Must we have that extra watch, that extra umbrella or a third cell phone? We all understand the concept of ‘a drop becomes an ocean’ when it comes to saving water, however, it doesn’t occur to many of us that our over consumption, once totalled up, will lead to a depletion of resources.
Common sense tells us to stop accumulating consumer goods but we are unable to control ourselves because of our biological urge to keep up with the Jones’s, the Smith’s, the Nakamura’s, the Ali’s and the Wong’s. This has led to us attaching our identity to the idea of having, and as we all collectively continue to assert our ‘individuality’, our ‘success’ via material means, the value of products will change based on the most lucrative market demand and resources will be redistributed to mirror that trend. Even now we see farmlands being converted into aluminium smelting plants, villages and forests being levelled into dams and rice fields being replanted with corn or oil palm for biodiesel fuel.
How and why is this happening?
Go to your favourite Search Engine and look up the words ‘Sales and Marketing Strategy’, ‘Business Strategy’, or even something more specific like ‘How to write a Business Plan’. One of the things you will notice is that almost all of the articles will talk about the importance of growth. It makes sense actually, because if there is no growth then no one will want to invest in the business.
This need to grow, and grow big, leads to the phenomenon of over promotion, whereby salespeople are expected to break into a market by whatever means. Admittedly, Economic growth has led to better living conditions for millions of people. Competition between firms has not only created jobs but has also brought down prices to affordable levels. For example, the IT industry’s need to grow has brought down the price of PC’s to well within the reach of a large number of people. This in turn has spurt growth in many other industries that uses the technology. Growth changes the way we live, the way we think, and even the way we relate to each other and the change is generally good. Yet with the problem of depletion of resources and resulting pollution, have we reached a point where we need to rethink the idea of growth?
How have we changed?
Thirty years ago advertisements appeal to our sensible nature. A product is convenient, cheap, easy to repair, easy to use and reliable. Yet now, when I watch the 30 second commercials on TV, I see that a lot of the products are presented as cool, trendy, must have, free for first 100 calls etc., all of which seem to be focused on more, more and so much more. We can’t seem to get enough of anything. We listen with rapt attention as strangers tell us how their product or service will make our life better, sexier or even richer. We watch programs hosted by rude people who tell us how to dress, and then we parrot their words back and forth to our friends, after which we buy more products to stuff into our already overflowing wardrobes and cabinets to make our image match our words.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that more is better especially in this age and time because we can now count to infinity. The quantity of anything we can have has become limitless. Our senses are also being constantly bombarded with images, and we are made to feel that we must show our multi-facet self to the public by changing our image incessantly which, by the way, is only possible if we buy more.
Will our choices come back to haunt us?
In my second year while studying in Tokyo, I saw a man jumped in front of an express train. He was standing less than a yard in front of me. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. Since I was at the end of the platform and had to wait for everyone else to walk down the staircase leading out of the station, I had to watch him being scrapped off the tracks. Admittedly, the man might have committed suicide because his heart was broken, or because he failed as a student. Whatever the cause was, the effect must have been such that he could find no way out of his predicament. Would he have acted differently if he was in a less competitive society? When you experience something like this first hand, your ideals of success is suddenly turned on its head. I began to question if perpetual growth is absolutely good, or if it is only good when it is within a certain range.
Right now, the security we rely so heavily on is only effective so long as the ideals of the existing law-makers continue to be effective. If water and electricity were to be cut off from our cities, few of us will know how to survive. If we were to suddenly lose our jobs, many of us will have nowhere to go. And even if we do have i.e. a piece of land, some of us will not know what to do with it. When we consider these kinds of scenarios, the concept of self-sustainability should be the most important thing to teach and to learn, yet why is the growth of self-sustainable technology so slow in coming? Instead, we teach our children to rely on corporations for jobs, for lifestyles and for validation without realizing that our economic independence is dependent upon the decisions of others. Our situation now is certainly oxymoronic, and if it were not so worrisome, I would have considered it one great intellectual joke. This is one comedy I am in no mood to write.
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