It was after the Canterbury quakes that I realised how little I really needed of the stuff I had accumulated over the years.
For several weeks, I listened to harrowing tales from traumatised callers on talkback, who had lost almost everything they owned.
Yet no matter how uncertain thefuture and no matter how hard it was going to be to replace their possessions they always finished with the mantra "but nobody's hurt, nobody we know died, so really we're very lucky".
I came home when I finished my shift at midnight one night and looked around my own house and ultimately I concluded that if I lost it all, it wouldn't really matter so long as the people who are special to me were okay.
It hasn't stopped me buying stuff altogether– the pretty little set of Art Deco crockery bowls that I bought from the local antique store's closing down sale is a case in point – but I am trying to cut down on buying stuff for the sake of it.
I haven't brought anything home from trips overseas for years – I would far rather spend money on making memories with the grandchildren than on handmade linen from a French village; linen that was quite likely mass produced in China just like the Venetian masks and the English teddy bears.
I was reminded of the modern malaise of stuff acquisition when I read an opinion piece in the Spectator last week.
The author was pointing out that things have never been cheaper for the ordinary Joe and Joanne to buy – that by every objective measure, our material quality of life continues to improve – and yet we have never been more discontented.
Rory Sutherland was talking about the Brits in his column but I think the same is true for the majority of us in most Western democracies. For our grandparents, a bottle of whiskey cost a working man a week's wages; overseas trips and your own motor vehicle were unimaginable luxuries, and Sutherland says in 1950, a transatlantic phone call cost more than it does to fly from London to New York today.
Even in the 1970s, in small town New Zealand, stuff was so expensive you were very limited in what you could accumulate. I certainly had no need of a walk-in wardrobe. One pair of jeans, until I got my paper round and could buy another pair, a couple of Pickaberry T-shirts, one good dress, one every day one.
Money and the acquisition of stuff won't make us happy. Photo / 123RF
People just couldn't shop, as a hobby, the way we do now. Rory Sutherland says the answer is flexible working conditions. A bill has been introduced into the House of Commons which would make all new jobs flexible by default. Unless an employer could come up with jolly good reasons why an employee had to work set days and hours, it would be assumed that flexibility is an option.
I know Britain has a lot on its plate at the moment, but I sincerely hope this bill moves through the House ... 87 per cent of Brits say they'd like more time, more flexibility when it comes to their working hours and I'm pretty sure we'd be the same. We've never had more labour-saving devices and yet we've never been so time poor. I absolutely loved my four-day working week and its taken a while to adjust back to doing five – and that's doing a job I love.
I was talking to a young man last week who's switched careers – he was an environmental planning manager; now, in his early 30s, he's an apprentice chippy. Absolutely loves it.
I asked him how he adjusted to the drop in pay he had to take and he said he'd planned for it and saved for a year before he quit his old life and began his new one. And then he added that now he's doing a job he loves, he doesn't feel the need to buy stuff and spend on nights out to compensate for doing a job that was boring. So he doesn't need as much money as he did before.
There's the key. Money and the acquisition of stuff won't make us happy. Flexible working conditions and loving the job that you do will. At a time of record low unemployment, it's time to be the master of your own destiny.
