I feel the pull of constant consumption. You, too? The sheer volume of marketing messages, affiliate links, emails, and text messages is stunning. Buy now, last chance, you need. Heading into our Tended Life experiment, I decluttered multiple boxes of excess stuff out of a single bedroom. Yikes.
It doesn’t feel good. Movies and documentaries like Wall-E, The Story of Stuff, and Buy Now! try to nudge us to open our eyes wider and reconsider.
Post-Depression and World Wars, it seems like there was some collective awareness about the value of cared-for quality and the risks of chasing a consumption-based economy.
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without became a popular slogan.
Dorothy Sayers, in Why Work, penned this zinger:
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.
Michael Brower observed that, following the thrift brought about by war,
It would take well-funded marketing efforts and changes in economic policy to shift these American ideas away from these less consumptive and more contented patterns to patterns of overconsumption and rising materialism. Notably, this is also the point in time when American levels of well-being and happiness began to decline from a high point in the 1950s to the present day. Simply put, the agenda of getting Americans to link their well-being with ever more consumption may have resulted in economic growth (and a good deal of profit from those who control and supply consumer markets), but it also directly reduced the well-being of Americans.
Hyperconsumption doesn’t create flourishing people. Materialism correlates with diminishing well-being.
Is the profit good? doesn’t go far enough.
Is the product good? In quality, and in impact on other humans and the world?
Guilt isn’t the point. Most of us are doing the best we can with what we know at any given time. One of life’s gifts is that we get a chance to learn, and we get a chance to change.
We don’t have to consume because an artificial sales cycle says we should.
We don’t have to consume to follow trends created by marketers to fuel the purchasing pipeline.
We don’t have to consume because a better product exists than the one we have that still functions.
We don’t have to consume more than is healthy for our bodies, our souls, or our neighbors.
Good word. Thank you!