The Consumerism Trap: The Social, Financial, and Environmental Destructiveness of Over-Consumption

The Nature of Capitalism

The debate of the chicken and egg applies to many world situations, such as the relationship between culture and government: does government evolve due to cultural influences, or is it culture that develops to fit the demands of the law? With the vast expanse of human history, we can summon examples supporting both the former and the latter. Whether government evolves from the moral standards of a culture, or culture from the government’s infrastructure is dependent on the collective personality of the population. In other words, both culture and government have the potential to produce the other. But can the narratives of authority influence the cultural personality of a population? Judging by the global citizens’ transformation since the rise of globalization, I believe that the answer is yes.

In a capitalistic society, the international trade market dictates the world by influencing consumer and producer behaviour. For the system to be functional, all people must actively maximize their consumption by fulfilling their own needs. Only when individuals and corporations alike continue to trade can profit be made: additionally, trade and profit are both essential elements of survival in the modern world: the only way we can be privileged with access to life-sustaining products like food, shelter, and electricity, is with money.

Consumption is natural. After all, we people are animals, and we have needs. But on the other hand, the hyper-consumption of our growing desires has become the main pleasure we seek in our daily lives.

Over the decades following the Industrial Revolution’s innovations, the wide selection of consumption choices provided by capitalism has resulted in a global rise in consumption rates. The increase in public demand for non-essential goods and services was, at one point, quite linear. However, after World War II, the rise of consumption in the developed world dramatically increased, and since then, the annual consumption rate per person has been rising exponentially.

Consumption has always been a way of fulfilling one’s needs. But in our modern era, consumption power and liberty have become synonymous. This may seem instinctive on many levels: it’s liberating to have the right to earn a living, climb the socio-economic ladder, access a new level of consumption once only reserved for elites, and in turn, climb the socio-economic ladder. But someone has to pay for the consumption levels of the developed world.

Do you recall what I said earlier about the chicken and the egg debate? Well, consumption is a cultural component in developed nations, a culture engineered to create an endless need to produce, sell, and purchase at increasing rates. As a result, the producers and consumers of modern society have a symbiotic relationship: the producer cannot survive without the contributions of the consumer, and the consumer cannot access essential needs or leisure desires without the market. We can observe how true this is when asking ourselves, “how is national welfare measured,” or “how does a group of people determine their standard of living?” In asking these questions, we find that economic growth is the official measurement of a nation’s standard of living, which equates to success within today’s consumer society: after all, what better way to measure the success of a consumer than the rate at which they can consume?

In its purest and most theoretical form, capitalism enables both producers and consumers to mutually satisfy their fundamental needs. But as we progress in time and globalization, the line between “needs” and “wants” has been blurred. Consumers and producers are no longer trading to satisfy their rudimentary survival needs of things like food and shelter. Instead, the free trade market now exists to maximize revenue and obtain more material assets. This is because material goods now represent an individual’s very personality. Globalization of trade combined with a desire to increase wealth has created an epidemic of consumers using their purchasing power as a form of identity: consumers make and maintain their personal image through material goods.

Consumer Sovereignty — or the idea that the most important economic goal is the fulfillment of consumer desire — means that products are only produced if they are guaranteed to be bought by consumers on the market. In other words, where demand exists, producers will manufacture more goods to satisfy that demand; and as demand increases, production must also increase to meet the growing levels of demand. This cycle in itself is a disaster of waste that has manifested due to the very nature of human beings as social creatures: we base our identity on our material possessions and judge our worth relative to how much we own in comparison to those surrounding us. Our income is a representation of our financial freedom to consume, and measures our success compared to our friends, family, and acquaintances. This means that, in a capitalistic society, poverty and wealth are subjective: no set definition remains static from population group to population group because we base our status as “rich” or “poor” on the population surrounding us. If we have equal financial freedom and consumption power to our peers, we are average. We are rich if we have more financial freedom and consumption power than our peers. And, of course, if we are financially inferior to our peers, we are poor. Whether a person considers themselves as “well off” or “poor” depends on the conditions of the people around them. As a result of these societally-manufactured definitions, we overconsume to remain equal to our peers, thus protecting our identities.

“The Politics of Consumption” discusses how identifying with unrealistic aspirational groups encourages people to keep up with constantly changing identities by consuming above their means. Especially in the era of credit, consumers are encouraged to purchase well above their income, collecting large debts that they may spend years paying off. As a result, many consumers sacrifice the comfort provided by their income to identify with a reference group for only a short period before switching to a new one. And let’s be realistic; is years of debt really worth it? There is, of course, momentary gratification, but because the consumers purchasing patterns are so irrational, consumers do not generate a high enough income to maintain their desired identity.

Human desire has not been blown into ridiculous proportions by sheer chance: producers on the international trade market are aware of the continuously evolving desires of consumers, and so, a culture of excessive consumption has been carefully constructed by producers.

The consumer society is bombarded with an endless supply of advertisements throughout the day. This, factored with the nature of overconsumption, has led some analysts to suggest that the perpetuation of materialism has led to swapping human connection for work. On average, a working adult has 6 hours of free time per day. Of these 6 hours, most people spend half of their leisure time watching television or on social media. During these hours, the working class is bombarded with ads that persuade them to believe they need more things — a need that is really just a desire in disguise. Now, with an increased appetite, working-class members need to make even more money — not out of necessity, but to fulfill their new desires and maintain their identity. To earn this money, they work more hours, which removes them from their home. In an attempt to make up for their absence, they turn to consumption and materialism yet again, and use expensive gifts to materialize their love.

As Christopher Lasch writes,

“The importance of advertising is not that it invariably succeeds in its immediate purpose, …but simply that it surrounds people with images of the good life in which happiness depends on consumption. The ubiquity of such images leaves little space for competing conceptions of the good life.”

Growing Desire and Increasing Consumption

A fundamental component of successful marketing is the understanding of human psychology: due to this, the vast majority of marketing teams for large corporations are aware of the human desire to match, and even exceed the material wealth of their peers. When there is no demand for a particular good or service, they create demand. Markets are designed to fulfill a desire that never previously existed. A notorious example of this is luxury brands, whose products are marketed to suggest they are essential purchases when in fact, they serve no real purpose.

Suggesting that a luxury product is a necessity has shown to drive the mass consumption rate upwards within wealthy nations, which receive the exports at low prices from foreign and underdeveloped countries. More prominent corporations can now market for the goal of ever-increasing demand because the cost of producing products overseas is so low. Although many pro-consumers push the validity of the saying “everyone benefits with free trade,” this is not the case for the lower classes and underclass. Poor producers are marginalized beyond their preexisting dispositions as wealthy producers consume more and more resources to meet their growing consumer demands and maximize their profit.

The impact of the western world’s consumerism culture on developing nations is not the only issue that has arisen: to purchase more, you need more money. The active consumer is forced into a dilemma of desire above their income, so they have two main choices: one, trade your time for a paycheque by working longer hours, or two, accumulating debt. Personal credit gives people the ability to make purchases above their income level, which removes the need for the immediate liquidation of time in the form of money. Consumers can continue to consume in a state of growing desires without working longer hours to pay for their hunger. Larger homes are desired, more clothes feel needed, and more expensive cars feel necessary to prove one’s social status. The severity of this problem of consuming above one’s income is quite drastic, with just under one-half of Americans unable to pay off their monthly balance. The average monthly balance carried forward per household into the next month is $6929, totalling around $420 Billion of consumer debt. Consumers weren’t always inclined to overspend shows that we can do better: ownership was once intergenerational within a family, and recycling old items that were no longer useful was second nature. In the past, people were remarkably conscious of their consumption levels and readily lowered them to suit their earnings. As a collective on this international market, habits were sustainable for many years, but we are now unwilling to revert to our old ways.

Many people believe that once their fundamental needs are met, they will stop desiring excessive material because they will be content with their livelihoods. However, this notion is flawed on a psychological basis. When a person’s fundamental survival needs are satisfied, this gives them the leisure of browsing various markets and deciding where to spend the accumulated wealth that is no longer necessary for the sustenance of their livelihood. The cycle is summed up quite eloquently by J Livingstone, who said; “the commodity form penetrates and reshapes dimensions of social life hitherto exempt from its logic to the point where subjectivity itself becomes a commodity to be brought and sold in the market as beauty, cleanliness, sincerity, and autonomy.” Consumption is a pastime in western culture — a hobby if you will: it is what we fill our time with to give our persons a sense of individuality, and our lives a meaning when we have strayed from all deeper purpose in our day to day lives. Consumption and the spending of money is not only a temptation, but it is how we materialize and express our social statuses to our peers and our emotions to our loved ones.

Increased Division Between the Rich and Poor

One can argue that the common term “working class” is no longer an accurate description of the class of individuals who sustain our society through various means of “work.” For this reason, the term is actually falling out of use; “working class” belonged to an old and now theoretical imagery of a world where the tasks carried out by people of different socio-economic statuses were distinct on a fundamental basis. A group of people’s labour categorized the class system, and what their labour produced: people who made significant contributions to society were rewarded. The term “lower class” is also falling out of use: in the past, a person born into a low socioeconomic station could climb the social ladder by accumulating skills that were useful to society. But society has changed dramatically: if you live within a first-world nation and are poor by the standards of your peers, you are still wealthier than the majority of the world’s population.

Due to the globalization of trade, large corporations no longer need to employ local, lower-class individuals because they have the ability to expand their production into nations with less security of human rights and exploit the natives for cheap labour. So what exactly happens to the now under-employed, lower class and working-class individuals in western nations? They become a part of the underclass, meaning that they live within a society that does not seek to accommodate all. The underclass were once workers, or lower class individuals seeking to rise in status, degraded to an aggregate of people who have grown so useless to the system that they have lost a spot on the social hierarchy. Due to the absence of demand for localized human labour, there is little chance they will ever gain a notable status in their lifetimes.

As members of the developed world continue to participate in overconsumption, the underclass is forced further and further behind. As a result, they become more worthless to their society, often viewed as a plague for their lack of production opportunity.

Who Consumes and Pollutes the Most?

When discussing environmental issues, such as overconsumption or the unnecessary occupation of natural resources, many people seem to believe that developing nations with higher populations create the most pollution. The argument is along the lines that “these nations have more people, so they use more to sustain themselves, thus emitting the most pollution.” While this can seem like a logical explanation, it is inaccurate past the surface.

How a company chooses to utilize their land can mean the difference between sustainability and environmental destruction. But what exactly influences how corporations decide to use their land? If one way is sustainable and the other isn’t, why not just choose the former? To answer, the sustainable option is hardly ever the profitable option or the option that meets consumer demands. For example, monocultures devote an unnecessary amount of kilometres to only one form of plant life rather than diversifying crops, which leads to a loss of natural biodiversity and the usage of unnecessary resources. Building a monoculture requires destroying the wildland to accommodate the nurture needs of whatever is being grown. This process was actually one of the main contributors to the famous Great Depression. In that particular case, nutrient soil clad in luscious grass across the prairies was upturned to support the demand for crops. The farmers never considered that the grass worked as a defence mechanism, protecting the soil from drying into dust in the intense sun. This made the threat of dust storms in the wind non-existent. But as farmers began to alter the natural land, dust storms degraded the entire landscape, and famine followed.

Now, if you’re feeling a bit lost as to how this relates to consumer culture and materialism, think about it: was degrading natural biodiversity a necessity to growing crops and feeding people? Or were monocultures becoming normalized to maximize income? If you guessed the second option, you are correct. The industrial agriculture industry has always gravitated towards monocultures because they give corporations the ability to produce large quantities of demanded produce. In contrast, a diversity of crops would deliver a large amount of produce, but a variety of it, rather than a specialty of the most profitable or demanded crop. Furthermore, because the developed world has grown so reliant on having a plethora of foods reality available in grocery stores, grocery corporations no longer have the option of selling food seasonally.

Considering that demand for a particular resource dictates production, it’s essential to look at what populations demand the most and what is produced the most. 86% of the world’s resources are consumed by the world’s wealthiest 20% of the population. Deniers of western over-consumption culture often like to point to statistics showing that poorer, developing nations like India, Bangladesh, the Philipines, and so forth release more pollution per capita and consume more natural resources. While statistics do indeed matter, context is just as vital because the truth is not the truth unless it is the whole truth. Statistics can mislead one to believe that developing nations consume the most resources and release the most pollution, yet the vast majority of the resources used in these countries are going towards the purchasing power of developed nations. These wealthy countries employ poorer nations to manufacture large quantities of goods and services for lower prices. To put the magnitude of this issue into perspective, according to the 2008 journal Energy Policy, 1/3 of Chinese carbon dioxide emissions were due to the production of exports to be consumed in developed countries.

I’m sure many people have heard the rebuttal that “The free trade market gives each party the freedom of choice to participate, and contribute in whatever way they are comfortable with. These developing nations agree to produce large amounts to benefit themselves by making higher profits! Right?” Well, this rebuttal is not necessarily true. Think back to what I mentioned earlier about the underclass, the people in our societies who have become so worthless to consumers that they no longer have a social class. One’s skills need to be valued both within a small community as well as on the international trading market, or there will be no employment for them to trade their skills. All countries have the option of being ultra-nationalistic in the economic sense, but many developing nations rely on the revenue gained from trading with foreign governments and citizens to sustain their current quality of life.

In 1992, the affluent economist Lawrence Summers had some controversial things to say about the relationship between first world consumption and developing world production. On February 8, 1992, he told The Economist magazine,

“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the less developed countries?… The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that… Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City… The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.”

Summers and many other economists sharing his perspective advocated for the migration of industries that utilized environmentally damaging practices to produce products that would then be shipped to highly developed nations for consumption. Economists who shared these ideas knew that they could pay low and unfair wages to foreign workers. They also knew that the western world would not remain clean and developed if harmful manufacturing practices were destroying their nations and deteriorating people’s health within the developed world. Because those who participate in the market have a mutual goal of maximizing revenue, changing the functionality of the factories to fit environmental needs was not an option. What I’ve described is one explanation for why the wealthiest nations that consume the most every year have the cleanest air and water.

This ideological system alone shows that the urge to over-consume has been very interwoven with the culture of the developed world itself. Ordinary citizens of all classes can’t fathom the idea of changing their lifestyles of overconsumption and excessive waste because, to them, overconsumption is not only viewed as routine but as their right. As long as they don’t directly have to face the consequences of their actions on a daily basis, change will not be demanded. So, the current economic system of foreign exploitation for immediate gratification is maintained.

Personal Solutions

A frequently proposed solution to world inequality proposed by many people on the left of the political spectrum is globalization: the argument is made that a globalist government is the solution to the socio-economic division between the developed and developing world. But our world has maintained a global trade market for decades, which has only further polarized the rich from the poor by rewarding developed nations in the top 20%. Meanwhile, the other 80% of the world is punished with worsening environmental conditions. Globalization is a nice idea in theory, but it has a tendency to be romanticized by members of the developed world: anyone in the developed world is in the top 20%, and we are members of the top 20% because the globalization of trade has given big corporations the ability to exploit the developing world and its citizens. To understand why globalization benefits the top 20% and the top 20% alone, we must realize that globalization of trade was designed for the benefit of the top 20%, by the top 20%, to exploit the other 80% of the world population.

Markets exist to fill a need or want of a particular demographic. It’s a fundamental economic principle that there can be no sales where there is no demand. So, if not for the constantly growing desires of consumers in the developed world, the issues of excessive waste, overconsumption, and increasing inequality between the social classes would not be so drastic. To avoid personal bias, I will allow you to draw your own conclusions on which economic philosophies are the most sustainable. Still, I do want to stress the importance of personal responsibility: where there is a privilege, there’s power, and where there’s power, there’s responsibility. As of now, we may not be able to single handily transform the world, or even our countries, into more equitable environments. But our consciousness and self-discipline can significantly control our behaviour on the market. We’ve established that a substantial portion of our purchases are not essential to the sustenance of our livelihood — in fact, modern purchasing patterns have far more detrimental effects on our financial circumstances than we give them credit.

As a personal pact to ourselves, I believe it is a personal responsibility to understand the impact that each purchase we make has on ourselves in the long run, on the market as a whole, on the environment, and on the people not blessed enough to be within the top 20%. Information breeds mindfulness and compassion, so understand the aftermath of your consumption choices, choose the sustainable path, and spread knowledge.

Sources:

Bauman Z. Collateral Casualties of Consumerism. Journal of Consumer Culture. 2007;7(1):25–56. doi:10.1177/1469540507073507

Shah, A. (2005, August 10). Effects of Consumerism. Global Issues: Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All. Retrieved January 2, 2022, from https://www.globalissues.org/article/238/effects-of-consumerism

Roach, B., Goodwin, N., & Nelson, J. (2019). Consumption and the Consumer Society. Global Development And Environmental Issues (GDAE), Tufts University. Retrieved January 2, 2022, from https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2019/10/Consumption_and_Consumer_Society.pdf

Keyfitz, N. (n.d.). Consumerism and the new poor — society. SpringerLink. Retrieved January 2, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02698520