A Culture Conditioned to Consume

Published February 26, 2008

By Alex Hemmer

As good environmentalists, many of us try to reduce the amount of materials we use and throw away each day. You know the routine: use a reusable mug instead of a Styrofoam cup for coffee, print on both sides of the paper, don’t let food go to waste, walk instead of drive, etc. Besides saving the environment, conservation also saves a lot of money.

But when a closer look is taken at our lifestyle, frugality and conservation are nowhere to be seen. My dorm room is full of shit I don’t need anymore and probably didn’t need in the first place. I can barely log onto the internet or open a magazine without being inundated with cheesy advertisements trying to get me to open my wallet. We only wear clothing that is new and in style. Look into any store and you’ll find aisles upon aisles filled with ridiculously pointless disposable products. Shopping has become America’s new favorite pastime and answer to everything. To put it simply: we were born into a culture of consumption.

Ever since we were children, we were taught that more is better. As a kid, more toys meant more fun. Once adults, we’re told that the purpose of our lives is to make as much money as possible so we can buy more stuff. Even if a few of us hippies in Vermont decide to reduce our usage for environmental or moral reasons, the vast majority of the people in the world will continue to follow this trend of consumption. Why? Because in the end we are just part of the system. And the sad fact is, the system needs us to spend as much as we can, as fast as we can.

Think about it. Our entire economy depends on a steady outflow of money from the lower and middle classes. We can see evidence of this wherever we look. Take our holiday spending habits for example. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, America enters a wild frenzy of shopping that clogs malls and plazas from coast to coast. Yet despite this overindulgence, economists complain that if consumer spending does not increase, the nation will slip into recession. Capitalism relies on constant growth; in order to grow, one must spend.

As the main component of capitalism, corporations have perfected strategies on how to discretely keep the cash flowing from their customers. Why do you think Walmart has been so successful? People drive away with bags full of merchandise and smiles on their faces as they think of all the great bargains they found. But what they often don’t realize is that those products are made as cheaply as possible, so that they will inevitably break after purchase, thus forcing the customer to buy more cheap plastic crap. In the end, more money is spent.

This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to Walmart. Planned obsolescence is a well-documented and deeply ingrained tactic of nearly every business. Companies create intentional defects or use cheaper, more fragile materials in producing consumer items so they last a much shorter time than they would have had they been made to full capacity. On top of that, many things come in a convenient, but completely unnecessary, disposable form. Pretty much anything we use on a daily basis, from pens to Porsches, could last way longer than they do. But they don’t. Say goodbye to quality goods and thrifty shopping and hello to mass consumption.

As companies devised ways to sell more products, banks came up with an ingenious plan to increase the amount of money the average person can spend: the credit card. The idea behind this is that you can spend as much money as you want, even if you don’t actually have that much in your bank account. Advertisements everywhere urge us to apply for a new card, promising the absolute joy of uninhibited spending. Never mind the fact that you eventually have to pay this money back, often with interest. Most people don’t quite understand this; the average credit card debt in the U.S. is $8,000. But hey, those new shoes sure make you feel good.

Don’t expect the government to come to our aid any time soon. Most politicians wouldn’t dare to call for major conservation efforts or an end to induced consumption strategies because of the enormous influence companies and their lobbyists have within Washington. There’s no better way to commit political suicide than to piss off your corporate donors. You’ll find that most economic policies support this scheme for mass consumption. Whenever the government talks about trying to “stimulate the economy,” what they actually mean is they need to get the American people to spend more. That’s exactly what tax cuts and the recently passed economic stimulus plan are intended to do. Give the people a little money so they can spend that amount and more on the corporate sponsors’ shiny new products.

The consequences of this compulsory consumption are devastating to both our society and the environment. Exposed to incessant advertising and helpless to exploitative economic policies, people become little more than automated pawns in an unscrupulous system. Any other values or lifestyles are hindrances, so will be slowly squeezed out. Despite what we may tell ourselves, happiness and fulfillment are now synonymous with material gain. Is this really what we want out of life?

While it may be difficult to prove the impact of consumption on our society, the physical consequences can’t be ignored. With production and consumption greatly outpacing necessity, mountains of still highly usable “waste” are recklessly dumped in our environment. Accumulating in landfills are millions of functional computers, refrigerators, TVs, shoes, iPods, batteries, CDs, and cell phones. There’s so much of this superfluous junk that hundreds of people actually live inside landfills in cities like Managua, Nicaragua, scavenging for anything they can use or sell.

The oceans, which have been used as civilization’s dumpster for the past hundred years, are now so full of debris that the future of life there seems bleak. An area the size of Texas lies in the Pacific Ocean where there is more than six times as much plastic as plankton.

Maybe those 100 billion plastic bags the U.S. produced last year weren’t such a good idea.

Where do we go from here? If this unneeded consumerism is as entrenched in our lifestyle as I have described, is there anything we can do to stop it? While it’s tempting to submit to pessimism and fatalism, we have to remember that there are millions of individuals out there whose spending habits can be changed for the better, one purchase at a time. These millions of people also have voices that can demand accountability and responsibility from politicians and corporate CEO’s. Either way, for the sake of our culture and our environment, we must shift away from this current era of compelled and conspicuous consumption to one of more conscious consumption.

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