Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, New Year – what an exemplary spending spree. But the advertisements showed just how happy and popular we would be: it’s only failures who can’t afford it and miseries who opt out. There’s quite a lot of irony in all this – getting and spending not what Jesus was about. But the more we buy the greater the profit, and money flows up in a privatised world hugely polarised by wealth and dangerous power (the countries ranked happiest are the more equal).
In the normal course of life we all consume (globally the richest 1% emit twice the carbon of the poorest 50%), and enticement by producers is only to be expected. But we should be alert that there may be problematic features. Try looking at the long lists of unfamiliar chemical additives (preservatives, attractive colours, flavours and fragrances …) to many household products. And did humans really exist without the daily shower and change of clothes, the cosmetics, supplements and gyms that now seem required to endorse identity?
Particularly sinister are products to which we can become addicted: we will need no further persuasion. Of course alcohol and tobacco began in innocent ignorance. But the corporate greed that long rejected the smoking-cancer link has provided a model for climate change denial since the 1960s, and the career of nicotine continues in the vast experiment of vaping/snus. Humans did not evolve protection against much that is now all around us – criminal drugs and scams, gambling and porn, the dubious social media and influencers that replace mutual face-to-face familiarity and evidence.
Perhaps the final weapons deployed by the power of commerce are obsolescence and debt. New technology may have defects undiscovered or unrevealed, and for users there are always costs and confusions of change. In a digital world it is easy to enforce consuming the new simply by ending system provision: some, perhaps elderly, will be disempowered, unimportant casualties. As for debt, we may calculate that a mortgage or equity release is justifiable. But many debts arise without due care: the buying of money is costly (odd how interest and inflation somehow resemble money creating and consuming itself) and British household financial debt exceeds £100billion. Problems spiral destructively If we fail repayments, and if destitute we may find no way to recover.
How we individually tackle or evade the many problems of life of course varies with our resources and situation. The human race lived for 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers sharing and cooperating in small groups, their awareness restricted to familiar time and place. Their evolution with very necessary concerns for safety and food lingers in present futile behaviours: the luxury yacht promises a safe realm, a sugary drink the energy to make change.
Improved survival since the 1800s has surged our population fivefold, just as our carbon energy consumption p.c. has similarly increased (and look where that has got us!). An excess now very plain is our calorie intake, in Europe and USA often over 3000 cals daily when nearer 2000 will do for our less active and less chilly lives (highly-processed foods probably link reward dopamine with habit glutamate). How many pounds a week go in the mouth? A wiser diet will also reduce ill-health and its social costs, and spare the natural world further agricultural invasion.
Sharing is an excellent escape from consumerism, to be understood as enlarging rather than diminishing self. Public libraries were a fine idea, and now charity shops. More use of public transport would bring a global reduction of waste and pollution. Tackling the wider consumption and waste issue requires systematic steps to reduce, redesign, repair, reuse, recycle.
In our worrying and fast changing world even our own sense of identity can lack firm footing. Many distractions seem to make us feel better (from buying iffy glam to shouting populist slogans) in a temporary way. What we need to acquire and enjoy (does more than a decade of school much help self-understanding or practicality?) are the useful skills of adult life, not least parenting a better next generation (note the many young neglected at home during covid shutdowns). To discover, to think and learn anew are joys.
A simple positive way to cheer oneself up is to do something for someone else (back to Christmas with the redemption of Scrooge). Kindness is natural (exemplified by Jesus and key to Humanism), think of those early humans when life depended on mutual support. The response to kindness benefits both sides. A lot better than another credit card dedicated to the worship of GDP.