The Real Curriculum / Doing not Saying

Stand behind a child in a supermarket queue and watch what they watch. Not the sweets at eye level, though those are engineered for them. They watch you. The small sigh before you reach for the thing. The half-second of hesitation. What your face does when the card goes through.

I have spent my working life studying why grown adults look away from the largest problem we have. The short answer is that we are extremely good at it. I have written about five defences: distance (it is far away in space, in time, in social relevance), doom (catastrophic losses with guilting), dissonance (the gap between what we know and how we act), denial (the wish not to mention it), and identity (we filter out whatever threatens our self-image). None of these are stupidity. They are mostly self-protection, and they work a bit too effectively.

Here is what I keep thinking about lately: nobody is born with them. They are learned. And the first classroom is the hallway, the kitchen, the checkout, the parcel on the doorstep.

Behavioural science draws a useful line between wanting and liking. Kent Berridge (1996) and his colleagues spent decades showing that these run on different machinery in the brain. Wanting is the itch‚ the lean-forward pull toward a thing, easily triggered by a cue, generously supplied by dopamine. Liking is the quieter one: the actual pleasure of the thing once it is yours, produced by much smaller and more fragile systems. Usually the two travel together. But they can come apart, and when they do, it is the wanting that keeps running. You can want something you no longer like at all.

Almost everything in modern commerce is built on the first one. Liking is hard to sell twice. The itch can be manufactured on demand, refreshed hourly, delivered to a device in a child's hand. Dopamine. The business model does not require anyone to enjoy anything.

Children learn what to want by watching, not by being told. Whatever we say about materialism is not what they learn. The curriculum is the sigh, the scroll, the unboxing, how we talk about the neighbours' new car, whether anything in the house is ever cared for, mended, or loved past its second year.

There is a finding I return to often. Materialism in children does not rise steadily with age. It spikes around twelve or thirteen, and it tracks self-esteem. When Chaplin and John gave children direct evidence that their peers liked them, expressions of materialism dropped so sharply that the age differences vanished. Their later work points the same way: supportive parents and friends raise self-esteem, and children who feel securely held reach for objects less. Wanting, it turns out, is often a stand-in for something else.

This matters well beyond shopping. A child is quietly assembling an answer to a question they cannot yet phrase: is there enough? What is sufficiency? Someone who learns early that satisfaction always lives one purchase ahead will meet climate change as pure subtraction; less, worse, smaller, sacrifice. That is the loss and doom defence, installed in childhood, decades before the first news bulletin about emissions. Someone who learned that things can be chosen slowly, used well, spoken with care, repaired and kept anyway, will hear the same facts as a design problem rather than a punishment.

Plastics make all this concrete. Of all the plastic ever made, only around nine per cent has been recycled. Roughly a tenth has been burned. Everything else is still here somewhere; in ground, in water, in us. Children understand this instantly. It is the adults who need the abstraction.

So I no longer think the task is teaching children to want less. Wanting less is a thin, joyless goal, and it makes the future sound like a punishment. The better one is teaching them to like well. Let them watch you finish a jar. Repair something clumsily and keep using it. Say out loud, now and then: I nearly bought that, and then I didn't, and by Thursday I'd forgotten it existed.

They are not listening to your values. They are watching your hands.

Per Espen Stocknes

Per Espen Stoknes is a serial entrepreneur, including co-founding clean-tech
company GasPlas. He’s also a TED Global speaker, a psychologist with doctoral
degree in economics, and co-director of Centre for Sustainability at the
Norwegian Business School in Oslo. An experienced foresight facilitator and
academic, he’s the author of several books, among them Money & Soul (2009)
and the award-winning book: What We Think About When We Try Not To Think
About Global Warming (2015). His latest books are Tomorrow’s Economy (2021)
on MITPress, and Earth For All (2022) with the Club of Rome. Per Espen has
served as member of Norwegian Parliament, and on the EU Commission’s
mission board on Horizon Europe’s Climate Change and Societal Adaptation. He
has been project lead for the Club of Rome’s www.Earth4All.life project.