The Consumption Pandemic
Immorality in pieces
‘Ati sarvatra varjyet’ (Extreme is prohibited everywhere), reads a Sanskrit quote I still remember from my school years. By this message, too much is not to be pursued, even with good things. But when it comes to our current consumption, not only ‘too much,’ it is also ‘too wrong.’
It has been few thousand years, and we have gone from a few frugal nomads wandering the world, dodging the shifting rifts of nature to a swarm of billions spread across continents. Our refrigerators and smartphones packed with contents waiting to be consumed and over-consumed with comfort. Both tangible and intangible stuff has crammed the unimaginable spaces to serve our appetites.
From the morning’s first-minute to eating, commuting, partying, and again before-bed-screen-scrolling, everything is more or less fixed on an abstract gargantuan conveyer line followed by billions. And more and more are still to be added to the same perpetual chain.
It’s a constant influx from the first minute of the morning — politics, fashion, status, food, click baits or anything capable of drawing attention. There is a thin stream of subconscious desperation oozing out every minute necessary to satiate by the endless options presented by staring at phones, shopping, eating, or posting online.
The argument is not against consumerism itself but against the immorality promoted by those within its purview, the immorality of the irresponsible consumption being enjoyed by the irresponsible individuals. It is worth pondering now as the globe is getting more and more intricately connected with each passing day. A single post in one corner of the world has become capable of changing the wind of the next morning on the other side of the world.
The Immoral Fractions
It may sound radical or even absurd in theory when I propose that many of our actions come with small embedded fractions of immorality. And those fractions can add up to complete immoral acts on our part over the time of our lifespan. All our daily choices of consumption are part of it.
Humans (and animals for that matter) weren’t perishing before by the ‘pollution caused’ or ‘social’ diseases, but today they are, in droves. For example, our choices of fashion, food, and transport have their significant part in a pollution-caused-fatalities pie, they contribute to our daily immoral footprint. Be it people breathing in the city of Delhi or living on the Citarum River’s water, the distant but profound cost of glamour and glitter that intoxicates us is visible.
In the discussions around moral and immoral actions, the usual norm portrays the harm in terms of immediacy to the causal action in space or time. Damage is delivered to the sufferer in proximity to the action in one whole consignment.
But give it a thought — what if harm is a result of smaller accumulating actions and effects spread in fractions? When tragedy does not pop up like half-hour pizza delivery but slice by slice over the years. Does harm caused by that can be counted as immoral on our part?
Our choices of what we devour, may not change a life somewhere for the worst in a day, but it might if we are going to hang around with the same habits for more than half a century.
Intentionally or unintentionally, technology amplifies and expands this pandemic by a large factor, laying the groundwork and completing execution even more rapidly and efficiently.
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If it weren’t the most efficient of businesses to entice the senses of population, it wouldn’t have been there for centuries. Now only the field has stretched, cults have enlarged, and the whole game has upped. Be it political or commercial corporations, it is essential for the “success” to excite the masses’ imaginations, to sell and oversell the perceptions, dreams, or semblance of meaning in the market.
Now only is the time when consumers are radically free from bodily limits. Bars have been raised for the glutton inside. If the physical limit is exhausted mental limit is always there to exploit. The continuous Instagram feed of a decadent life, life-changing gurus, conspiracies, fake news, and hate news are sold and consumed avidly in billions each day casually and carelessly.
Why? It turns out that outrage and anxiety are both stimulating and profitable. We may not care to know that while being busy chasing tweets on Twitter, algorithms and organizations do. Algorithms and organizations have powers, but they also often have the least reservations against using them unethically. They fail to account for numerous negative externalities in their short-term aims.
The side effects of depression, anger, division, riots, and more continue to accumulate fraction at a time. Always unattended and uncontemplated.
When the printing press was invented and books became available to lower classes, it brought emancipation. It was emancipation from the narratives of power-drunk higher echelons who manipulated masses to suit themselves. Today when we have an information revolution, content chasing us and crammed everywhere, we are again trapped in the bubble of narratives.
Inside the bubbles, information is injected continuously to stimulate the taste buds of mind. That way, consumption is maintained. And if someone does manage to get out of one, the next bubble is there to scoop him up.
We already are well beyond the sustainable population of the planet. And now, the consumption of these unsustainable numbers is shooting for exponentials. The unperceived immorality accumulating little by little may take us by storm someday, with its actual naked cruelty.
How the face of this little blue sphere in the Goldilocks ends up will eventually depend on how we act toward the responsibility we can’t toss on to just governments or Gods.
