Spent‘s Main Argument

We are social primates who survive and reproduce largely through attracting practical support from kin, friends, and mates.  We get that support insofar as others view us as offering desirable traits that fit their needs.  Over the past few million years we have evolved many mental and moral capacities to display those desirable traits.  Over the past few thousand years, we have learned that these desirable traits can also be displayed through buying and displaying various goods and services in market economies. (p75)

The standard self-display strategy in most developed societies is to seek the highest-paying full-time employment permitted by one's intelligence and personality, and to use the resulting income to buy branded goods and services at full retail price. … As a self-display strategy, it is very inefficient. … Almost every other way of acquiring and displaying human artifacts or experiences sends richer signals about one's personal qualities. (p257) …

Buying new, real, branded, premium products at full prices from chain-store retailers is the last refuge of the unimaginative consumer, and it should be your last option.  If offers low narrative value – no stories to tell about interesting people, places, and events associated with the product's design provenance, acquisition, or use. It reveals nothing about you except your spending capacity and your gullibility, conformism, and unconsciousness as a consumer.  It grows no physical, social, or cultural roots into your local environment.  It does not promote trust, reciprocity, or social capital.  It does not expand your circle of friends and acquaintances.  It does not lead you to learn more about the invention, manufacture, operation, or maintenance of the things around you. … The alternatives listed above try to minimize retail spending not just to save money, but to maximize trait display power. (p270) …

We have wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display – language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty – and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates, and gaining prestige.  Instead we rely on goods and services acquired through education, work, and consumption to advertise our personal traits to others.  Those costly signals are mostly redundant or misleading, so others usually ignore them.  They prefer to judge us through natural face-to-face interaction.  We think our gilding dazzles them, though we ignore their own gilding when choosing our our won friends and mates.  This is an absurd way to live, but it's never too late to come away from it.  (p328)

Whenever you think you want to buy a new physical product, consider these options instead.  Just Don't Get It … Find the One You Already Own … Borrow One from a Friend, Relative, or Neighbor … Rent It … Buy It Used … Buy It in Generic, Replica, or Trickle-Down Form … Make It Yourself … Commission It from a Local Artisan … Wait Three Years Before Buying New Technologies … Ask to Get It as a Gift …

The whole valence, significance, and trait-signaling power of any given product can be radically altered by the stories we tell about it.  … Rather than buying more products, almost everyone can improve his conversational skills more effectively through Dale Carnegies's "six ways to make people like you." ….

We yearn to display our distinctive traits – our individuality, uniqueness, identity – in as many of our possessions as possible … Some new technologies of mass customization will make it ever easier for a wider range of consumers to "express their individuality" (display their traits and preferences) through products made uniquely for them. (pp258-274)

These tactics … might seem inefficient to economists [who say] … If a male lawyer who can bill $300 per hour can buy a new shirt in ten minutes from Neiman Marcus for $100, rather than searching through a thrift store for forty minutes to buy a used shirt for $5, he should. … [But] If the lawyer spent fifty minutes browsing GQ magazine to see which leisure suits are in fashion, twenty minutes choosing which one he prefers, ten minutes calling local stores to find out who has it in stock, sixty minutes driving to and from Neiman Marcus, and forty post-purchase minutes defending his GQ reading and shirt purchasing against his wife's aesthetic skepticism, then he's really spent three hours on the shirt purchase. … 

By contrast he could have driven to the nearest thrift store, used its logical arrangement of stock by garment type, size, and color to quickly identify some interesting shirts, tried them on, picked one, and bought it, in a total shirt-purchase time of about one hour. If his wife doesn't like the shirt, no problem: it only cost $5.  It could be burned impulsively on the barbecue to display his respect for the wife's superior aesthetic judgment, and she would love him for it, and they would have connubial canoodling for two whole hours, and he would still come out ahead.  Plus the whole episode would make a great dinner-party story.  (pp270-1)