It's 1am and I can't fall asleep. So many thoughts are running through my head: all the stuff my sister threw out during her move, BBC news reporting that the toxic recession in the US is trickling down into the global economy, and OK! magazine reporting that celebrities are cutting back on their Christmas spending even though Christmas time as Macys so brilliantly coined is the "gift giving" season. I have one thought and that is that this recession has seriously made me think about my consumption habits, the things I throw away and the things I refuse to let go.
This year my family decided to have a Secret Santa. It's not because we couldn't afford to buy each other gifts but because we wanted to concentrate our individual efforts on buying something special for one person. How many times have we gone gift-shopping and picked up the same sweater or ipod for multiple people and how disingenuous is that?
We as a Western society have taken many things for granted. We have taken our material wealth for granted and we glutted ourselves on things that we never even thought we wanted. We took for granted the value of our homes and thought that this was something special that WE did rather than an error in the system. Keep the good times rolling, right? One of the things that really struck me over the past year was that countries that relied on importing grains for food could not afford them because of the demand for it due to biofuel. This in turn drove sharply higher grain prices. Countries could not afford to buy grain for food and in turn its people had to cut back on them or go hungry.
Yet I said more, more, more. We all chanted it.
I have personally thrown away clothes that I have never worn, let food rot in my refrigerator untouched, spent thousands of dollars on things that I never used. In light of the economic slowdown, I have spent less on things I don't need and really thought about what I value materially and spiritually.
What do I want? I want people to think about what they buy and how they consume. I want all our talented and creative people making innovative and inventive products that shine beauty and truth and I want the consuming masses to seek it if it's not there. I want to go into a store and find everything beautiful and seek the one beautiful thing that sings to me. I want American Consumerism to stop behaving like a bloated glutton and say no for once to the marketers forcing bland derivatives of true beauty down its throat. I want this recession to revolutionize how we think about our wants versus our needs.
Call me an an idealist but I think we can do it. All we needed was a catalyst to make it happen. We needed to be shaken up. I needed this change so I could put my faith back into what we create as a nation, as a society and as a generation.
