The consumerist culture has been expanding inexorably across the world even to the remotest places. The result is that most of our purchases are aimed at satisfying induced wants, not real needs. It is puzzling, for instance, to see people, who seem to be striving for survival and struggling to make ends meet, holding a sophisticated cellular phone – and sometimes having more than one – only to come to know later that they had to pawn them to get some cash for basic needs.
In less than half a century, there has been a sixfold rise in consumption under the influence of cultural conventions that affect people’s behavior. Government officials and economists proclaim that consumption is necessary to stimulate economic growth. The thriving advertising industry lures citizens non-stop through the media and street billboards to make them believe that they will be happier if they have access to more services and goods of civilization.
Do we need to purchase so many “commodities of modernity”? Tom Hodgkinson wrote in the Guardian recently: “We did actually manage quite well for many millennia without computers or mobile phones. Shakespeare had no Blackberry; Aristotle managed without an i-Phone. Christianity spread around the globe without blogs. Christ preached His sermon on the mount without the need of a PA system and Powerpoint presentation. All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life.”
This thought-provoking approach may help us to focus on what is essential in life and how we want our world to be. Compulsion to acquire and flaunt the most modern “status symbols” – luxury automobiles, the latest cellphone models, designer clothing, expensive jewelry – might be a sign of low self-esteem. They mean that we wish others to admire us for the brands we wear, the things we possess and the lifestyle we display, not by who we really are. The Earth we pollute pays a heavy toll for our materialism and superficiality.
Spiraling consumerism is a major cause of environmental degradation (besides inducing people to put moral values at the back seat for the sake of acquiring what they desire and live up-scale lifestyles; since greed is insatiable, “the ends justify the means”). Many Earth’s ecosystems are on the verge of breaking down or even get extinct. We live in a finite world, with limited resources; we cannot continue to overexploit them, lest we gravely endanger ourselves and the survival of future generations.
Science doesn’t have a formula to save the planet from our destructive ways. The only efficacious solution is to live in a more sustainable way, that is, a simple and modest life. And stop cooperating with a wasteful culture that requires things to be consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate. The Earth is limited in its capacity to assimilate and synthesize the waste we produce.
The challenge is to moderate our wants, reduce our carbon footprint, fight superficiality and mediocrity and welcome a spirituality that upholds the most genuine human values of simplicity, solidarity and communion with nature and other human beings. Money, and all the products and services it makes possible for ourselves to avail of, can contribute to our well-being but they, certainly, cannot obtain for us happiness; sobriety, awareness of oneself, truth, love, self-giving, deep personal relationships, communion, meditation and faith do.
