BOOK REVIEW: Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More. John Naish; Hodder Stoughton; €21 (£16.99)
WE NEED to develop a sense of enough. Or, if you fancy, enoughness. Or even enoughism," writes John Naish, a freelance writer on health, brain science and spirituality for the Timesof London, in this plea for practising some consumption continence.
It's certainly an argument whose time has come, as the voracious, brand-obsessed western world ponders a greener agenda amid signs that we have, in far too many ways, overindulged.
On Naish's argument, for just the same reasons that the West is seeing an obesity epidemic, with all its concomitant health and welfare and cost implications, so too do we see an overabundance epidemic. Humans are driven by evolution and the school of hard Darwinian knocks to have a strong taste for fatty and sweet foods because once upon a time - and that time is not on a couch in front of the TV - eating such rarely-found substances helped boost health and survival.
Our forefathers and mothers were excellent at immediately storing such occasional high caloric food jackpots as body fat and our metabolism is such that those fat deposits, protective against literal times of lean, are very hard to shift.
Once on the lips, forever on the hips has sound evolutionary theory behind it.
Similarly, our primitive brains are hard-wired to hoard against want.
"We are lumbered with 'wanting' brains," Naish argues. We want, want, want, and are also intrigued by novelty.
Our dopamine pleasure centres in our brains are flooded when we acquire and buy.
That has led to gross overindulgence in just about every part of our lives.
This applies equally to serial purchasers - a salesperson talks of "shoe-limics", women who on weekends flood shoe stores and buy shoes they will return the next week, just for the thrill of the moment when the purchase is made - as to devourers of information purely for information's sake.
This Naish terms "infobesity", the constant need to consume information that we cannot possibly use and to be always on, always connected.
Thus do we become beholden to our Blackberries, mobile phones and internet connections, and glued to 24-hour news channels to see the same item on some remote happening of little direct relevance over and over and over again.
We also become workaholics, lured by the promise of earning just that bit more to buy yet more things we do not need.
Studies show that people worth over £100 million are only marginally happier than the average Joe,
Naish points out, yet working life becomes all consuming - again, literally - for those in those positions.
We associate status with certain jobs and our ancient drive to achieve status causes us to jump into jobs that deplete our private lives, taking away time from family and leisure.
Some of what Naish describes is quite funny - his trips to a rubbish dump, for example, where people are throwing out new sets of golf clubs, almost new appliances, and other items.
He details how a YMCA store in Hove in the UK makes over £1,200 a week selling such rescued "trash" to the public, for example. On the list of items is flat-pack furniture still in the container and never opened, lots of George Foreman-style grills, and ordinary toasters, often still in the box.
But even the charity shops can't cope: last year the charity Help the Aged had to spend £300,000 disposing of junk that the public "donates" that cannot be used or sold.
What goes into the dump has a massive effect on the environment, much of it passed on to developing world countries as we don't like keeping our own trash at home.
In 2007, more than two million tons of British rubbish was shipped over to Chinese landfills, a country that is predicted to be unable to cope with its own waste 12 years from now.
If people don't dump such excess belongings or take them to charity shops, they store them. The rise of self-storage is a phenomenon of our inability to say enough, says Naish.
In the US, self-storage occupies more than three times the space of Manhattan and the storage industry takes in more money than movie theatres or the entire music business.
So intrinsic is self-storage to economic growth that Joseph Quinlan, chief stock market strategist for Bank of America, has said that self-storage is now a "critical prop to global growth" as people need somewhere to stick their unused purchases.
"If US consumers run out of storage space, the global economy is doomed," Quinlan has said.
Enoughis a fascinating and timely book and offers, at the end of each chapter, some interesting suggestions for how to learn to say "enough" in many spheres of one's own life.
The self-help side of things may prove a bit cloying, as may the overall tone of Naish's writing style - the very word "enoughism" will make some people want to scream.
But I dare anyone to read this book and not feel ashamed as they survey their sitting room. We all need to rein in, and Enoughoffers insight on how to do so and why it must be done.
