THE TROUBLE WITH CONSUMERISM

As human beings, we are fundamentally shaped by our environments. It’s just the way we are, it is our nature as social animals to adapt our lives to varying social conditions. And as anyone who’s ever taken an anthropology class will attest, the social and cultural environment we find ourselves in affects not only what we do, but how we think. How we conceive of the world around us, the way that we see our lives, the concept of the human person is all moulded and shaped by the situations in which we find ourselves within society. And the environment that we share as Canadians in this 21st century is one that encourages mass consumption of goods.
We live in a consumerist environment, it’s true. If you live in an urban setting, just stepping out onto the street places you in the midst of a barrage of advertising, from billboards to bus stops. Even in if you dwell in the country, the simple act of flicking on the television, opening the newspaper or connecting to the internet exposes you to advertisement after advertisement, letting you know what stuff you should want and why. Every waking moment is seen as an opportunity to insinuate products into our lives. Mega department stores are everywhere, 24 hour shopping centres are the norm. Teenagers actually enjoy spending time at the mall- that epitome of the consumerist mindset, where seeing, wanting and buying fuse into one beautiful activity- shopping. See it. Want it. Buy it. See it. Want it. Buy it. And we do it all the time.
Now, there are many, many things wrong with this societal pressure to consume (and I’d love to go into them all, but that would make this an incredibly lengthy piece indeed). But I think the most harmful of its effects is the way in which a consumerist mindset encourages us to see ourselves.
First of all, everything that we buy is material. It is inanimate. It has no soul. We feel free to judge it, scrutinise it, compare it to the leading competitor. Everything is seen by its qualities, how it is useful to us, what makes it special, why we should buy it. We have become very savvy, us consumers, we know what is a good buy and what is a rip-off because we have been conditioned since the time of conscious thought that to do well in a consumerist environment, we need to be good choice-makers. This type of thought would be okay if it just applied to consumer products; the things that are 100% produced by and made for human beings. But that’s not the way it works. When you’ve been conditioned to number one: be a consumer and number two: be a smart consumer, and you mix that with an environment in which every activity from taking the bus to opening an email to communicating with friends involves some aspect of the consumer cycle, the culture of scrutiny is going to make the leap, and it has.
Within this type of environment, people become things. Persons are judged to be worthy or unworthy by specific qualities, by how useful they are to us, by what makes them special. Tragically, I saw this in High School all the time. I saw it in students liking teachers who gave them easy grades because good grades meant a good transcript, which was good for the student. I saw it at career fairs, where students were given tips on how to make themselves seem ‘marketable’, how to best ‘sell themselves’, like a product on a shelf. I saw it whenever a friend got a bad mark on a test, their sense of inadequacy reaching far beyond what was indicated by the test itself. The mark did not just indicate how much of the course material they had learned, it came to symbolise how worthy they were as human beings. It’s everywhere, people feeling like failures because they don’t measure up to some arbitrary standard: they don’t make enough money, aren’t muscular enough, don’t look like the women on the commercials, aren’t a perfect super-parent. Yes, indeed, the culture of scrutiny and comparison has made the leap.
As people of God, we know that this is not right. We are not products that
can be rated against each other. We do not gain or lose worthiness by how attractive we are, how high our GPA is, how fast we can run or how much money we make. Each individual is fashioned by God, made with tenderness and loved with a fiery passion that cannot be extinguished. We are not loved because of what we can do or cannot do, by what actions we have taken or failed to take, we are loved because we are. The worthiness of a living creature cannot be gauged by some standard set of measures; we cannot be told who is better and worse by how well they fit specific criteria. No, we are all loved simply for being, for being the wonderful, glorious, beautiful children of a benevolent God.
And so, I do not like malls. I don’t read advertisements. I don’t want another pair of jeans or an ipod or a gaming system, no matter how many new features it may have. I don’t allow my possessions to define me, and I do not want any more possessions. As a child of God I feel called to take pleasure in the life around me, to find fulfilment in the warm sunshine, the call of birds in the evening, the wonder of the human creatures around me. For these are the manifestations of God, the wonderful gifts that are valuable beyond measure, more beautiful than anything that can be bought or sold. Thanks be to God!
- Hannah Mang-Wooley