Life in Excess

I’ve often wondered why we need so much stuff. Before we’re born people are buying us stuff – clothes, diapers, blankets, strollers, car seats, toys, and all the other infant necessities. After we die people are still buying us stuff. In case you didn’t know, the average funeral expenses is a whopping $9,000, and is one of the top five expensive events in your life. Our lust for possessions is so asinine it would make for a great standup skit…

Our consumption obsession creates repercussions that spread beyond our own understanding of the process of production, distribution, utilizing, and eventually disposal. Annie Leonard has put together an amazing video and site to go along with it, called storyofstuff, that wonderfully depicts this whole mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

story of stuff

Consumption as it is right now is linear. Essentially, we exploit the Earth of its natural resources, exploit people for their labor power, pollute the environment, buy a lot of shit that we don’t need, throw it out, and then fail to fully replace the resources that we used in the first place. Because there is a finite number of resources in the world this process can’t indefinitely continue. What’s extremely disturbing is the fact that if the whole world consumed at the rate of America, then we would effectively need 3 to 5 more planets to provide the necessary resources!

Depleting natural resources and polluting the Earth are serious topics by themselves but unfortunately there’s even more forces at work in all this chaos. We’re ruining the lives of people in order to continue our current lifestyles. As natural resources are destroyed so are the homes and habitats of people, which in turn forces them to move to urban areas where jobs are available. Often, these jobs have extremely low wages and benefits such as healthcare are very limited. Then we ship the stuff made by these workers to retail outlets like WalMart where a whole other set of workers are poorly treated all over again. The best part is, you and I go to these retailers and then buy all these goods! If we don’t buy the latest styles, gadgetry, or models we are ultimately not accepted into society and laughed at in public. We’re doing ourselves a narcissistic disservice by buying into this whole never ending cycle.

We all need to stop consuming so much stuff and make sure that the products and services we do utilize are created in a fair and just way. Just as humans need fair compensation, our planet does as well for our disservice over the past century.

Tagged as: consumption, excess, go green, pollution, stuff