TRIGGER WARNING! This post contains graphic and explicit references to common and frequent teenage traumas. Proceed at your own risk!
It can be hard not to think of yourself as a dour Puritan ideologically opposed to anyone having fun or taking pleasure in life when and if you come out against consumerism. How on earth can you be against material comforts and, say, exciting new electronics or pretty fashions?
Puritans? By the gods that's putting it mild! Who cannot believe such people are not dreamy idealists? Or worse, dreamy pleasure-denying, celibate idealists? Or even worse, dreamy pleasure-denying, celibate, busy-body idealists! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Burn the witch!
Yet, I'm still going to come out against consumerism. And no, I'm not really scared I'll be burnt at the stake. That just never happens these days, and it would be silly even by my standards to think it could. Instead, I'm quite certain I'll soon be driven from my home into the modern day equivalent of a desolate, howling wilderness: A Walmart store on Black Friday.
But let me be clear: I'm not opposed to materialism itself. At least not on principle. While I would not advise even an especially obnoxious person such as @Terese to make material things her chief pursuit in life, who can possibly be against creature comforts? Do such people really want a return to the days before indoor plumbing, central heating and air conditioning?
No, it's only consumerism I'm opposed to on principle. But you might ask, what actually is consumerism if not the same as materialism?
Granted the two things are in some ways just as locked to each other as those unfortunate, but so many teenage couples who on prom night understandably fling themselves at each other the very first moment they are alone, and so passionately only a dentist armed with a mini-jackhammer is reliably able to separate their nearly heat-welded braces.
Yet, close as they are, materialism and consumerism are in at least one vital way distinct. As I'm defining them here, the one is the simply the belief material goods and services have value, even great value. Nothing more than that.
The second involves self-identifying with material goods and services to the extreme extent that one actively seeks self-fulfillment through both their acquisition and possession. The difference between the materialism and consumerism is both subtle and consequential.
I buy a house. I like my house. I think my house is a jolly good house. Maybe I'm even proud of myself because I own my house. All of that is mere materialism.
In contrast, consumerism starts even before I buy a house. It begins the moment I think owning a house can be a means to significant self-fulfillment. I try to actualize my self, I try to realize or create my self, through buying and owning a house. The house not only becomes "me", I not only self-identify with it, but I also actively seek self-fulfillment through identifying with it. I become bigger, more important, more valuable -- least in my own eyes.
But is there anything wrong with that?
"Wrong" can mean so many things that if words were people, and their meanings were their deeds, "wrong" would easily be as busy as a virgin teenage boy for the first time in his life fumbling in earnest with a bra clasp, and fully conscious he's in imminent danger of reaching premature orgasm before he's even come close to his heart-felt and quite understandable goal of plunging himself face-first into her naked cleavage.
God help them both if they also wear braces! Sadly, only some of life's most tragic and predictable accidents are truly preventable.
One meaning of "wrong" that I am not in the least concerned with here is "moral" wrong. Consumerism could be morally right or morally wrong and neither state of affairs would much more than bore me. But I almost passionately believe consumerism is wrong -- foolishly wrong -- in how it so easily distracts people from more substantial and meaningful forms of self-fulfillment.
Now, a risk here is that I might fall into the distasteful trap of telling others what they should or should not value. That I intend not to do. Rather, I will confine my analysis merely to what I believe are the obvious consequences of a failure to pursue more substantial and meaningful forms of self-fulfillment than through material things.
The chief reason is this: As far as I can see, there is no real self-fulfillment at all. That is, there is no genuine development and realization of your true self. All that happens is you create and swell up an illusion that you then mistake for yourself. What else can believing a house is "you" be but a falsehood, an illusion?
To make your purpose in life creating and maintaining illusions about who you are as a person seems a bit meaningless. But I think it's worse than that. I submit that most of us who chase after mere illusions are reduced to a life dominated by boredom. As if our lives were lived endlessly standing in line. It's a life we constantly try to escape via all means of entertainment. Thus, we become junkies addicted to fleeting pleasures that not only soon leave us craving for more, but whose highs are all we have left to live for.
If you have asked why so few people seem capable of living passionately, I think you'll find an answer in how most of us pursue pleasurable entertainments that dull down or substitute for any true passion for living we might have once known as small, joyful children.
To sum, my chief objection to consumerism has no more to do with its morality or moral value than a wild turkey can be a satisfying conversational partner for people with more brains than our President. Instead I go much further than that to assert that consumerism is at least as meaningless, fundamentally unsatisfying, and preventive of passionately affirming life as a teenage girl's profound disappointment is poignant when it fully dawns on her that her boyfriend's cruelly premature orgasm can only mean she is fated to remain a chaste, virtuous, and utter virgin on her prom night.
Comments? Questions?
It can be hard not to think of yourself as a dour Puritan ideologically opposed to anyone having fun or taking pleasure in life when and if you come out against consumerism. How on earth can you be against material comforts and, say, exciting new electronics or pretty fashions?
Puritans? By the gods that's putting it mild! Who cannot believe such people are not dreamy idealists? Or worse, dreamy pleasure-denying, celibate idealists? Or even worse, dreamy pleasure-denying, celibate, busy-body idealists! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Burn the witch!
Yet, I'm still going to come out against consumerism. And no, I'm not really scared I'll be burnt at the stake. That just never happens these days, and it would be silly even by my standards to think it could. Instead, I'm quite certain I'll soon be driven from my home into the modern day equivalent of a desolate, howling wilderness: A Walmart store on Black Friday.
But let me be clear: I'm not opposed to materialism itself. At least not on principle. While I would not advise even an especially obnoxious person such as @Terese to make material things her chief pursuit in life, who can possibly be against creature comforts? Do such people really want a return to the days before indoor plumbing, central heating and air conditioning?
No, it's only consumerism I'm opposed to on principle. But you might ask, what actually is consumerism if not the same as materialism?
Granted the two things are in some ways just as locked to each other as those unfortunate, but so many teenage couples who on prom night understandably fling themselves at each other the very first moment they are alone, and so passionately only a dentist armed with a mini-jackhammer is reliably able to separate their nearly heat-welded braces.
Yet, close as they are, materialism and consumerism are in at least one vital way distinct. As I'm defining them here, the one is the simply the belief material goods and services have value, even great value. Nothing more than that.
The second involves self-identifying with material goods and services to the extreme extent that one actively seeks self-fulfillment through both their acquisition and possession. The difference between the materialism and consumerism is both subtle and consequential.
I buy a house. I like my house. I think my house is a jolly good house. Maybe I'm even proud of myself because I own my house. All of that is mere materialism.
In contrast, consumerism starts even before I buy a house. It begins the moment I think owning a house can be a means to significant self-fulfillment. I try to actualize my self, I try to realize or create my self, through buying and owning a house. The house not only becomes "me", I not only self-identify with it, but I also actively seek self-fulfillment through identifying with it. I become bigger, more important, more valuable -- least in my own eyes.
But is there anything wrong with that?
"Wrong" can mean so many things that if words were people, and their meanings were their deeds, "wrong" would easily be as busy as a virgin teenage boy for the first time in his life fumbling in earnest with a bra clasp, and fully conscious he's in imminent danger of reaching premature orgasm before he's even come close to his heart-felt and quite understandable goal of plunging himself face-first into her naked cleavage.
God help them both if they also wear braces! Sadly, only some of life's most tragic and predictable accidents are truly preventable.
One meaning of "wrong" that I am not in the least concerned with here is "moral" wrong. Consumerism could be morally right or morally wrong and neither state of affairs would much more than bore me. But I almost passionately believe consumerism is wrong -- foolishly wrong -- in how it so easily distracts people from more substantial and meaningful forms of self-fulfillment.
Now, a risk here is that I might fall into the distasteful trap of telling others what they should or should not value. That I intend not to do. Rather, I will confine my analysis merely to what I believe are the obvious consequences of a failure to pursue more substantial and meaningful forms of self-fulfillment than through material things.
The chief reason is this: As far as I can see, there is no real self-fulfillment at all. That is, there is no genuine development and realization of your true self. All that happens is you create and swell up an illusion that you then mistake for yourself. What else can believing a house is "you" be but a falsehood, an illusion?
To make your purpose in life creating and maintaining illusions about who you are as a person seems a bit meaningless. But I think it's worse than that. I submit that most of us who chase after mere illusions are reduced to a life dominated by boredom. As if our lives were lived endlessly standing in line. It's a life we constantly try to escape via all means of entertainment. Thus, we become junkies addicted to fleeting pleasures that not only soon leave us craving for more, but whose highs are all we have left to live for.
If you have asked why so few people seem capable of living passionately, I think you'll find an answer in how most of us pursue pleasurable entertainments that dull down or substitute for any true passion for living we might have once known as small, joyful children.
To sum, my chief objection to consumerism has no more to do with its morality or moral value than a wild turkey can be a satisfying conversational partner for people with more brains than our President. Instead I go much further than that to assert that consumerism is at least as meaningless, fundamentally unsatisfying, and preventive of passionately affirming life as a teenage girl's profound disappointment is poignant when it fully dawns on her that her boyfriend's cruelly premature orgasm can only mean she is fated to remain a chaste, virtuous, and utter virgin on her prom night.
Comments? Questions?