The Epidemic of Consumerism

Continuing on the friendship theme, I thought it might be worthwhile to repost a Facebook note I wrote a few years ago. For what it’s worth, I feel like this realization was the first key turning point for me in my quest for making friends, (the previous post being the second.) I think you need at least both realizations to be an effective channel for love. At the time of this post, I had figured out how to pass love on to other people, but I didn’t know how to receive it. Up until my previous post, recent events had drained whatever love I had left, and I had reverted back to a consumer. When my friend decided to move on, I got depressed because I didn’t know what else to do. Now having figured out how to receive love, this weekend was incredibly awesome, and I feel like I can produce again.

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Don’t get me wrong. I think consumerism is perfectly acceptable in a business context. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get what you pay for. There’s nothing wrong with getting free stuff. But this mentality is absolutely devastating in the context of a friendship. The interesting thing is, we’ve heard this dozens of times, and yet people still hold this mentality without even realizing it! — like I did.

The common saying is you can’t buy friends. Okay, so I understand that friendships aren’t about doing favors for each other for the purpose of getting something in return. I’m told to love my neighbors including my enemies. This is easy enough when the neighbors are nice. I don’t know why the love-your-enemies part is difficult for me, but I guess it’s just another quality that I need to grow in. For now, I prefer to hang with the people I like. I’m also told that Christians are supposed to love the Church just as a husband loves his wife. One application of this is that people shouldn’t hop from church to church as their needs change every week. This makes sense, although I think one of the primary reasons for going to church is to be enlightened by someone whose main job is to study the Bible. Otherwise, why not study and have fellowship with other believers at home?

This was basically my mindset until a couple nights ago when I realized I was completely missing the point! No matter how I would have liked to think of myself, almost every issue that I saw in my life when it came to relating to other people traced to the fact that I was fundamentally a consumer. As I stated earlier, I understood it was wrong to leave a church because another church served better coffee. But let’s say I move to a new town and have to choose between 10 different churches; doesn’t it boil down to the coffee? I posed this question to Danny who was the pastor of the Crossroads college group at Grace Chapel, and he basically replied, “No. The coffee may be an influence, but the deciding factor should not be about what you need/want, but about who needs the most help. You should be asking, ‘Whose needs can I fill?’ rather than, ‘Who can fill my needs?’ Of course, if everyone is doing this, then everyone’s needs will get filled by everyone else. But the focus should be on the needs of other people, not your own needs.” I realized my problem. I had applied this advice to maintaining existing friendships, but I hadn’t applied it to creating new ones. Sometimes I just can’t think outside the box.

I started to analyze my life, and it was amazing how all of the issues I saw in relating to other people linked directly back to my consumerist mentality. Here are a few examples:

I’ve often wondered why cliques exist. They are infectious and detrimental to society. As someone on the outside, I’m often disgusted when I see a clique, and if it’s exclusive enough, I have no desire to go back. Despite my awareness of their negative effect, I still find myself fostering them. How does this happen? I’m not a shy person. I have no problem meeting and conversing with strangers. Why is it that reaching out to the new people always feels like a chore? It’s because I have a consumer mentality. It seems that cliques exist when there are a group of consumers who have managed to create a symbiosis relationship. Perhaps the relationship didn’t start out as that, but it certainly degenerated into nothing more than a bunch of parasites content to feast on each other. When someone is engulfed in this mentality, there is no interest to break that bond and try someone else. The only people who have easy entry into a clique are the ones who can bring something new to the table, i.e. fresh meat.

American culture has always confused me. People just can’t be taken literally anymore. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to avoid all hospitality and favors (unless either I know the person or they’re making it very difficult to refuse) than to accept and have it backfire because they actually desired that I leave them alone and were only trying to be polite. But why am I even thinking like this? Why is it now that the first thing I consider when someone makes an offer is whether it is genuine? It’s because I have a consumer mentality.

I hate asking favors of other people — especially for a ride. I always feel like I’m imposing. My mom would offer gas money, but often times they decline, and I’m not the type to force them to accept that either. Why do I think like this? It’s because I have a consumer mentality. The entire essence of our friendship was the ride I was getting. I’d like to think there was more to it, but that was it. Sometimes the friendship actually started out as more, but in the end, it was just about the free ride.

All of these issues tied to the simple fact that I was in it for myself. It was all about what I needed. Had I actually been focused on serving the needs of other people, I would have never found myself in a clique, or been worried about imposing on the lives of others. And by serving other’s needs, I don’t mean doing things like washing their car. Perhaps that’s what they need, but I think often times, people just need companionship. They just need someone edifying to hang out with. And that’s who I need to be.