Humans and Consumption

- Chandrashekhar Sangoi

+91 9098581529

In the times of current lockdown to the Covid-19 pandemic, most of us are unable to step out and finding ways to break the monotony, conversations over phone calls bring some respite. I have also been receiving many calls from friends and family. During such conversations when I ask to end the call, usually the person says “What’s the hurry, where is the money being charged, calling service is free!”

But is it really free? Aren’t we prepaying charges in advance? This is the power of consumerism. We are spending money and yet not realizing it. The time spent over unnecessary phone calls could have easily been utilized for other productive work. Hence, even if it is entirely true that there is no additional monetary cost of calls, there is a time cost that we are bearing.

If we compare our daily consumption of various items before and during the lockdown, we will find a noticeable reduction. It is primarily because before lockdown, out of all the items consumed either many of them were unnecessary or were consumed in excess. Making us consume more than our needs by generating a false sense of excessive requirements in us, is consumerism. This false sense then makes us toil day and night to fulfill our exaggerated needs.

The human mind is such that there is always a desire and enthusiasm to rise high, achieve something, or feel important. Dale Carnegie in his famous book ‘How to win friends and affect people’ called it desire to be great. 

Our eyes like to see beauty, the skin likes to touch well, the tongue likes deliciousness, the nose likes pleasing aromas and ears like to hear melodies. Despite being an ordinary human, we do not consider ourselves less than anything, anyone at all. Our ego keeps pushing us to be superhuman. And whenever we feel that there is a shortage in achieving this greatness, we pacify the feel of the deficiency by taking recourse to materiality.

Consumerism took the onus to satisfy our ego and that is why we are easily drawn towards it. Instead of finding satisfaction inside, we are constantly trying to make ourselves great not by self-improvisation but by the gratification of ego through the fulfillment of carnal desires.

Mother Nature, as Mahatma Gandhi said, has resources to fulfill our needs but not to satisfy our greed. You have to understand the difference between need and desire.

Consumerist forces have always inspired you to increase your needs and have cunningly transformed most of your desires into needs. Now you work day and night to fulfill those transformed needs. And when in spite of hardships desires are not fulfilled then to compensate that the fantasy world of entertainment has also been created by these consumerist forces. The vast world of entertainment is in reality a means of keeping you engaged.

It is often argued that in the absence of consumerism humans will remain poor and how will we progress in the absence of desires? How will poverty be overcome in the absence of consumption? But if this is true then why is it that few people own almost 99% of the world's wealth? Why is it that even today, a significant part of the world population is unable to meet the basic survival needs? Why do we see hungry, helpless people walking on the streets during the current lockdown? On one hand, we are talking about becoming a 5 trillion-dollar economy, and on the other, about 30 to 40% of the population of our country can’t live comfortably even for a month, without earning.

Is life’s only purpose being to increase our desires, be immersed in the world of entertainment, and not think about the value of our existence? Is it appropriate to keep striving whole life just to increase material affluence? Is it impossible to live happily in limited resources? I am not advocating poverty but I also do not endorse the unending race for luxury. Are we going to continue exploiting nature until the complete destruction of our ecology?

Although these questions can be contemplated any time, the pace at which the speed of life has been almost zero due to the Covid-19 pandemic now is the best opportunity to give it sincere thought.