Don’t Buy It — You’re Worth It

Our consumer lifestyle is killing us

I was born innocent in the mid-1960s, an era when the greatest power since the Roman Empire reached its pinnacle and put a man on the moon.

It was the age when Rice Crispies and Corn Flakes would be replaced by Cap’n Crunch.

He was a white man who landed in our cereal bowls and on our moon, and many say the moon is made of cheese.

As white men conquered the moon and breakfast cereal, they would also become Mad. Men, that is. They would bamboozle me and everyone else.

I grew up to fulfill my destiny as a mindless consumer of drugs, entertainment, food, and propaganda.

The Age of More morphed into the Era of Excess, which has finally slumped over, numbed out by heroin, into the Epoch of Erosion. Call it Gen X cynicism if you want to, but the stunning sunset views are gone as I peer at my cute sneakers in the fading light, while the cliff crumbles beneath me.

The watchwords of my generation are stagnation and erosion. Frozen wages, lost trajectories, Boomer bros.

Human greed isn’t new but in our time, we are feeding a monster every time we buy, eat, celebrate, or go anywhere.

What matters is this: it’s not your fault. Go ahead and echo Gordon Gekko that Greed Is Good, but you know in your heart it’s a disaster and that you didn’t ask to be born into a world with pizza delivery and drive-thru liquor stores.

You can fly off to paradise or step aboard a cruise, but somewhere deep inside you know it’s all effed up.

You want off this carousel, so why does it feel impossible?

Take Me Home, Country Roads

I listen to too much John Denver because I want what he’s selling: a simpler life, without a twang, that we can all generally agree on.

The Waltons and Beverly Hillbillies were popular because we liked those people.

Now we have Duck Dynasty and the Duggards.

Something is deeply wrong, and I blame the Bigs.

Big Tobacco, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Oil

The Big Lie is how the little guy did this to himself. We got addicted to cigarettes, junk food, illegal and legal pills, and driving.

We did it to ourselves because we were weak.

Never mind the drug dealers who got you hooked, knowing it would make them a good living.

We got hoodwinked by the neighborhood fast food joint, our family doctors, and the comfort of plush seats in $60,000 trucks.

Burgers, painkillers, keeping up with the Joneses.

It’s hard to find a human these days — especially one under 40 — who doesn’t partake in some of the Bigs on a daily basis. That’s not out of weakness. You literally cannot live in America without being part of the problem.

We’ve been carefully groomed since childhood for consumerism through media, exposure, and most of all the virulent prevalence of cheap, normalized consumables.

The Bigs rule our lives.

Most of us have no choice but to drive, and all of us depend on trucks to deliver our goods. We remnants of rural America must shop at Walmart or Dollar Stores or go without.

We take vacations — by car or plane.

Using fuel is no longer a free choice. Big Oil owns us.

If you want to opt out of gobbling fuel by driving an electric vehicle, you’d better have money.

We eat out because we are busy and tired. We order pizzas at the end of a long week. We bring cupcakes to a party because we don’t bake like our mothers and grandmothers because we work.

Eating convenient crap has become completely normal.

If you are wealthy enough, you can get Hello Fresh, hire a personal chef, or hire a nanny and take cooking classes.

We gave up smoking, but the next chemically manufactured evil got us hooked courtesy of our family doctors. It was called Oxycontin.

We half-heartedly try giving up Starbucks, Amazon, cable TV, Wellness, guns, and sitting in our cars with the engine idling so we can bask in A/C every single moment of our lives.

We can quit one thing, but quitting convenience altogether isn’t possible because our society runs on it.

We are stuck on a conveyor belt of ease.

It’s not our fault. This is a shell game run by con artists betting on your desperation and exploiting the pleasure principle.

The robber barons knew where our soft underbelly lay and they, rapacious and energetic men, took full advantage.

Consumerism x Numbers = Billionaires

The wealth monster is always hungry and it feeds on numbers. As in hoards of people smoking, doing drugs, driving everywhere, shopping online, and eating out.

When states sued Big Tobacco, there were plenty of defenders of the cigarette makers, blaming the addict. The tobacco apologists conveniently ignored key facts:

:: 90% of smokers (and other tobacco users) start when they are teens.

:: Tobacco companies targeted vulnerable people, including kids, LGBTQ+ populations, and people with chronic mental illness.

:: They lied about designing cigarettes to be far more chemically and psychologically addictive than the tobacco plant.

:: Smoking was promoted in ads by doctors.

Rich people want you addicted because it’s more profitable.

The Tragic Story of a Fancy Coffee Machine

My consumerist transgressions are pervasive. They probably began in kindergarten, but let’s rewind to a few short months ago.

I vowed to stop overspending on Starbucks, and I’d just gotten a job, so I bought a fancy Nespresso machine. I won’t lie, I was influenced by a recent Airbnb stay in Sedona and a mild sense of disappointment with life.

I can’t afford Sedona. It was gratis through a wealthier branch of the family tree.

The Nespresso machine arrived in a fancy cardboard box, which I would later put in my SUV and deliver to the recycling plant, tossing it inside a dumpster like a seed onto fallow ground.

I ordered posh-looking sleeves of 80% recyclable aluminum pods, thus relieving me of 80% of the burden of guilt for creating zombie ocean trash.

I can only get pods online, but they are sooooo adorable. They come in a rainbow of metallic hues and resemble bonbons, by design.

Am I saving money? Possibly, if I drank Starbucks every day.

Which I did not.

Is the coffee better? Yes. Are the pods vegan, gluten-free, and free-range? Yes. Is it easy and convenient? Sure.

Is this good for the planet? No. Is it good for my head? Sadly, also no.

The Backlash

Obscenely wealthy American princess jets to the last remnant of paradise to murder innocent leopard for fun.

The counterbalance to our collective consumer madness is a bizarre culture of do-goodery, fueled by the immense boredom and deep guilt of the idle rich and championed by upper-middle-class white women.

Wellness. Veganism. Electric cars. Biohacking, ecotourism, billionaire thrill seekers in mini-submarines and their defenders. Gender reveal parties that set forests on fire.

Wealthy white glitterati who hunt African leopards and are murdered by their equally odious dentist husbands.

Jeff Bezos donates to charity while constructing his evil Bond villain escape vehicle. Elon Musk takes ketamine because he owns the world but feels depressed.

Gurus on TikTok tell you it’s all about inner peace.

Once known as a country of nice white people, Canada is now an inferno.

You can’t even write about this sh*t without someone telling you your existence IS the problem. Your cynicism is the problem. Don’t call a spade a spade or a rich man a vicious rotten drug kingpin unless you have an answer.

Well, I don’t have an answer. But one thing is for sure: fancy coffee machines only create bigger problems.

I Want a New Nervous System

I am one of the lucky people who stopped leaving the house during Covid but didn’t have to worry about housing, food, companionship, or fatal illness.

It was heavenly. I missed people, but as an introvert, the overall experience was an improvement.

I want to go back.

Now that it’s all over, I got a job as an essential worker. Having a job makes me constantly feel like life is a little too much.

So I outsmart my overwhelm with more stuff. The empty hole widens and yawns. One false move and I’m tumbling down, to the familiar playground of consumerism.

I am no different than Bezos and Musk, just much poorer. I’m a typical greedy human and a product of a manic celebration of consumption.

So are you — yet that is the minor role. We have this lousy economy and Pandora’s box of addictions because of the power imbalance.

Men and women. White and black. Rich and poor.

Evil men exploit our weaknesses on a grand scale. If only James Bond were here to defeat him, but James Bond was always a thug, too, who harassed women and drove fuel-inefficient vehicles with impunity.

Gurus on TikTok

I follow Sadhguru on social media. He has a pleasant-sounding voice and promises a way out. He’s a little vague about it, but I can’t disagree with anything he says and since I want a way out, I watch and listen.

I want to stop being a consumer.

I could go on a purge of all consumerist ways, then tolerate the boredom. Theoretically.

I’d have to give up my job as a 9–1–1 dispatcher and stop feeding peanut butter and banana sandwiches to the raccoons, all of whom I’ve named Elvis (except the mom, who goes by Momma).

I could ride my electric bike to shop locally at Walmart, which would add adventure to my life because the risks of being shot, run over by a longhorn bull, chased by a loose dog, or stopping halfway to get barbecue are real.

I’d have to junk the Nespresso machine or sell it to someone.

I’d need to learn to download books from the library.

I’d have to stop driving an hour to Costco and therefore stop buying insanely overpriced Starbucks sous vide bacon and gruyere egg bites and subsist on plain old eggs and bacon.

Now that I write this, I realize how ridiculous I am. I pray everyone else is better, but judging by how many followers Sadhguru has, I doubt it.

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years. She’s recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, a YA adventure story, with Wings ePress.