
Throw-away society:
n. a human civilization that is strongly reliant on consumerism. The term is used to describe a critical view of overconsumption and the dangers of excessive production of wasteful, short-lived products.
America’s notorious for its greed, among other things. Corporations and businesses exploit about as much as the earth has to bear — its plants, animals, fossil fuels, land, air… and people — not just out of gluttony, but to ensure that they still own us. our humanity, our well-being, our lives, and futures — thing that money can’t buy.
They have mastered the art of consumerism and have laid it out as the foundation of not only our economy but our society.
I can already hear the upheaval of the consumerists. I don’t blame the productivity and automation that has taken complete control of the markets. It is these marginal “enhancements” and frivolous conveniences that are both obsolete and deplorably wasteful.

Like the straw. Now these have existed for 7,000 years. Before the plastic straw it was the paper straw, before that was the dried wheat shaft and rye straw, and before even that, “drinking tubes” made of reeds or gold were used by the ancients in China and the Middle East.
Plastic straws debuted back in the 1900s, after polio and tuberculosis were formidable epidemics that guaranteed death due to the lack of advanced medical care. Restaurants began serving drinks with these straws to avoid contact with the glass.
Then, fifty years later, when the car industry exploded, dished and glassware that had to be washed and couldn’t leave restaurants were swapped for cheap, disposable Styrofoam or plastic packaging even as risk of disease and contamination died down. Paper straws were history, their plastic counterparts having taken all their places.
Even though both are environmentally costly, paper will always be better than an oil-based ephemeral product. Oil is in everything, from the earth’s core we pump it out of to shampoo to vitamins to the artificial colorants that make these straws look pretty.
But humans have never developed with the straw; it was only well needed at one point and just became outmoded after our medicine improved and the fast food industry got to save a few quick bucks.
What I never fully understood was why we use straws to sip soda but chug beer straight from the glass. People enjoy coffee right out of the mug but apparently the proper way to sip ice tea is through a straw.
Americans go through half a billion of these sheer plastic contraptions each day alone.
Talk about efficient use of resources. These are the most common object you’ll pick up when cleaning up a beach and the majority of the composition of ocean trash.
Producers are becoming desperate. What used to be intriguing, innovative products that everyone bought or heard about are now pretentious, useless ones that don’t even border on creative. And then producers just buy more ads from news shows in order to convince you that it’s still “revolutionary”, that it’s worth throwing away again after your satisfaction faded.
Our economy is no longer producing necessary products with efficiency and consideration for their opposite and equal reactions. These markets and industries and markets no longer exist as just the backbone of the economy; they’re also there as a body of ecocidal conglomerates focused on temporarily satiating every whim and arbitrary desire by making and selling products* that barely serve its purpose but still stick around because they sell.
*(Speaking of products, remember these? No one even understand their original purpose anymore. They’re cheaply made and break in less than a month — that’s how long it takes for certain people to get addicted to them and have the nerve to buy another. And another. And another. And another.)
We are acquiring a culture in which we hold on to things as a paltry as straws, plastic colored beads, and patterns on napkins and toilet paper because of the dangerously lazy environment consumerism promotes. And it’s sending a message — that the earth is expendable and so are the people who make these products.
Yes, we aren’t just wasting resources; we’re wasting human beings.
Instead of investing their lives in a creative career, both Americans and people abroad are dedicating them to labor, producing objects that won’t last or have any lasting impact on anyone or anything.
People may scoff at creativity and the arts, but innovation is a product that will always sell and last infinitely longer than a trendy convenience.
Labor and production have always been seen as life’s worth — meaning that your life’s value is based off only work, and how much you make when doing it. What you make and the quality of it doesn’t matter, even if there’s a 12-year-old boy in Japan stuck in a sweatshop making half-priced disposable pens.
The workforce has revamped human life into an assembly machine. Thousands of industries waste workers’ skills as they protest minimum wage hikes and wait for their fast approaching deaths. And when they all die, they’re replaced with a fresh batch and the cycle begins again.
These workers are “nurtured” by their parents, groomed to accept mediocrity and submissiveness while also growing their dreams until they are squashed just as they bloom after they graduate. Then some of them go on to work in a shoe factory when job opportunities are nonexistent while the others — the lucky ones — enjoy a comfortable occupation and consume and dispose the products they make.
We’re all contributing to the same problem — this throw-away society; this crime against humanity, the world, and everything that every was — for profit and for convenience.
But why does it have to be this way? Why all the superfluous aesthetics, inventions, and conveniences that take an irredeemable toll on our planet?
The answer? To obscure the monotony of our lives. For what is life without take-out in a plastic container, or without sticky notes, or origami, or those little plastic Ziploc bags that keep you so organized but always end up missing?
And what is life without dreams, ambitions, goals, and drive? What happens when those get left on the edge of the driveway for the garbage truck too?
The only legitimate reason our economy continues to prevail through each recession, depression and hitch in the road was because of vicissitude. Because a few brilliant people dared to dream and ask the right questions, breaking free from the chains of the Consumer. For a dream isn’t a thing you throw away once you’ve fulfilled it, and neither is it something you let blow away into the ocean after reality hits. It will outlive everything you’ll ever own. There’s no risk placed on the outside world, but so much on just yourself.
And I think it’s time we abandon our mainstream talks of consumerism. It’s not just a simple obsession with the latest thing. All you need to do is remember the 20-minute lifespan of the ubiquitous plastic straw.
