Consumerism

For much of history, almost everyone on earth owns… hardly anything at all. The clothes they stand up in, a knife, maybe a jug… if things are going really well, a few farming tools. Living standards remain the same year after year. Starting in the early 1700s, a change starts to take place. In north-western Europe, factories begin to open.

They produce new kinds of materials at incredible speed. Quickly, new products appear, and lots of them. At the same time, families who used to farm now receive wages from the factories, so after generations of owning only what they needed to survive, they find they can go shopping for a candlestick or some cutlery, a buckle or buttons. The more people spend, the more businesses grow, and the more workers they hire… who spend some of their wages on the businesses’ products, so the businesses grow more, and so on. This cycle is good news for governments, too.

They take more tax, from people’s wages and business’s profits. With this money, they build hospitals, schools, new roads. This new way of life brings dramatic changes. People eat better, receive an education; more children survive to adulthood, and people live longer overall. But as factories continue to produce more and more, faster and faster, they hit a problem.

They are producing more items than people are buying. How can companies convince people to buy more? How can they make people want more things? One answer, they find, is advertising. Fast forward to today, and companies continue to use advertising to sell more products.

On the TV, billboards, our social media, companies show us not just the things we can have, but the life we can have… if we will only spend our way to it. Ads encourage us to strive for better — the coolest sneakers, the newest cell phone. They encourage us to buy products beyond our basic needs in order to feel better in ourselves — to gain happiness, or to look better to others — to gain status. The idea that possessions — and buying more and more of them — can bring us happiness or status, is known as consumerism. But what happens when we follow this promise: ‘spending more equals a happier life’?

Have you ever found that, before long, the ‘coolest’ sneakers you bought slip out of fashion? Or the ‘latest’ cell phone is ousted by a newer model? Where does this leave us? Do we ever arrive at the lifestyle, the happiness, promised by the ads? And this isn’t the only dilemma consumerism raises.

Unlike the economy, the planet’s resources don’t grow endlessly. As we chop down trees, mine iron, drill for oil, and burn fossil fuels to produce consumer goods, we use up the earth’s supplies. We do this quicker when we are in a hurry to replace the things we already own. Companies sometimes encourage this ‘throw-away culture’ by designing products to become quickly unusable. Home printers built to break after a certain number of print jobs, phones that require a different charging cable for each new model, devices impossible to take apart for repair… All are examples of built-in limitations, sometimes called planned obsolescence, designed to make us buy new items more often.

While an economic cycle of extracting, producing, selling, and discarding brings us many benefits — jobs, new products to choose from, a higher standard of living, consumerism brings problems too — the failure of ‘stuff’ to grant us the happiness ads promise, and the environmental damage caused by producing and discarding it.