Returning back to school, and coming to Jakarta, has really forced me to think deeply about consumerism. Jakarta is a city of shopping malls – over 140, probably more than any city in America (unless you include strip malls). New York City, my home in the states, is the capital of finance, the machines that drive the modern capitalist economy.
New York City and Jakarta often feel like two sides of the same coin – the modern, developed consumer and the developing consumer, but both want the same things. In neither city do I feel like I fit in.
Can we really buy our way to happiness? After several years of traveling, of having new experiences, I’ve really begun to see how little I need to survive, material wise, but how I can feel really empty unless I have good people around me. We’ve really changed how we perceive ourselves and the world. Even our hobbies are commodified, our interests categorized, and our lives ordered to fit the consumerist path.
But it’s all unsustainable. We’re losing not only our moral backings, but our diversity of cultures, personal relationships, families, and, what I think is the biggest thing missing in modern society. Our connection to Earth – our connection to nature, to all the living things in the world. Jakarta and New York City are both modern cities, sterile in their own way, where we life in communities constructed around time, consumption.
Cities where we can’t even see the stars anymore.
I think we as a society need to regain this connection to mother Earth, and to each other, on a natural human level. We need to reassess how we live. There is nothing natural about nation-states, about cities, about consumerism. And therein lies the problem.
“We’re losing not only our moral backings, but our diversity of cultures, personal relationships, families, and, what I think is the biggest thing missing in modern society.”
Makes you think if those that push along the capitalist engine along realize this as well. What better way to control people than to make them loose these things. There’s been at least a few studies studying consumerism and it leads to only temporary satisfaction. It really fits the profile of addiction more than anything else.
Where I come up short is solutions. There’s a small segment of people that see this, and in some ways it’s growing. People growing their own food and buying locally as a direct response to agribusiness is one example. But there’s yet to be a mass movement to fight out unsustainable life styles.
-jakub
Bravo, Nithin! :) “…our lives are ordered to fit the consumerist path” — perfectly stated and sadly true. Society needs to get back to basics and take a more simplistic approach. I think this is hard for a lot of people to grasp considering the seemingly progressively complicated world we live in, but I know there are solutions to be found. Change seems to take place when innovative leaders set the example. *nudge*
@Pamela – i agree, but i also think the most powerful change comes from the bottom, not from the top. I think that’s one reason we are so disappointed with Obama, we hoped that by changing the leader, we could change everything. But unless we take action everyday, nothing will really change.
@Jakub – i think that what you say is true in the developed world, but here, in the developing world, there are many examples of people living in peace with nature – traditional communities. But their services – caring for the land – are worthless in modern capitalism, which only sees resource value in terms of exploitation and consumption. We need a system that recognizes the true values of nature, and also assesses consumption accurately for its true cost to society.