Thoughts on Consumerism

I realize that paraphernalia and marketing is not a new or innately bad aspect of large-scale events. And the truth is that most of us want the cutesy characters and the colorful souvenirs, so we can take home a piece of something great. But you gotta admit that it feeds into the cycle of short-term fads and frenzies in consumerist societies.

Maybe fads aren’t bad in themselves—they can be lots of fun—but they don’t often do us any good in the realm of long-term happiness. They can leave us always wanting more, looking for the next thing, discontent with what we have. Fads do, however, tend to bring in the big bucks for certain business industries, particularly each time the product changes.

Consumerism in China is younger than it is in the United States. The Chinese middle-class is growing fast. People here are buying cars, not because they need them, but because it’s the first time they’ve been able to afford them and they’re excited about that. It’s like when you get your first raise (at work or in allowance), and now you want to upgrade to an iPhone like your friend Jim has. Except you haven’t even owned a cell phone before; maybe you’ve only ever used the local public payphone.

If Jim told you that you shouldn’t get an iPhone because it was bad for the environment or because you should learn from his mistakes and not spend so much energy on superficial commodities, it would p*** you off. Who is Jim to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do?! He already has an iPhone. But one out of five people on this earth are Chinese people. That’s a lot of iPhones. (And by iPhones, I mean cars.) That’s a lot of gas; that’s a lot of pollution.

So what do we do? We make friends. And we work together. We practice what we preach, and we try to eliminate our hypocrisies. If we must play the older sibling, we should do so by being a good role model. But we should remember that we don’t always know what’s best and that others don’t necessarily need to follow in our footsteps as we expect.