If I Can’t Give Advice (!) How Do I Evangelize Frugality and Anticonsumerism?

Last week's post on advice-giving left me with grave doubts.

I feel strongly about my personal obligation to help reduce status competition. In fact, I consider it my ethical responsibility to give the people around me less to compete against. This is an important value to me, and I believe our society's health, and for that matter our planet's health, depends largely on our collective ability to reject consumerism and status competition in all forms.

But a problem came up last week. If it's true that any advice I might give produces the exact opposite effect, then the efforts I make to reduce status competition actually increase it. My attempts to do the right thing end up doing the wrong thing, and I end up hurting the planet and the people around me.

Heavy, right?

Here's another way to think about it. By being overtly and in-your-face frugal, how am I doing anything other than mere virtue-signalling? It's as if I had a little sign over my head saying "Ooh! Ooh! Look at me and how little I spend! Look at how much I love the planet! Aren't I awesome!"

So if all this is true, it takes us right back to square one: How do we really go about sharing and spreading these fundamental values of spending less, saving more, anti-consumerism and anti-status competition? How do we effectively share these values?

Well, let's start with first principles: We want to produce in others a positive, helpful response--for them. This means we have to keep in mind that most people have fragile egos and respond with reactance. This, therefore, carries significant implications for how we influence others.

A side note: It might bother us that many people have fragile egos or respond with reactance. Or, phrased a little differently, we might react with our own reactance to the reality of reactance in others. But reality doesn't care that we're bothered. And it doesn't matter what type of responses we think people should have. That's just solipsism. What matters is the responses people actually have, and whether we help them or not.

Thus our evangelism of these values probably should be counterintutive, non-overt, subtle, nuanced. Anything other than overt and direct.

And, once again with feeling: no unsolicited advice! No "you should do this"-type advice.

Further, solicited advice is possibly allowed only in very rare and unusual circumstances. For example, when you receive no excuse-making or verbal pushback from the person asking, and they seem sincerely and strongly interested in following and embracing your advice.

In the vast majority of cases, however, you should default to reverse psychology-type approaches: Once again:

Most of this stuff will be too hard for you.
This is just too difficult for the average person.
Naahhhh don't bother, it's probably not worth it to you.

These approaches, as we saw last week, produce positive effects via the mechanism of reactance.

Finally, I think we have to depend on the quiet strength of setting an example through how we live. Do things like drive an older, non-flashy car. Don't buy a mansion (or if you already did, for goodness' sake don't brag or status-signal about it). Don't go on and on about the prices of things. The point is to never status-signal in any way, thus bragging about the $300 you just spent on your new tennis racquet or how much your last luxury vacation cost is obviously off-limits.

Instead, consider employing reverse psychology and anti-brag and anti-status-signal about how little your last vacation cost!

Readers, how do you spread your values of anti-consumerism and frugality? Do you try to spread them at all? Why or why not?


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Should You Give Advice Encouraging Others Not to Spend?

No. Never.

Let's start with advice-giving in its worst form: unsolicited advice. It's never a good idea to give unsolicited advice. Sure, you can try to convince people to do something other than what they want--but they're just going to do what they want anyway. By imposing your values on others (no matter how awesome you might think your values are), you're being both annoying and sanctimonious. Doubly pointless.

To repeat: do not give unsolicited advice.

But as we'll soon see, even if someone directly asks you for advice, it's still not a good idea to give advice.

Here's why. Once you understand that everybody has an ego, that everybody suffers to some extent from not invented here syndrome, you begin to understand a rather twisted truth: when you try to "help" with advice, most people respond with reactance rather than agreement. Therefore, whenever you give overt advice, whether requested or not, it usually creates the opposite of what you intend.

In other words, by encouraging frugality in others, you actually influence people to spend more. Disturbing to say the least.

I know you didn't mean it. You never meant to produce this twisted contra-result with your heartfelt, well-meaning frugality advice. But to paraphrase the movie Unforgiven: I didn't mean it's got nothing to do with it.

Thus it is critical to observe carefully the actions and reactions of others after you give out encouragement or advice. If they respond with reactance-based or not invented here-type responses such as:

"I know that already"
"I tried that and it didn't work"
"Sure, that's easy for you, but..."
"I'm too busy to do XYZ"

...then it's time to shut up. You've already said too much.

Then again, if you want to have some fun and actually produce positive results, forget the advice and switch to reverse psychology. Say something like "You want to save more money? It's probably gonna be too difficult for you." Or perhaps phrased more diplomatically: "It's really just too hard for the average person."

For a shocking percentage of people, well more than half, these reverse-psychology statements will be far more effective than actually saying what you mean. Why? Because your statement of doubt produces reactance in others. It makes them want to prove that you're wrong to doubt them!

In other words, your reverse psychology produces the result they (and you) actually want. Yes, this is weird and a little twisted. But it doesn't change the fact that it's true.

Finally, a thought for any readers resisting the admittedly counter-intuitive idea of using reverse psychology to positively impact others. And this goes double for any reader who considers doing so to be somehow insulting or condescending.

Ask yourself which is more caring: to produce a positive, helpful response in someone... or a negative, unhelpful response? Is it in any way caring or loving to produce in someone a response that observably does not help them?

Remember, this is about the success and effectiveness of the other person. It's not about you and the type of reaction you think they should have.



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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Synergies of Being an Investor AND a Consumer

"Consumer brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, or Starbucks all do somewhat similar things: they buy commodities (their raw materials) and sell brands. Nike's shoes and shirts might be nice, but the material isn't all that different than Russell's or Champion's, but you may not have even heard of the latter two companies and you likely have paid a 100% markup or more for Nike gear."
--John Huber, Saber Capital

Readers, the above quote is from a small hedge fund's year-end letter to clients. (Yes, I read letters like these in my spare time. For fun. Sad!)

This quote above, however, helped me crystallize an insight: think like an investor when you're a consumer. When you purchase something, who is on the other side of your trade? And how much money are they making off of you?

After all, savvy investors want to invest wherever there are juicy profit margins. Savvy consumers, on the other hand, buy products where there aren't juicy profit margins. If they want to get good value that is.

Therefore, if you think like an investor whenever you're out there buying stuff, you'll often discover both where not to buy--and where (possibly!) to invest. In other words, wherever you find a highly profitable company charging prices well above intrinsic value, forget buying the product. Buy the stock instead.


A quick final footnote: If you're interested in following various hedge funds and investment letters, and "borrowing" both interesting investing insights and specific stock ideas from many of the world's greatest investors, there's never been a better time than right now. Ten years ago, it was nearly impossible to get access to these letters. I'll offer readers few places to go to find them:

1) ValueWalk offers online access to investor letters from many well-regarded value investors. Some of the site's older, archived content sits behind a paywall.

2) Reddit has a Security Analysis subreddit with a long list of recent investor letters from a wide range of mutual funds and hedge funds.

3) At SeekingAlpha you can follow the changes in holdings of many major hedge funds (via official 13F filings at the SEC). See, for example, changes in Mohnish Pabrai's fund here. (Pabrai is a well-regarded value investor and the author of the exceptionally useful book The Dhandho Investor.)

On Self-Doubt

This short anecdote on Henri Matisse should resonate with anyone involved in any sort of creative work:

Matisse's continuing self-doubt is revealed in the story of his encounter with a group of schoolgirls in a Nice gallery where some of his paintings were on display. Years later one of the schoolgirls remembered, "At one moment we all stopped dead in front of a picture we couldn't understand... To our eyes, conditioned to perfect classical art, that work appeared as just 'bad.'" Matisse happened to be walking incognito among the students and heard their negative comments. When a girl asked him if he were Matisse, he did not identify himself, but when the group was about to leave he took their teacher aside and apologized for his lie. He said he had been afraid of the children's criticism: "I believe they are the only ones who see rightly, and for the moment I hate that picture in my heart for having shocked the eyes of a child, even if the critics should call it a masterpiece."
--from Matisse: A Portrait by Hayden Herrera

This story shocked me, to be honest. Matisse was one of history's greatest artists. If he gets down on himself when a schoolgirl criticizes him, who am I to have any confidence at all--about anything?

Then again, maybe there's an alternative, more encouraging way to think about this story. Yes, Matisse was one of history's greatest artists, but he's also a human being subject to self-doubt. Just like all the rest of us. But his self-doubt didn't stop him from creating. In fact, Matisse later went on to create some of his best-known works, including his famous late-career collages and cut-outs. It didn't stop him.

Maybe self-doubt is normal, and you just have to manage it--survive it--as best you can. But yet you still have the obligation to keep working, keep producing.

It's just another way to think about it. And framing it up this way makes me feel kind of lucky that sometimes, every so often, I get a random moment without self-doubt.

Readers, what do you think?






[Cross-posted at Quick Writing Tips]