Consumption And Hollow Satisfaction

The irony is that focusing on your own life achievement and satisfying your own material needs isn’t what results in life satisfaction. How could it when it’s a phenomenon that tends towards the pathology of narcissism?

Life satisfaction needs something more, yet what results from a narcissistic consumer society is apathy towards all the important things from family and friends to community, the wider society and the environment. The pernicious effect that this has on all of us and our own lives is significant.

It seems more obvious than ever that consumption and using our bodies merely as a means to consume doesn’t help us, nor could it.

Success measured by getting more stuff, and thus more status is obviously hollow. Climbing up the economic ladder merely to get more stuff is obviously hollow.

Behind it all needs to be substance.

But what is that substance and how can we get some of it?

Surely it’s obvious by now!

We need more of a focus on psycho-social values that promote the cultivation of the individual and the increasing of social bonds. Essentially, we need a culture that is significantly reconfigured because the economic world depends on people being perpetually hollow and needy in order to insert superficial fulfilment, which provides temporary relieve before moving on to something else to purchase.

It’s up to us to step back from that and use it sensibly without being defined and subjugated by it. The system of the production of consumption isn’t going to help us all at once as a collective effort since this would undermine its objectives of growth through the extension of consumption.

The way forward for individuals is through the personal investigation that brings together elements from various times and places and integrates them into a way of living that becomes differentiated from the distilled approach of the mainstream.

The problem with this approach is that you will always isolate yourself through differentiation when the average is heading in the other direction or at least languishing.

Yet, leadership still exists, and it’s certainly better to be differentiated and relatively isolated with awareness and purpose than to be subjugated by the hollow world that’s on offer to the mainstream, on which the production of consumption depends.

Even though the road ahead is relatively isolated for individuals on this path, developing a sense of internal calmness makes it manageable.

It is something that needs to happen, and it’s the responsibility of each individual who has a nagging feeling that certain key aspects to contemporary society are leading us astray. This needs to happen if there’s any hope of creating small cohesive communities on the same wavelength and then expanding out to societies where the spirit of humanity can be cultivated and flourish.

There has to be more for humanity than a reduction to consumption....

#consumption #growth #BlackFriday #consumerism #lifesatisfaction