How consumption culture consumes you

...and how to fight back

Photo by henry perks on Unsplash

You’re sitting at the doctor’s office: waiting. You’re staring at the wall when—ah—you feel the prickle of boredom creeping into your body. Instantly, your phone is out, your thumb opens TikTok within nanoseconds like the millions of times it’s done it before. Before you’ve even realized the world has become a background to your consumption, the beast has you firmly in it’s claws.

Welcome to the age of consumption.

You wake up. You consume. You sit on the toilet. You consume. You sleep. No, you don’t—you lie in bed awake for hours, consuming.

Consumption controls your life. It dictates when you sleep, when you get out of bed, when you can tear yourself away from its jaws to eat and do whatever else you have time for before it snatches you back.

It pulls you into a depression, not the clinical version of the word, but the original meaning. Depression as a lack of expression. Your soul and mind were made to create, to express. And instead it’s force-fed videos of war crimes and ads on skin care products until it’s become a consumption machine.

You see, your mind is biologically programmed to adapt. And it is very good at it.

You consume and consume and consume, and so your mind becomes an expert. It relishes the lack of attention, and venerates the scattered, unorganized chaos of it all. You set down the phone only to realize your focus has disintegrated. Your mind rockets between thoughts like a pinball. Your attention has imploded without you even realizing.

You sit alone with your thoughts thinking you’ve beaten the machine. You haven’t. It still has you firmly caged. It has forced your mind into dependency. You crave the excess stimulation. You crave it everywhere.

It controls your food. You glance at the nutrition label to see hundreds of chemicals you can’t pronounce. The food is predigested slush, yet you crave it. You die for the stimulation of the corn syrup, rioting for the extra dopamine in your Cheetos.

You enjoy nothing.

Enjoyment comes from investment. Instead you take pleasure in everything. Pleasure is passive. You sit and allow reward chemicals to fill your brain for none of your own merit. You see a funny dog video, your thumb twitches, your brain fires for a second, and you’re filled with pleasure. But you don’t enjoy it.

You crave excess.

Stimulation. Food. Fashion. You buy things you don’t need for reasons you don’t believe. You consume. For what? You’re sprinting through life at breakneck speed snatching objects off shelves. For what?

You consume and consume and consume, and the machine purrs, and your mind dies. And we all accept it. We see the ruins of the beautiful world we used to live in and we accept it.

That’s consumption culture. That’s the world we live in.

But some of us rebel.

Substack and Pinterest—people who create. People who push the machine away and create. People who throw off the shackles of depression by expressing.

We enjoy things because we push passion back into the world. We build and create and express because that’s what we were made to do.

We feed the machine, but not with our sanity, with our creativity. We breathe life back into the world with writing and painting and cinema. And it’s not enough to reverse the damage—not even close. But it’s a start. A small rebellion.

So be the creatives.

Don’t be depressed. Express.

Don’t take pleasure. Enjoy.

Don’t let the consumption culture consume you. Live.

—Charlie

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