CONSUMER LUST BRINGS US TO RUIN
CONSUMERISM is cancerous, and we need to think more frugally to survive this constant need to fill our lives with ‘things’.
This week’s release of the latest economic report highlighted that we have not recovered from the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. It’s time to face the brutal facts. Consumerism rests on the assumption that the economy will grow and grow forever and pay for any excesses we allow ourselves today. But infinite growth is incompatible with a finite planet, finite resources, a finite ecology. Infinite growth is cancer.
At some point, the ‘economy’ has to stop growing. We’re already drowning in landfill – present and future. We’re committing ecological suicide.
Economists have been selling us this theory of perpetual growth for decades now and the result is record household debt across the globe with Australia leading the way. Not a position that we should be particularly proud of.
Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank is generously lowering interest rates to stop a spiralling economy, with the hope that this will encourage us to spend and stimulate the economy.
Everything viable on this planet is in a feedback cycle: plants give us oxygen, we give them CO2; animals eat grass, fertilize the field, predators and prey adapt to keep each other from outstripping their food supply, and so on. The entire planet is self-sustaining. Only humans try to inflate themselves endlessly.
When balloons get overinflated they explode. Our species will not survive unless we can find a way to come to terms with that unthinkable concept, a steady economy.
The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, all are driven by rising consumption.
With every generation, the baseline of normalised consumption shifts. Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, worldwide, we use a million plastic bottles a minute. We are bombarded through our digital devices with a retail environment that is on sale every week.
A global growth rate of 3 per cent means that size of the world economy doubles every 24 years, which explains why environmental crises are accelerating at such a rapid rate.
We need a different system, rooted not in economic abstractions but in physical realities. We need to build a world in which we place our values on what really matters, and not on material things.
People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.
As a wise woman once wrote “Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.”