Consumer Consumption, I Have Seen A Truth

The ability to have nothing and still be happy should be considered one of the greatest achievements on earth. It’s something that so few of us can still feel, the image I have of this is seeing rural communities meeting someone that has a lot for the first time.

You must believe that up until that moment those people barely cared about more than finding something to eat, getting a new shirt and maybe go for a swim in the nearest lake. You know the people I am talking about, those smiling faces you always see gazing at a camera, absolutely amazed by a piece of technology we all complain isn’t good enough.

Our world is moving faster and faster towards getting everything for everyone. We always try to get the next best thing, forgetting that we may already have something as good with us already. I myself am a big sinner when it comes to this, not one week after getting my Camera all the way back in 2010 I was looking at which camera would be the best next thing.

Yet, when I look at the things that I use the most, almost none of them are new. I find myself moving towards using trusted items more and more, things that I would prefer as just the older, trusted thing. My camera is now 10 years old, I know it completely, there I can switch between settings, lenses and angles without thinking about what I’m doing.

It’s the same for most everything else, my PC is old, my Xbox is now almost three years old, my TV is a hand me down from my father. Don’t get me wrong, I still want new stuff, new cameras, phones and even washing machines still interest me. However, increasingly I find myself looking at these things and wondering why I would need a new one.

The TV I have isn’t massive or impressive, but it works, it has been working for over 10 years and hasn’t even shown a dead pixel. The PC is the same, ten years and some minor upgrades, the things that I have are now a mix between a few months old and decades. In the past I would buy something new, because I want something new. Now I find myself comparing everything I already have and judging whether I really need something new.

It may seem simple to most people, even obvious, however I am willing to bet that most of humanity that is bombarded with the latest ads and videos won’t think like this. We see constant feeds from marketers and people that wants you to buy their latest thing. At some point we all turned into a consumer society, a people that relies almost entirely on getting what we want, not always what we need.

This short talk will end with something my father once said to me when I said I just “NEEDED” to get my hands on a new computer. You only need three things, air to breathe, food to eat and bed to sleep in.