My thoughts on mass consumerism
Mass consumerism. I just hate it. It was probably the release of the new iPhone 5S that got me started on this. People were camping outside Apple Stores days ahead of its release! In my opinion, that's definitely not a good sign. Such materialistic devotion doesn't really inspire me.
We have to understand that every few years a new technology comes up which will totally revolutionize the way we see our world. A new technology today will be replaced by something newer and better tomorrow.
At the individual independent level, we are all focused on our individual desires. We want our small comforts, a nice gadget, a car, a few vacations (or maybe that one trip to an exotic place) etc etc. Let's imagine a scenario in our current world where each individual focuses ONLY on what he or she needs and ignores the needs of everyone else. Like an independent entity. An island. So basically what I'm trying to communicate is- Imagine a world without collective thinking.
The world has a population of around 7 billion people. What would happen if each individual thinks only about his/her individual desires and his/her own life? I know one thing that will definitely happen. All resources on earth will be depleted in a very very short period of time. Human greed can reach highly disproportionate levels if not kept in check.
Even the population keeps growing rapidly every day. Three babies are born every second around the world! http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_babies_are_born_per_second_in_the_World
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Remember we are imagining a world without collective thinking. Its terrible to imagine what would happen to our natural resources if that was the case.
Obviously that is not the way we are living right now. I just took an extremely negative scenario. The majority of people are actually living in small groups of non-collective thinking while the rest are finding ways to make the world a single collective entity. The best way according to me is that we collectively build a community which can think as one entity, with complete freedom and respect.
That way we will still have the good peaceful life we always wanted but in a new, efficient and better way. Instead of simply consuming products we, as a group, help in building sensible products that can be consumed intelligently without wastage and use them in a far more efficient way.
Spiritually enlightened people might talk about finding peace within ourselves. But I get a feeling that its very misleading.
When we go deep within ourselves for our source of happiness we forget the world. Yes we have to go deep within ourselves but not at the cost of forgetting the world.. I believe that the path to happiness and peace lies on both the outside and the inside. Not only should we look inside ourselves we must look outside.
We don't live in our minds or on this earth or in this solar system. We live in an ever expanding universe and that's the perspective we should put ourselves in.