Consumerism is poison to the mind

We are bombarded with a plethora of ways to occupy our time so that we can be exploited just to keep our economies going.

Our modern societies are geared towards growth and that means to guarantee spending, people have to consume much more than they need, whether that be in goods or services. But what we find is that while they may occupy our minds for a time, we can soon get bored with them, especially if what we get next is more of the same with slight variations. The core of the problem is that we have been trained to rely upon others to entertain us, which is really about distracting us from making our own entertainment.

The music industry want us to buy our music and crowd into stadiums en masse to listen to some big name artists, rather than learn to play music for ourselves. Sports is similarly geared towards packing us into stadium seats and buying merchandise so we can cheer on a few others who actually play the sports. These industries are set up to dissuade us from entertaining ourselves by setting the performance bar so high that we are obviously not going to be good enough to do it ourselves.

While we watch TV cooking programs, we are generally spending more on bought food because we do not have the time to make the sort of food that the programs promote. We are dissuaded from actually making our own food just because it is being drilled into us that so-called good food is too time-intensive for us to do it justice. The impression we take away from this is that unless we have the time to put in the effort, we may as well pay for others to do it for us. This is the core of consumerism, but we do not have to accept that that is the only way to live.

Consumerism relies upon the notion that creativity is expensive and time-consuming. That may be true, but that is relevant if we consider only he output of the process as important. Creating something can be very fulfilling, and even meditative and relaxing, but not if our time is so filled up with working to survive that we only have time left over from that to cram is some distracting entertainment. .

The paradox is that we are being persuaded that we as individuals count while we are being sucked into being addicted to relying upon others who want to monetise almost everything we want to have and do. We are offered individual freedom but what we really get is mass addiction. The Arnaut family is worth over US$200 billion through over 75 brands of cosmetics. They did that by basically persuading us that we cannot present ourselves in public without help from them. Advertising relies upon us seeing ourselves as inadequate without help from something we have to pay for.

Our economies rely upon that view of ourselves to keep the growth momentum going. Industries are spending billions to keep us consuming what they peddle, even if it pollutes our environment and poisons us. Some of the most effective decisions we can make are to opt out of the advertising propaganda peddled to us and choose to live without a lot of the products and services that we have come to rely upon, but which are actually not necessary for our lives at all. It does not take a very large percentage of people to opt out of indulging an industry to make that industry far less viable.

If we do that in enough areas, together we can have a huge effect upon reducing the levels of the earth's resources used and how much waste we produce. However, industries that have been affected by such consumer downturns ramp up their propaganda, and lobby governments to embed them into government services. The dairy and sugar industries lobbied to pervert the US food chart to recommend unhealthy amounts of their products. People in the US are consuming an average of 20kg of cheese per year compared to half that a few decades ago, and flavoured milk contains as much sugar as soft drinks.

Those industries are only doing that because they are afraid of the collective choice that consumers have made to not buy their products, at least in not so large amounts. That means that we are having an effect, and us continuing to cut their products out of our lives will force many of them to drop out of the market, and hopefully to the point that many industries become unviable.

We must not let ourselves be dissuaded from ramping up our efforts to wean ourselves off what we do not really need. That does not mean that we do not indulge ourselves from time to time, but just not buy into the wholesale consumerism that many are trying to tell us is essential for us to maintain our lifestyles. No, we do not need to be so addicted to what is actually making us unhealthy and stressed out. We can still have good lives without the majority of what we buy. That is often by just being more judicious about what and when we spend our money.