The dilemma of consumerism

They say, the more you have, the better you feel in life. But is it always the case?

Why is it that people never seem to stop buying if having more is the solution?

Apparently, as it turned out, having more goods is simply a marketing ploy that is insatiable unless you are wise enough to sort out between what is important and things you can do without.

Perhaps, most of us are convinced that it’s okay to buy more stuff (we often won’t use as much as we thought we would) just because it’s on sale. Who doesn’t like to buy things on sale anyway?

And if you will just be honest with yourself, you have literally so many stuff that are way more than what you need. How many pairs of shoes do you have in store right now? And how’s it going when you’re limited to go out these days?

From Consumerism isn’t a sellout – if capitalism works for all, which by the way is a good read, there are four types of critiques concerning consumerism. And they are:

1. Moral — “The moral critique of consumerism is that the acquisition of things displaces more worthwhile activities or priorities. Instead of shopping, we should be spending time with friends and family, in places of worship, or in nature. Even as consumer societies meet our immediate, shallow desires, they are said to corrode our deeper selves. “They do not rejoice in what they have, no matter how much it is, so much as they lament what they still lack, or think they lack. Their soul is eaten away with cares as they compete in the struggle for success.” That was Saint Basil the Great, sometime around the middle of the fourth century.”
2. Aesthetic — “Here the problem is the brashness, the showiness of material consumption, whether of goods or services. The aesthetic critic highlights not how much we consume, but what we consume.”
3. Financial — “the impact on personal finances of buying lots of stuff now, often using debt to do so, and putting too little aside for the future. We are induced, through sophisticated advertising efforts, to consume even more than we would in the absence of ministrations of marketeers. The knock against consumerism is that it displaces wiser spending or saving.”
4. Environmental — “Things take energy to make, transport, and use. Many services are energy-intensive too, with air travel just the most obvious example. Energy is scarce, and currently produced in ways that are heating up the planet.”

I know most of us are guilty about buying stuff for the sake of buying. And yes, we do enjoy the dopamine our bodies release every time we hit the ‘add to cart’ and ‘buy’ buttons.

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