Our vulnerable consumer behaviour
As every moment our consumer behaviour warrants something to desire in today’s consumerist culture, satisfaction and happiness remain always in the future and paradoxically become objects of desire themselves, but ever more elusive.
Sense of craving, invigorated by our consumer behaviour, is on a treadmill; It has satisfaction and happiness in sight but seldom makes any real progress in getting hold of them.
We are awfully fast at judging the sea of products and services that surround us today as our needs. These products and services are new to our evolutionary understanding of possession. As a result, our untutored intuitions judge them to be our needs through insecurities and fear of loosing out. The retail sphere taps into this fear and fuels itself.
Through grand and gorgeous product events, corporations breed desires, but they fail (and it is understandably not their job) to elucidate how to build economic prosperity in order to afford their products – and most cannot. Unbelievable offers notoriously hack into our consumer behaviour, which is vulnerable to transaction utility – if you don’t need the product, why not direct your focus and make the decision based on its impressive 80% discount?
Things that we posses make a statement but in a large scheme of trade – buying and selling, before whatever statement our possessions are expected to make, we are primarily identified as consumers.
Consumerist culture and conscious consumerism
We carry more objects around than our ancestors ever did. And while our consumerist culture has given birth to some of the things that make our lives convenient, most harbinger chaos by demanding attention and care that cause unhealthy clinging.
Theory of conscious consumerism is not so much to stop consuming and lead an ascetic life, but to regulate consumption in a way that things that we own successfully reduce chaos.
But to our dismay, economic prosperity of countries is measured by our capacity to consume. Economic growth of countries, measured by gross domestic product (GDP), involves assessing amount of goods and services produced in a year. But it is a poor marker of what humans need in order to thrive.
Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, together who conceptualised and strategised the Paris Agreement, in 2015, argue in their new book The Future We Choose that the GDP marker is all about extracting, using and discarding resources. They argue that GDP as a marker fails to effectively consider the impacts of pollution and inequality and does not prioritise the value of health, education and even happiness.
Consumerist culture thrives as we compete and our merits are validated through incessant consumption. Things no longer sell merely by promoting their utilities, they are cloaked with meanings that aspire to define people who possess them. Like a peacock’s tail, which strictly acts as an ornament to attract mates and serves no other utility (and largely remains a threat to its own life).
Conscious consumerism instructs paying attention to these cloaked meanings that instil desire and identifying these products for their utility. And by not indulging in products that show no regard for our wellbeing, we regulate what enters the market and save money and time.
Withdrawing from consumerist culture
To withdraw from consumerist culture, we will have to make our consumer behaviour less vulnerable to stories corporations have to tell about their products and services. The goal is to minimise consumption and waste and control the narrative, by reusing and repurposing what’s already out.
Consumerism is not some disease that we are born with or suffer alone. It is a systematically constructed environment wherein our struggles to achieve goals are deliberately confused with desire to consume. It is an environment wherein the network of supply chain cleverly infiltrates every aspect of human life and incessantly prompts goods or services.
By showing interest and investing in products that are derived from renewable sources and services that enable recycling and upcycling, we can add momentum to the wheel of circular economy, which does not thrive on waste.
By enrolling into conscious consumerism, we not only put our money into products and services that make our lives more sustainably convenient but also help alleviate climate impacts and become a part of a solution to climate change.
Making a conscious inquire into every new object that enters our lives may sound tedious, but by doing so we subscribe to a lifestyle that is surrounded by essentials and manifested in our thoughts in a form of clear thinking. Consumerist culture influences our being, but our becoming doesn’t have to be prophesied by it.
