I Consume, Therefore I Am

You are of limited intellect. Nothing personal, we all are. We are a mass of people incapable of thought, part of a crowd that thinks in images, powerless when it has to do with sentiment. We are a collection of readily-hackable egos. We are a consumer culture, the essence of our discussion piece, A Brief History Of Consumer Culture featuring a broad swath of consumer economists.

Man's thoughts and actions, you see, are compensatory substitutes for suppressed desires. And so it is when it comes to consumption. Things are desired, not so much for their intrinsic worth, but as symbols of social position, as evidence of success. In Id-speak, we are creatures of sex, power, and security. Thus was born the twentieth-century public relations industry.

The timing was not coincidental. Capitalism had taken care of the production side of things. In fact, more than taken care of it, as the post-WWII problem was insufficient demand. Something needed to goose the flow. Enter demand creation – let loose the dogs of envy, or at least insecurity. Those of a certain age might trade examples of these implanted inadequacies (personal favorite "ring around the collar").

Then, food – now meet hunger. The problem is the hunger became insatiable, driven quite intentionally by means of planned and/or psychological obsolescence. Add to that the “convenience” of deferred cost through payment plans and debt. The gorging continues until, maybe, it becomes time to purge. That high priestess of minimalism, Marie Kondo, invites us to throw away those things that no longer give us joy, or what once passed as joy.

The fact is there’s no such thing as “away.” As we start to choke on our own vomit, the problem is exported. View, for example, the eighty thousand tons of floating plastic in the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a memorial dedicated to our “compensatory substitutes for suppressed desires.” Then throw in for good measure the trillions of dollars of consumer debt. Perhaps it’s time for the super-ego to regain control.

The point is that instead of always pointing the finger at others we might look within. Maybe the problem is that we collectively are, indeed, of limited intellect.