Being a consumer has for some time caused me some amount of angst, as I can’t help but feel complicit in someone else’s plan. I’m not the type to say the government or large corporations are controlling us into becoming drone-consumers, but I do think that’s where the collective conscious might be heading – most behaviours are rewarded by the acquisition of material things.
Perversely, I’ve been a marketeer, so I was one of the people whose job it was to prize money from the hands of consumers. Again, I’m not doing that to control people, but because the company I worked for had the ambition to be profitable (and you can kind of understand why) it was my job to think of ways to extract money from folks. Me doing my job well meant – you guessed it – reward!
This is all part of the ever so gradual shift in mindset amongst a gaggle of generations. It was this Christmas that got me thinking about all of this. I sat watching my house full of gifts and happy people, and I should have been very happy. I was to be honest, but because of the people. However the overriding feeling I had, and still have is one of guilt. In our house we’re successful as most definitions would have it. We want for nothing, and yet we still strive for the next thing or event. We can’t sit back and think “Yep, this is enough”. Everything has to be geared towards growth and acceleration.
I wonder if me fighting this mindset is fighting the very thing that made humans as they are today. If it’s the in-built desire for improvement that has borne our advancement. If that is the case, I wonder if it’s all part of a closed system, and that it will be our demise too. Like a virus we’ll consume every ounce of the planet and then perish ourselves.
I wonder then if the next really big development in how we evolve won’t be technologically or politically, but instead spiritually? I’m not about to start preaching to a magic sky man, I haven’t made my mind up about religion just yet, but instead I mean our ability to understand life itself. I certainly couldn’t answer the questions – “What’s the point of life?”. The capitalist culture we live in is doomed to fail – I have no doubt whatsoever about that. They say that share price should always reflect the value of the underlying asset so the constant drive for more will of course fail. The Earth is a closed system!
After the over indulgences of Christmas we all hopped in the van and fled for the basics. We camped in a couple of freezing fields with only a small fan heater, no Wi-Fi, technology or even an ECU on the van and I felt so happy and relaxed. It was this very excursion that made me want to write this piece in the first place. What’s funny though, as soon as we got home, dependency on technology and the desire to be a good consumer goes up and would you believe… stress goes up too. Funny that.
