- How does consumerism affect society and our planet?
- This is a question of incredible interest for me because of how shockingly integral it is in our society. Recently, I have been watching quite a few documentaries and educational videos about economics (YouTube recommendations are weird). While I knew prior to watching those videos that consumerism was important for the structure of our modern society, I had not truly noticed how important it was. It might just be common knowledge to some, but I had never noticed how nearly each and every part of our lives revolves in some way around consumerism. We learn so we can work and we work so we can buy. We determine people’s wealth by what they can afford to consume/buy and in turn, that level of wealth determines where we are placed in society. We are so conditioned to think in this way, to the point where buying things has become the principal thought of many. Of course, this works very well on us because humans become bored incredibly quickly; a new item will become the status quo before we know it. Consumerism develops us to become consumers, individuals whose main purpose in society is to purchase more and more products. This also results in us buying things we do not need and causes us to have a surplus. Typically, the results of this are demonstrated in landfills and calculations of the world’s pollution. Buy a new iPhone every year? Not only is it likely that the old one will go straight to a landfill, but there is also the pollution caused by the factory to take into account, as well as all the mining of the necessary resources. All of this and more goes into consumerism and we, as humans, are still unsatisfied. We are very strange.
Blog
3 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Hi Victor,
Your question really interested me. You’re very right when you say that consumerism is in all parts of our lives. I liked how you mentioned that consumerism has a really big impact on our environment. I think that many times people don’t think about the environmental consequences of their consumerism. For later blogs I recommend you to look at the pros and cons of this issue. There are some interesting pros regarding the economy that I think it’s also interesting to look at.
Here’s a link to an article I found that briefly talks about the pros and cons of consumerism in our society: https://swiftmoney.com/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-consumerism/
Hello Victor! Your topic truly interested me in many ways because consumerism has practically turned into an idea all human beings have and it has become normal for people to think like this. I liked how you talked about how humans have become sort of ungrateful for items they have and they are at a constant need to buy more every-time (for example) when a new iPhone is released. It was very fun to read your inquiry and best of luck on your research!
Hi Victor, your topic is very interesting, I am taking business classes, I was only been studying how the market is working and how to get people to buy your products, but I have never thought about this. I’m interested in seeing how this project is going in the future. Here are some links that I think might help you with your researches.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210120-how-the-world-became-consumerist
https://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy/media-issues/marketing-consumerism
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/four-types-consumerism-marketing-25527.html