Introduction

In my generation, there’s been a lot of talk about consumerism—the cultural trend of acquiring goods and services habitually and in ever-increasing amounts. In college I learned a little bit about why it this trend came about and how it affects cultures and societies—both mine and others’. Tied to this information was a framework of opinions about what it means and what should be done about it. What I’ve noticed since graduating college is that the analysis and remedy of consumerism was not quite wrong, but incomplete. I’ve learned that there’s another dimension to consumerism (which I’ll cover in this post), and there’s more to how it should be addressed in everyday life (which I’ll cover in Part 2).

The high rate of consumption of material goods in Western societies (especially the US, and especially in the last 100 years) is pointed to as the result of certain cultural trends and the cause of others—many of which are considered threatening to the long-term health of societies. Consumerism is one of the reasons our well-being as a nation is so contingent upon the economic behavior of other nations. It’s also why Americans are in more debt than ever and why large corporations have now managed to amass such a great deal of money and power, the effects of which we see in national politics. It’s why cherished mom-and-pop businesses often get replaced by impersonal chain retailers and restaurants that, while lacking in identity or unique human experiences, are indeed cheaper and more convenient and thus allow us to consume more. It’s also at least part of the reason we worry about the amounts of raw material we’re extracting from the earth and what will happen when they run out.

How are these problems conventionally being addressed? I’ve noticed that common feelings about consumerism allow it to have a secondary effect on our lives, at least within my own generation. Consumerism—and the popular ways of resisting it—has acquired a moral valence. It’s considered responsible to do your shopping at thrift stores and farmers markets where possible, to put a creative spin on hand-me-down clothing, and to stay at hostels while traveling. On the other end, even the most extravagant goods and experiences get more love when they’re branded as “sustainable.” A significant section of Western culture encourages resistance to consumerism through some variation of buying differently (specifically, supporting local companies over big corporations and ethical businesses over exploitative ones) or simply buying less.

What I’ve noticed outside of college is that there is more to consumerism than just money spent and units sold, and being more conscious of our spending is not all that’s required to alleviate the negative effects of consumerism in our lives.

The consumerism I was warned about in college, which I’ll refer to as “material consumerism” from this point on, is measured by the amount of money we spend and the amount of goods we receive. It should be measured this way, because the movement of money and goods is what affects economies and cultures, and this is what’s studied in school. But there is definitely another kind of consumerism; more accurately, it’s a general definition of consumerism that is not measured by the amount of money spent. It’s simply the excessive habitual consumption of value. General consumerism is not necessarily even about the flow of goods and services from business to person; rather, it’s about the manner in which we consume any kind of value, from any source. This includes material consumerism, of course, because value is transferred when we buy things. But it also includes other things we ought to consider.

I’ll use an example to illustrate the distinction between material consumerism and general consumerism. Anyone who fears the dangers of material consumerism would appreciate me passing on a new $60 video game and instead buying a similar used game that’s a couple of years old. Better yet, I could borrow it from a friend for free. I understand why this is commended: it keeps more of my money local, which tends to be better for my community, and it (probably) reduces my dependence on a large corporate retailer with an already-concerning amount of influence over my society. However, with all that said, my general consumption would be exactly the same. I’d be consuming the same amount of game-value (though maybe from a different game), and it would take me roughly the same amount of time and attention to do so.

Similarly, I might decide that I don’t really need to subscribe to HBO because sharing my family’s Netflix account provides enough TV entertainment for me. I’ve saved money, but the amount of TV I consume may well be unchanged.

General consumption is about the flow of value. When value, in the form of material goods or entertaining ideas or any pleasant experience, is going from the world into us, it’s consumption. General consumption is unavoidable, of course, but when consumption-oriented activities reach a certain level of importance to us or take up a certain portion of our time and energy, I think this can and should be labelled a consumeristic lifestyle.

So, we can look at consumerism in terms of value instead of money and goods; what’s the point? If we are talking about any consumption of value, even that which is fiscally responsible and causes few-to-no negative long-term effects for other people or the environment, then why is it worth a second thought? My answer is that there’s another kind of negative consequence (which occasionally gets lumped into discussions about material consumerism), and that is the way in which consumerism affects the consumers, directly and personally. We tend to grow and change to better fit our lifestyles, and a lifestyle dominated by general (even frugal) consumption can inspire undesirable changes in us. Importantly, these changes are not simply allayed by bargain hunting or product sharing or ethical shopping.

For one, our habits of consumption can eat away at our own senses of self-worth. This happens because when we play the role of consumer, we really aren’t demonstrating any worth in that moment at all. In most cases, that’s why we have to pay money instead! And if this becomes too prominent an activity in our lives, it may start to feel like money is the only thing we have to offer the world. The band doesn’t show up to see the man in seat MM-13; they show up because of his money. But more importantly, even when the good or service is obtained for free, the problem persists. In fact, it’s worse: the consumer is reduced to some inert entity, having experiences but not being experienced by anyone else. In this case, we start to question whether we have anything to offer the world. Our habits inform our identities, and identifying ourselves primarily as spectators or enjoyers is bad for our self-worth because, in general, the spectator is just not cared about.

To another point, we can still get caught up in the impossible task of expressing our true individual selves though our consumption habits. The idea that our unique identities are established by what we consume is (successfully) conveyed in the advertisements of companies looking to increase demand for their products, but it lingers on even when we take those companies out of the equation, and it remains just as impossible to carry out. Consumption of any kind makes a poor instrument for expressing individuality, because the very nature of consumption implies sameness. It shows that we hold some of the same values as everyone else who consumed that thing. This is true for both the $500 Broadway show and the free underground rock show. It’s true that the less popular a particular thing is, the more it says about us when we choose to consume it, but this trend only goes so far. The rarer the good, the more effort we must spend to get it, and even when there are very few others who share our taste in something, there is still the fact that someone out there created the thing with our own tastes in mind. Without knowing us personally, they were betting on the fact that “people like us” would value their work, and we conformed to their expectations. It’s not a bad thing at all, but it certainly doesn’t make us look or feel unique. Combine this with the fact that the objects of our consumption tend to lose their meaningfulness to us over time, and we can see why trying to achieve individual expression through consumption is an endless, exhausting, unsatisfying effort.

Finally, we can still end up surrendering so much of our time to the pursuit of “cheap” pleasures. As I alluded to earlier, we may focus on reducing the monetary costs of our consumption while paying no attention to the time costs, which often remain the same. I don’t claim that all consumption is necessarily a “cheap” or “lower” form of pleasure, but some of it surely is, and this also is true regardless of how much money we’re spending on it. A freely streamed TV show is just as tempting to binge-watch as one we paid for, and when we look back on a weekend spent doing nothing else, we feel the same uneasy sense of loss. Consumerism is a drain on our free time, and it competes with other activities that may in fact be more fulfilling.

At this point, I hope I’ve demonstrated that in addition to the problems around the local and global flow of money, consumerism can actually bring problems that have nothing to do with money. Therefore, we’d do well to think of these issues in terms of general consumerism—the broader category which depends only on the flow of value. In Part 2, I’ll lay out what I personally believe is the ideal attitude and set of actions for confronting consumerism.