site went viral, thousands of e-mails flooded in, BuyMeOnce was featured in almost every major newspaper in the UK and I was suddenly being asked to be on TV in America. I hadn’t realised it, but I had tapped into something that people all around the world were feeling. They were tired of our throwaway culture.
By this stage, my life had completely turned around. My spending was under control because I was living by my new-found philosophy. I sadly hadn’t morphed into a ‘naturally’ tidy person, but after giving away over half of my wardrobe and countless boxes of clutter, any mess I made was easily dealt with in a couple of minutes. Owning items I loved for the long term also meant I naturally started caring for them better and lost things less regularly. I’d also stopped worrying about keeping up with the Joes or Janes, and reconnected with the person I really was. This, together with doing something I truly believed in, had raised my self-worth and allowed me to enter into a relationship based on a joyful connection rather than neediness. I had found my best friend – a kind, funny, bespectacled man who made me happier than I had imagined possible. As I write this, I’m looking forward to marrying him in six weeks’ time.
I’ve now been given the opportunity to share with you what I believe is a life-enhancing way of thinking and behaving. My hope is that this book can be helpful to you on a personal level and, if it falls into the hands of enough people, helpful to the planet.
WHAT CAN ONE LITTLE BOOK DO?
This book tells the story of how we’ve sleepwalked into a world where our lives are focused on a constant churn of items with little lasting value.
I’ll also reveal how we’re being manipulated to feel that our current possessions (and by extension ourselves) are inadequate, and how this drives us to constantly upgrade our wardrobes, homes and technology. After ten years in the advertising world, I’m able to take you behind ad-land’s glitzy curtain to reveal the tricks of the trade and arm you against its devious tactics.
Overbuying habits are often linked to low self-worth, so this book also contains sections to help you to value yourself. No object can make you more or less of a person. Once you’ve truly understood that possessions don’t have that power, you’re able to choose which ones to bring into your life with much greater ease. As an added bonus, by the time you’ve worked through the exercises of this book I would expect the clutter of your home to be greatly reduced, along with your stress levels. ‘A life less throwaway’ becomes simultaneously a simpler and richer life, because the focus is off consumption and on what really matters.
As my company name, BuyMeOnce, suggests, living a life less throwaway does involve buying certain things, but this lifestyle isn’t about buying beautiful stuff to gloat over, it’s about buying only those items that will support a functioning and fulfilling life.
MINDFUL CURATION
I call my method ‘mindful curation’, which might sound as pretentious as bringing your own tablecloth to KFC, but is the best term for it. It is ‘mindful’ because it is done with purpose and thought. And it is ‘curation’ because, like a curator putting together a collection in an art gallery, it’s about picking only those things that will work together to form a home and a life that uniquely reflects you and your needs.
It is comprised of several steps:
1. Understanding the benefits of mindful curation. (Chapter 1)
2. Understanding the pressures that promote mindless buying and developing tactics to free yourself from them. (Chapters 2–8 and 12)
3. Investigating your life’s purpose and the long-term priorities that will help you meet this purpose. (Chapter 9)
4. Identifying which items you need to fulfil those priorities and to live comfortably without being swayed by status. (Chapters 9–11)
5. Identifying your true tastes and sense of style so you can buy future-proof items. (Chapters 3 and 7)
6. Identifying your values and the brands that reflect those values. (Chapter 9)
7. Taking stock of the items you already have to understand your present tastes, priorities and buying habits. (Chapter 10)
8. Letting go of the clutter and the superfluous. (Chapter 10)
