Things I’ve learned from killing consumerism #6- I’m still hungover from my drunkenness

I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s been so ridiculously easy for me to quit shopping. So easy, in fact, that I’ve felt like I must be cheating somehow.

There are three options that I can see:

1. I was never really hooked in the first place
2. I’m finding enough loopholes to keep up the habit anyway
3. I’m still hungover from my drunkenness.

I think it’s probably a combination of all three, but the most interesting one is the latter. I’m not a drinker, but I get the impression that when you’re hungover, you really don’t feel the need for another drink. Quitting shopping is easy when you’ve been drunk off of consumerism so long that there is actually nothing you could possibly need.

The deal was that if I needed something, instead of buying, I’d make, or borrow, or swap. It has been two and a half months and I’ve neither made, nor borrowed, nor swapped. I’m full up of stuff.

So why on earth did I shop before? I guess it must have been a hobby; a past time or entertainment.

So now? Well I just replace it with dinners or friends or reading or whatever else I feel like doing and that is that. Because at the moment there’s nothing I need. I’m still drunk from before.

Who Tells the Creators of Technology When to Stop?

I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to being glued to my phone. Yes, I’m distressed when I look around at a group of friends out to dinner and see them all on their phones, but what can I say? I do it too.

What really gets me though is that I know I don’t need it. Somewhere, deep in a drawer, is my old Nokia 3315. Gosh I loved that phone. It did everything I needed it to, and for years I refused to upgrade, until eventually I did, because everyone had, and somehow that created a need.

Technology changes lives, saves lives and improves lives, but like many things that can be used for good, it can also be just plain bad.

Companies, driven by the desire for money and success, create, improve and reinvent. And like lemmings we lap it up. We pour out our hard earned cash to buy the newest thing, because it’s new.

We don’t need it, but the very fact that everyone buys it creates a need.

There is no accountability; no one who looks at new technology and asks: Will this be truly beneficial for society in the long run? They just create and we consume.

Could we be lining our graves because we follow without thinking, people who are creating without thinking, and there is no one to tell them when enough is enough?