Refusing Consumerism, Reclaiming Wholeness

How might we navigate the festive season as our awareness of the polycrisis deepens?

I literally feel sick at the sight, even the thought, of all the stuff, and what it contains.

The cheap tat that contains the exploitation of someone’s labour. The flimsy imitations of designer goods that contain the tease- perhaps you will be worthy of inclusion or positive regard if you present yourself like this. The luxury items that contain the implication that the more we love someone the more we spend on them. The devices that contain our relationships with them- the torment of social media, the temptation of resource sucking AI, the tedium of ad after ad after ad…

The empty space where someone, especially a child, is hoping that something will be. Disappointment. Guilt. Meaning making about self worth. Disruption to our relationships.

Hours and days and weeks and months and years of our lives devoted to working to buy things we believe will satisfy us and those we care about. The planet groaning under the strain. Most of us too busy with all this to notice.

Seeing the world through a transcontextual lens can be as overwhelming as it is expansive and generative.

I’ve been continuously re-evaluating my participation in Christmas for the past 5 or 6 years. I’ve had a lot of disentangling to do- I worked in retail from being 16 to 28. In around that time period, clothing production doubled. My life revolved around selling more than the previous year, and it genuinely never occurred to me to wonder- how much stuff is enough? Where does all this end up?

There’s enough clothing on the planet right now to clothe the next 6 generations.

Sounds… plenty? And yet, it’s continuously churned out, along with endless variations of accessories and homewares and toys and devices and all the rest of it. And we keep on consuming it, imagining that it will deliver us a sense of success or belonging.

In her brilliant book, Combining, Nora Bateson explores the etymology of the word “consume”…

Late 14c., “to destroy by separating into parts which cannot be reunited , as by burning or eating,” hence “destroy the substance of, annihilate,” from Old French consumer “to consume” (12c.) and directly from Latin consumere “to use up, eat, waste.” (Etymonline, n.d.)

When we consume resources, we annihilate them. How might we like to get into a different relationship with them?

In Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth quotes Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Onondaga Nation. “What you call resources we call our relatives,” he explained. “If you can think in terms of relationships, you are going to treat them better, aren’t you? … Get back to the relationship because that is your foundation for survival.”

What could it look like to collaborate or partner with our relatives? Perhaps we would find ourselves metabolising, alchemising, regenerating with, rather than consuming. In what practical ways could our behaviours transform through this description?

Staying with Doughnut Economics, I was interested to read that students invited to take part in a “Consumer Reaction Study” identified more strongly with notions of wealth, status and success than did their fellow students who were merely told instead that they were participating in a “Citizen Reaction Study”. Kate Raworth quotes the media and cultural analyst Justin Lewis, “Unlike the citizen, the consumer’s means of expression is limited: while citizens can address every aspect of cultutral, social and economic life… consumers find expression only in the marketplace.”

What do we yearn to express in this festive period?

How might we reclaim our lives outside the marketplace in doing so?

How might we reclaim our wholeness here?

It strikes me that as much as we are consumers, destroyers, wasters, we are also being consumed, destroyed, wasted in this dynamic.

How might a citizen, a member of a community, express the values upon which our liveable futures depend? How might we acknowledge what we ourselves contain?

Much of my client work includes supporting people to build tolerance for being misunderstood, disliked, eye-rolled when it comes to their choices that support a just transition.

If you think you might benefit from some support, check out ways to work with me here.