This article discusses how modern consumerism always leaves us hungry for more.
A quick scroll through Instagram to catch up on the lives of friends and family will force you to bypass dozens of ads. Many of these ads now masquerade themselves as content delivered to audiences from their favorite internet creators in bite-sized clips that provide a paid-for advertisement glimpse into their lives. These advertisements generously inform audiences about wonderful products that they are lacking in their lives. Are we simply being enlightened to the paucity of our past, or is the overabundance that many people hail as normal living simply a result of the marking goal of never-ending satisfaction? In short, why do we think we need so much shit to be happy?
A Look At Modern Consumerism
Modern consumerism leaves us in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. I consider myself one of the worst offenders, as I like many am entirely aware of the manipulation and yet still fall prey to thinking I can buy short-term satisfaction through my spending habits. Many marketing tricks leave consumers with rushes and highs even if we realize we are being hoaxed. From making absurdly high original prices just to provide the satisfaction of slashing them to offering buy-more-save-more sales for high quantities of items we never really needed, consumers are filled with happiness and satisfaction as we hunt down sales and think we are pulling a fast one over on the system. However, in almost every case, we are being duped by said system.
Perhaps actually finding a bargain for needed household items or for goods that benefit other people can bring about happiness that lasts for more than a few scattered moments. But for most people, the never-ending array of new products always leaves a gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction and hunger for more. There is always a new product to buy and the next model to acquire. This leads to people being discontented with what they currently possess. And everywhere people look, they are being assailed with ads for these products. How did we end up in such a consumerism-saturated way of living?
Why Is Excess Celebrated?
An MIT article examines how over the 20th-century capitalism sunk its fangs into the average person and turned them into a consumer. This is when the notion of consumption shifted from “consuming” the necessities of life to the consumer-saturated world we now recognize in 2022. While frugality was once a necessity, consumerism arose when economic motive became a possibility. Early campaigns for consumerism harnessed the power of envy to boost sales, which is the same underlying current behind many of the sales in 2022. It appears that from the start, people have always been coveting what their neighbors had. And as soon as they could afford to buy it, people were eager to sell it.
What is different is that today, we can see what our neighbors have thanks to the internet and social media. Consumption beyond the idea of substance alone erupted after World War II, but it has now exploded again thanks to the power and ease of online marketing and sales. Mail-order shopping has been popular since back in the 1890s, but people can now click on an ad, use their fingerprint to sign in and pay, and receive their item the next day. Corporate giants quickly took over booming companies and found the best way to take advantage of consumers. And the consumerism world we now live in rapidly snowballed from there. Now the concept of consuming merely to survive seems wildly outdated.
Can We Ever Be Satisfied In The Modern World?
To be satisfied in a consumerist world, it’s clear that we have to shift our values. More importance has to be placed on immaterial things such as relationships with others or connections with the world. One way to help facilitate that is to spend less time on the internet. Many people need to use the internet for work. It is simply unrealistic to ban internet usage in the modern world, nor is this necessary. I mean, the internet can also be a really fun and interesting place. However, there are many tools for limiting time on social media and keeping track of how much time we spend feeding into a world riddled with consumerism, ads, and cookies.
What we feed grows and when we give our attention to consumerism, the importance of it blooms inside of us. Naturally, if we cared less, we would realize that we need less. If we felt more present and grounded in our own lives and more grateful for the things we do have, then we probably would care far less if our neighbor has a newer car model or a nicer iPhone. We might not even register this information as news. It helps to pay less attention to these things and to also be aware of when we are looking at ads and when we are experiencing real life.
As Charles Dickens wrote, Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature. When we find a way to quell or at least distract the constant hunger for more, we may find that we can attain satisfaction in the moment. And in the end, the sum of these moments is really all we have.
Source: Kerry Higgs from The MIT Press Reader, sourced on BBC
Continued Reading: Questioning Modern Media Trust