Are DIY and Self-Sufficiency the same thing?

Throughout the immediate postwar years ‘self-sufficiency’ meant ‘doing-it-yourself’ and ‘making do’ with limited resources not as a result of choice but necessity brought about by housing, material, product and labour shortages. From this earlier type of self-sufficiency two distinct lifestyles emerged. Marketers began to recognise the potential of ‘do-it-yourselfers’ as consumers and began to cash in with campaigns directed at young home-makers to entice them to buy a range of products from Laminex to paint. By contrast, the 1970s ‘back to the earth’ movement with its focus on self-sufficiency, organic gardening and sustainable living emerged as a response to dissatisfaction with mass consumption.

These two lifestyles continue to be promoted and adopted. There is a sharp contrast between the desires of aspirational ‘home-makers’ on the one hand and alternative life-stylers on the other. Alternative sustainable lifestyles – that reject the ideology of mass consumption – are in sharp contrast to the consumerist aspirations as presented in TV DIY shows such as ‘Better Homes and Gardens’, numerous glossy magazines and even more numerous retail outlets. This type of packaged DIY is not about self-sufficiency and sustainable living at all. What is evident is that there are philosophical differences between those who ‘do’ it themselves and those who ‘watch’ DIY being performed by professional TV personalities; between those who consciously reject over-consumption and those who remodel perfectly functional kitchens in order to maximise auction results by the superficial enhancements of their homes.

Self-sufficiency and sustainable living is about making a conscious choice to really ‘do-it-yourself’, about setting and meeting challenges. But it is also about a wider concern with lessening the impact on the environment by conserving resources, not just for one’s own family but for the benefit of the whole community for now and the future.

Marketers and advertisers are certainly adopting buzzwords like ‘green’, ‘environmentally-friendly’ and ‘organic’. But self-sufficiency as adopted by alternative lifestylers remains outside marketing hype. Most significant however, is that the self-provider lifestyle ethic is has not been easily co-opted.

 

The Consumerist Lament

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.[i]

In his 1960 follow-up to the best-selling The Hidden Persuaders, The Waste Makers, Vance Packard drew his reader’s attention to Dorothy L. Sayers’ lament over the hollowness of a life based on consumer choices.[ii] Although the concern of Sayers’ 1947 book, from which the above quote was drawn, centred on materialism’s negative impact on spiritual life, Packard shared Sayers’ distaste and dissatisfaction, deploring the pursuit of a high standard of living based on greed and waste.

By 1960, however, Packard observed a strengthening of a more strident pursuit of the consumerist agenda than had characterised preceding decades. Packard captured the mood of those concerned about the persuasive effect of modern marketing, the waste generated by mass production and consumption and the insatiable desire to keep up with the Joneses ultimately questioning the ability of the goods to deliver the good life.[iii]

It is common for writers concerned with consumer and other cultural issues to preface their work with a historical quote to remind readers of the choices they have but have perhaps chosen to ignore. This is my jumping off point.

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[i] Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘Why Work?’ in Creed or Chaos and other essays in popular theology, London: Methuen, 1947, p. 47; also quoted in Packard, The Waste Makers, London: Longmans, 1960.

[ii] Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, London: Longmans, 1957.

[iii] Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: an exploration of class behaviour in America, London: Longmans, 1960.