Breaking the chains of consumerism – DW – 06/13/2025

DW

13-06-2025

How does a person in advertising go from perpetuating consumerism one day to championing environment citizenship the next? In this episode, we explore the story of one ad man whose job was quite literally making him sick and the unexpected connection he made with a climate-anxious teen.
Transcript:
Jon Alexander: One day it all really just comes to a head for me. And I'm on my way to work. I'm on the tube and I get off. The underground at Oxford Circus where the agency is, and I'm, and I just can't leave the platform.
I'm asking all these questions in my mind of what are we doing to ourselves when we're telling ourselves we're consumers all the time. What am I doing when I'm a propagator of those messages when I'm just a another of the priesthood. And I'm staring at the wall, I'm staring at the ads and I'm watching a train go by and stop and go. And another one. And I'm starting to feel this rising sickness in me. And then I'm like, I'm physically sick on the platform. And at that point, funnily enough, I know I can't really go to work that day or probably ever again.
And that is the end of Jon Alexander's career in the advertising industry. Welcome to Living Planet, I'm Neil King, and in this episode we're exploring the ripple effects of swapping a life of consumerism for one of citizening.
It might be little used, but citizen is also a verb with roots dating back to the late 16 hundreds and it's seeing a resurgence. But what does it mean and how can it help us tackle the climate crisis?
Back in the early two thousands when Jon graduates from university, he gets a job at a leading advertising agency in Central London.
He's keen to get started in this glittering industry to claim his place in the working world, or at least what he thinks is his place, and he's excited to learn how to make his mark.
Jon: My first boss when I first arrived in advertising described my job to me, really? He said he said, what you've gotta remember is that the average consumer sees something like 3000 commercial messages a day, and you, and he said, you've gotta cut through that. You have to make yours the best.
More recent estimates suggest people on our exposed to anything between 4,000 and 10,000 daily ads, many of which are fed to us digitally. And that trend is set to continue. Industry analysis suggests. So that by the end of next year, the global advertising market will be spending 80% more than it was before the pandemic stop. But back to Jon. He's not too phased at the prospect of finding ways to cut through the already deafening noise of companies and organizations trying to pedal their wares. He has previously tried his luck at becoming a professional athlete, so he feels he has what it takes to rise to this new challenge.
Jon: I was very happy with making mine the best. I have a competitive streak that's pretty strong. I guess the logic inside, it's a bit like, that old thing about the person who stands up in the front row at the football stadium, and then everyone has to stand up behind them. That's effectively what's going on in our brains and in the world around us with these consumer messages. So you compete by trying to find whatever way you can to make yours, the message that gets there smartest, quickest. Fastest, yeah.
But the novelty soon starts to wear off. And what it reveals for Jon is a whole lot of uncertainty about the industry he has signed up to be part of.
Jon: Over time, I just started to ask deeper and deeper questions about what we're doing in the world when we're effectively telling ourselves we're consumers 3000 odd times a day.
With that question, occupying his thoughts, he takes some time out and goes to live in Zambia, wondering if international development might suit him better. Ultimately it doesn't, but his time away does make him want to do something that feels more constructive. So when he gets back to the UK, he turns his advertising hand to what might be seen as conscious consumption, train over playing fair trade chocolate these sorts of things.
Jon: But actually in that phase of my career was one of going, this is nowhere near commensurate with the scale of the challenge either. All we're doing is selling something slightly better while. As two doors down the road is being spent promoting the opposite.
But that is not all that is preoccupying him looking at the world around him, he is drawing correlations between the crisis of loneliness and the idea that people are independent and isolated. He's recognizing the relationship between inequality and competition as a way of solving problems, and he's seeing how ecological destruction is tied to the belief that humans are somehow impossibly separate from nature. And he acknowledges the role of advertising in everything.
Jon: I think the advertising industry is, as most industries are actually deeply embedded in a logic that says actually the right thing to do is to pursue self-interest. The right thing to do is to provide the choices. To set out the array of glittering choices that people can choose from because if everyone pursues their own self-interest, that will add up to the collective interest. That is the underlying logic that pervades the advertising industry, but also pervades most of our society for the last 80 years or so. And actually it's the cause of most of the challenges of our time.
For all that he says, it is a story with an internal logic, which most simply don't question.
Jon: Until such time as you challenge that story, you can be good within it. What I realized was that I wasn't just trying to be good within a story that I came not to believe in. I was actually a key propagator and spreader of that story, and once I ceased to believe in that, it became a deep threat to myself and my wellbeing and. That basically tipped into self-hatred really.
Having finally turned away from the industry that was making him sick, John finds work with the UK Heritage and Nature Conservation Charity, the National Trust. It is operating along transactional lines that invites visitors to buy a ticket for the chance to roam old houses and grounds. But John sees an opportunity to try something new that actually involves the public in these places of shared national interest and inheritance.
Jon: It was the perfect place to start to explore these ideas that were building in me around what would it look like to use the same kind of skills. But not to sell people stuff or get them to click things, but to invite them into their agency as citizens to invite them to contribute their ideas and energy and resources. I did an awful lot of work around children and nature.
We created a marketing campaign, allegedly marketing campaign that was called 50 Things to Do Before Your 11 and three quarters That was actually about rebuilding the connection between children and nature and was a crowdsource list.
So we were asking people to contribute. Their ideas for the experiences they believed everyone should have before they were 12 years old. So a very different way of thinking about these sorts of tasks.
He and a team of others also set up a project called My Farm Using the Line, 10,000 farmers wanted no experience necessary. They invite online voting to get people involved in making decisions around sustainable food production as opposed to just buying what has already been grown.
Jon: So it became a very exciting and creative playground for the work that has since become all of what I do.
Other projects follow. And before he knows it, he's writing and publishing his book: Citizens - Why the answer to fixing everything is all of us. It contains stories of collective citizen action to tackle problems relating to affordable housing, education for girls, access to healthcare and the climate. He has no idea where it will go or the nerve he is about to hit that set of ideas.
Jon: It was just in my head really and in the sort of people I was directly speaking to. And it had become to feel incredibly heavy. So in a way, the book, the writing of the book wasn't like, I'm going to write a book. It was like, get out of my head. And I think maybe that's why these ideas have me rather than I've got these ideas like I and I can't but try and do what they demand of me.
The book maps out three different incarnations of collective human experience over the course of history. The first he calls the subject story, which dominated for centuries and was characterized by a handful of leaders, essentially telling everyone else what to do, which for the most part they did. Second, the consumer story only emerges after the first and second world wars, but builds massive momentum over a few short decades.
Jon: The story is an idea of how to be good in the world. I. Milton Friedman, the famous Milton Friedman saying the social responsibility of business is to maximize its profits. Friedman wasn't saying business should maximize its profits to make as much just because making money is fun, right?
He wasn't like, put money in your ears and stick your tongue out. He was saying the social responsibility of business is to maximize its profits. The right thing, the good thing for business to do is to maximize its profits. That is the consumer story as applied to organizations. And so for individuals, it's a story that says the right thing, the good thing to be good, increase consumption, grow the economy.
But on a planet of finite resources, continued growth is having a detrimental effect. Around 40 countries have already used more resources than the planet can regenerate This year and rampant production of consumer goods is responsible for a large chunk of the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to the soaring temperatures connected to drought, excessive heat, and other extreme weather events.
Jon: The highest possible aspiration in the consumer story in that logic is to be less damaging. All we can be is the least damaging possible consumers. And that is not an aspiration. That's not something that gets us wanting to do something in the world.
Which leads to the third part of Jon's book called The Citizen Story. It shines a bright light on the potential opportunity and enthusiasm for a different way forward outside the mold of a consumer. He showcases everyday people in different parts of the world who have achieved significant changes in their communities and beyond by working together in the name of a broader benefit.
Jon: Humans are a useful part of the ecosystem when we play our proper role. And that is what we start to open the door to when we conceive of ourselves as citizens, when we conceive ourselves as finding collective agency to do generative, constructive stuff in the world, rather than just seeing ourselves as individuals and trying to minimize our negative impact. It's a, it's just a total flip.
The book seems to hit a chord with a lot of people. Initially, Jon has a page on his website which says, invite me and I will come. He goes to lots of places, but receives so many invitations that he eventually has to take the page down. Meanwhile, other people who don't yet have a project to talk to him about or quietly reading his book, taking it all in and allowing it to sow the seeds of thought about what might be.
Ellie Meredith: I honestly don't remember what like prompted me to pick it up, but the book cracked something open and it gave form to feelings that I hadn't yet found like the words for. And it just reminded me that there's another way to be in the world and that we don't have to live as consumers, but we can live as citizens, as carers and co-creators.
And also the people in the book are very normal, ordinary. People, but there's nothing, particularly like groundbreaking about any of them, apart from the fact that they're choosing to put their energy in different places than most people do.
Ellie Meredith is coming to the end of high school in the central English County of Shropshire. When she reads Jon's book, her upbringing has been steeped in nature, surrounded by woodlands and countryside. She has spent lots of time in nature walking her dogs or just lying on the grass listening to the wind.
Ellie: I feel like nature was my playground and kind of my teacher in a lot of ways. I really struggled at school. I was just like desperate to be outside and then after school, that's where I was most of the time. Just relaxing, tuning into that, slower sort of pace of existence. Yeah, and I just like being outside more than anything else.
It is that very love that Ellie has for the natural world that's making her anxious about what is happening to it. She's around 10 years old when she first sees coverage of Australian bushfires on the news. And although she tries to suppress what the images have stirred in her, she can't shake a deep sense of worry. It has started to take root and her growing understanding that Earth is experiencing a climate crisis starts affecting her in a way. It doesn't seem to be touching those around her.
Ellie: To be honest, I think I felt like completely alone in it. Like I started to care about it on a frequency that just didn't match those around me, and that was pretty overwhelming because it's difficult to find the people that you can talk to about it. And I was like riddled with guilt and kind of confusion and like just sad that's what was going on in the world.
And I felt a little bit betrayed by the adults in my life who just said oh, it'll be fine. Don't worry about it, we'll fix it. But it, it wasn't, and it still isn't, and it felt like the world was falling apart and no one really wanted to name it. And I was desperate and longing at that point to be. Myself, I didn't wanna sit on the sidelines anymore.
So she emails Jon, it's the week she leaves high school for good. She has no goal in mind when she reaches out other than to thank him for the book and to tell him it has shifted something for her. She doesn't really expect him to respond, but he does.
Ellie: And he replied on my various last day on campus. And said let's just hang out on a phone call or something.
Jon: I was getting a fair bit of inbound communication once the book was out in the world and there was a bit of momentum building, but I'm really, I was, I'm really awake to what it's like to be a young person in this moment in time.
And I've done a couple of talks at universities and these sorts of things, but to actually get someone who is prepared to contact me and say, this spoke to me at some level. I was like, okay, I just had an instinct.
They end up meeting in London. To talk about the ideas Jon has given voice to and the resonance Ellie is feeling. She explains that the stories in his book have cut through some of her feelings of being lost and given her a sense of hope.
Ellie: I'm definitely infected by the citizen story. And Jon's kind of. Way of looking at the world just felt like really refreshing compared to the other narratives we were being sold. Like certainly at school, like when you have a careers advisor come in and they're like what do you wanna do when you like grow up?
And I was like I just wanna be outside and, and do things that feel good. And they're like we can't really help you with that. I was like, okay, cool. I was the only one in my school year not to apply for uni. So that was a pretty kind of uncomfortable time. But I, it was, yeah, it was a weird one, but I knew that I wanted to do something else, so I actively chose at every corner to just do that instead.
During that first meeting, and there have been many since Ellie describes her love of the natural world and how happy she feels when she's outside. She tells him she wants to be involved in something like the Citizen Action stories told in his book, but she doesn't know where to begin as she is laying all of this out. John has an idea.
Jon: I really deeply believe that if we're gonna break out of these stories, we're gonna be led out of them by folk who haven't been so steeped in them that they can actually naturally live in something else. They can choose to inhabit a different logic.
And so I was instrumentally using Ellie from the moment I heard from her. But it, I had an instinct to pick up this connection and understand what she was up to. And. And then as you can already tell, as your listeners can already tell that the energy of this human is pretty punchy. I just tried to support it all the way I could.
Ellie: The first thing that, like Jon said to me was like, go and find the others. And I was like, okay, how do I go and find them?
Because Ellie's concerns were related to the climate and because being in nature is what makes her happy Jon suggests Ellie make contact with a group called the Re-action Collective. They are located in different countries across the world, including the UK. So Ellie starts volunteering with the collective online.
Before long she's invited out to the Alps, not only to see where it all began, but to feature in a short documentary about the inherent potential in taking a community approach to meeting the challenge of the climate crisis.
Ellie: And ironically that was on my birthday, so that was the best birthday present I'd received up to that point. It was the invitation to go out and do that.
Re-actionism is not a widely used or perhaps even widely known word, but up in the Alps as she's introduced to different members of the Re-action Collective, it's what Ellie is witnessing. She meets and mucks in with the team fixing up and creatively rebranding old ski wear for resale at reasonable prices.
This not only means more people can afford to dress warmly enough to get outdoors, but it also generates profits to put into environmental regeneration initiatives, and it keeps clothes out of landfill, which as Ellie learns, is hugely relevant in a world where up to 85% of clothing ends up on rubbish heaps or being incinerated.
According to the United Nations, the rate of clothing production has doubled over the past 15 years, and studies suggest the clothing sector is responsible for up to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Equally, making the clothes that hang in our wardrobes requires enough water to fill more than 80 million Olympic sized swimming pools.
Ellie is also introduced to people who run a secondhand shop and others who collect food waste from a local town to turn into biofuel. She's taking it all in and feeling at ease.
Ellie: When I was there, it felt like that was the first time that I was really in it, like really in reaction, and I felt at that point I found the others.
She also visits an old supermarket. That Re-action has creatively repurposed to benefit the community and the environment where there were once shelves of food. There is now secondhand furniture and clothing. As well as spaces for the community to gather and teach each other new skills.
Jon: I think at one point there was even like car teaching people how to repair their own cars and stuff. It all in this space that have been abandoned by consumerism in this perfect metaphor. But perhaps most of all, it is a place that generates a sense of being a part of something bigger by working collectively to find creative ways to act.
Ellie: Finding reaction gave me permission to imagine another way, like to stop believing that my only role in life was to consume and comply. Just demonstrated that you can be in relationship with one another, with the land, with community, and that there's that way of being is not only possible, but it's already alive in so many places.
The film that documents her journey from feeling overwhelmed and alone with her worries about the climate crisis to, as she puts it, finding her crew is aptly called Actionism. The art of finding your people and taking collective action.
Jon: This is where the power of the language is so powerful because it's and when you juxtapose it with not to critique activism, not to say that we don't need activism but activism is a sort of accepts where power is now and says like, how do we try and change that or reject it or whatever. Whereas Actionism is just going, what can we do? What if we come together, what can we do that I couldn't do on my own, and what can we do right now right here? It's not immediately enough, but it's such a, it speaks so powerfully to the kind of the deep need for agency that we all have.
By the time Ellie returns to England, she has a better sense of what she wants and even needs to do to move forward. She starts an 18-month apprenticeship, which allows her to work with reaction and simultaneously study corporate social responsibility at a university in the city of Manchester, she sees weaving the two together as a chance to spark meaningful change beyond the collective.
Jon: It's demonstrating that there's something else that we can do now and actively moving towards the future while still being in the present. The kind of leadership that, that Ellie's now showing as part of the reaction collective is potentially transformative. Like these things start in these ways that that they bubble and connect and, but then, but this is really a very powerful thing I think.
Ellie: Reaction has massively felt like a homecoming and like a remembering of what actually matters. Now it's just about showing up with kind of questions in both hands and your heart kind of wide open to, the massive kind of complexity that is the reaction collective. And I just feel completely rerouted now and there's that kind of, that pulse of life and possibility I, on my own, my generation needs to carry the shoulder, that burden of the climate crisis.
She's now able to take a single step at a time aware that each one of them is moving towards a bigger vision. Knowing she's no longer alone is a source of stability. But so is having found an approach that she felt was right from the start.
Ellie: And the action that Re-action was taking at that point felt very different to the action that I was told to take at the time, which felt very joyless and like big sacrifices. But they were showing that it can be really joyful and colorful and creative. And I hadn't seen that before, to be honest. To me that the kind of action activism was all very protest and placards and you had to go and shout on the street for an afternoon, and that just, that wasn't my vibe. I am like, I'm neurodivergent and I'm being in places of lots of protests and shouting was just not not of an environment that I wanted to be in.
Ellie still feels that mainstream messaging on climate awareness and action is missing a vital opportunity to encourage the kind of involvement that can have an impact.
Ellie: We're not guided in a way to, to do something different. I just got properly frustrated by it. 'cause, I like, again, like I just felt riddled with guilt anytime I tried to do something else because it was never quite good enough or I wasn't being activist enough or there was just something about me that didn't really hit the bear on what was the expectations, how you should be showing up for the planet, and then the kind of the joyful things that you end up doing are so much better than the other stuff.
She still cares deeply about the state of the earth, but knowing that neither she nor her generation can solve the climate crisis by themselves, the burden of feeling they should has eased. And she has also learned to see her own concern from a different, more galvanizing perspective.
Ellie: Climate anxiety, I don't think ever really fully disappears. Even when you're surrounded by people who understand in a way that I'd never experienced before. I also learned that's okay and that it doesn't have to disappear for us to keep going. If anything, it can be used as like a force to keep us in motion, but I feel like you do have to have that awareness of, okay, so there's stuff that I can do day to day, but actually the real work that needs doing is the finding of the others and the acting and not the, okay, I'm gonna get my disposable coffee cup outta the cupboard and go to a coffee shop, because, that's the thing that, that makes me feel good.
Both Ellie and John have traveled far on their respective journeys, starting from different places. They have ended up on the same path. Understanding and experiencing how making use of citizen agency genuinely can lead to change. And the key is working in community.
Jon: This is not an easy time to be human and acknowledging that and feeling the pain of it and finding the others in order to be able to hold that together and to be able to act together. Just is the work in this time and it's not easy and there's no point pretending it is or pretending that we're all happy and joyful every minute of every day.
Ellie: And also we can't keep like clinging certainty and expecting that we can keep, like buying our way out of this problem. There's a lot of stuff that we can unlearn and it's easier to do that when we're in community with others.
A billion choices have led us. Here, and we've got to make a billion more to feel and act our way towards something better and more meaningful and joyful.
This episode of Living Planet was produced by Tamson Walker and edited and mixed by me, Neil King. Our sound engineer was Jan Winkelman. With thanks also to two-step productions and reaction for the inclusion of some sound from their film. Actionism Living Planet is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What do you think of this episode? We'd love to hear your thoughts, so please do send us an email or voice message. Our email address is living [e-mail]. Of course, you can also leave a rating or review on the podcast platform of your choice.