August 22nd, 2008
The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption at the Interesting New York Unconference
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I’ll be speaking about my off consumption experiment at the Interesting New York unconference on September 13.
It’s basically a cool unconference where people talk about interesting things they are doing, or things they are really passionate about.
The Interesting unconference is the brainchild of Russel Davies and his colleagues at the Open Intelligence Agency. The previous Interesting events have been held at Sydney, Amsterdam and London. The New York event is being hosted by David Nottoli and it was because of Jinal Shah’s thoughtfulness that I came to know of it.
The list of previous speakers at Interesting unconferences includes some very smart people and Grant McCracken is one of the speakers at Interesting New York. Grant McCracken is one of my favorite thinkers about culture and marketing and I can’t tell you how excited I am about finally getting to meet him.
If you are in New York on September 13, I would strongly urge you to join us at the unconference. You can follow Interesting New York on Twitter or register for it on Facebook.
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I’m neither marketer, poet nor thinker. I’m also not a consumer. I buy the bare necessities that I need to survive. I do not own a car, a television or a stereo. My mobile phone is the only phone I own, and it cost me $20. My monthly electricity bill is $12 (in California). The only thing I do spend large amounts of money on is airline tickets. I’ve lived this way for over four years and have never had a need for anything I do not have.
I did, however, have to view the source code of this page to figure out what to type into each of the required fields above.
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[...] and comments (Harshil and Sumant) and saying “thank you” for their thoughtfulness (Jinal) by linking out to them. My hyper-linking is partly motivated by my need to stay in touch with my [...]
@Philip: Great! It’s nice to know that there are more people who are asking themselves questions about the value of buying/ owning things. It will be nice to know what event or thought process inspired your lifestyle.
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I don’t think there was any event that started it. I’ve never thought about the value of items in monetary terms, but only in terms of whether I need it or not. When you look at things that way, you realise that you really do not need anything, and once your needs are satisfied, everything else is a bonus.
You need food, shelter and clothing, and for that you need some form of income, or a benefactor who will provide those three for you. After some time you realise that intellectual stimulation is enticing. Some might see it as a need, some might see it as a toy, but you don’t actually need too much expensive raw material to stimulate your intellect. Then there are people who like to make rockets. The intellectual stimulation can be obtained theoretically with a pen and paper. It’s the practical part - the toying - that costs money.
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[...] be speaking about my off consumption experiment at the Interesting New York conference on September [...]