The Consumption Society
If the way the Milky Way revolves ignores your desires for one or two days, do not sink into sadness.
“This is where the consumption society comes to vomit itself out,” said my father-in-law.
We were at the Recycling Hof in Graz, the place where you bring your rubbish when it’s too much for your bins. Piles and piles of all kinds of things. Beds, pianos, fridges, microwaves, wood and paper and metal. A woman next to us threw unopened Ikea packages into the maws of the great rubbish monster.
Hel and I unloaded our car, throwing away old cupboards, rugs, metal poles, and a bunch of other assorted tat. And then, because we had borrowed a big car so that we could transport things to the Recycling Hof, we drove on to Ikea.
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Have you ever come across the notion of “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable”? I just googled it and there appear to be hundreds of Ted Talks with that exact title. Jordan Peterson thinks it’s a good thing. The Stanford School of Business recommends it.
A very popular idea, then. But I have always been a free and independent thinker, and on this issue, as on so many others, I have disagreed with the majority opinion and fearlessly gotten really comfortable with being comfortable. And I’ve done really well!
I’m great with comfort. I flower in comfort. As Wodehouse almost said, we are old campaigners, we Sanklechas. Give us a roof, a few comfortable chairs, a sofa or two, half a dozen cushions, and a few decent meals, and we do not repine.
Discomfort, yeah, not so much. I don’t like it and I am not happy in it - that’s kinda the definition of discomfort, right? So I have developed strategies to deal with it.
The internet, that’s a great one. Social media, wikipedia rabbit holes, checking emails for the 17th time in an hour. Drugs were good too, back when I took them. Same for cigarettes (cigarettes aren’t a drug, they’re cigarettes!). Eating, that’s another winner. Hit yourself up with enough fat and salt and you can push the discomfort away.
In the last few days, Hel’s words and the image of the Recycling Hof have kept returning, and I have been wondering why I consume so much. And my first realization was that (for me) buying things is often functionally identical to scrolling social media / smoking cigarettes / eating loads of pizzas - it’s a way of pushing away difficult stuff.
Fine. That’s true, but it’s just a starting point. The next question is: what do I do about it?
Stop buying stuff, for a start. That would be good.
That’s treating the symptom rather than the cause, but it’s still a good start. Often, treating the symptoms is a way of treating the cause - if you’re sad, one way of feeling better is to smile; eventually, allegedly, your emotions start reflecting your facial expressions rather than the other way around. So yes, definitely stop buying stuff.
But what is the aim? What underlying thing do I hope to achieve or get closer to achieving?
And then I had my next realisation.
The underlying thing, the thing that connects food and drink and drugs and doomscrolling and Amazon Prime, is pretty simple. Somewhere quite deep down, I believe that consuming things will make me happy (or less unhappy). That’s the thing I want to get at.
I want to destroy my illusion that consuming things will make me happy.
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But consumption isn’t just shopping or eating food or scrolling social media. It is also - and actually, more fundamentally - an attitude, a sensibility, a way of relating to the world.
What is this way of relating to the world? Well, ordinary consumption is just to use something for your purposes, right? We consume coal because we want to be warm, we consume food because we want to stop being hungry, etc.
And the consumption relation is just that on the broadest possible scale: it is to relate to the world as something that exists to be used for your purposes.
And that is just a godawful way of relating to the world.
Now, this isn’t a new thought. For example, when the German philosopher Immanuel Kant forbids - under all circumstances, with no exceptions, ever - treating people “merely as a means”, I think this is exactly what he is getting at.
He is telling us: people do not exist so that they can be used by you, they were not created so that they can further your aims. The world does not exist to make you happy or thrilled, it does not exist for you at all.
Look, in some ways this is a simple thought. But in other ways it is an earthshaking one.
The question - as so often! - is how to take insight and turn it into lived experience.
Stay tuned ...