Consumers

To some extent, I suppose the consumer culture is unavoidable. I mean, I am looking around me, and I doubt there is a single thing within 100 feet that wasn't manufactured and bought. When you think about the old days our ancestors lived in, when cloth was made at home, and the homes themselves were built by hand, it really makes our modern world seem that much more alien. I don't know that I have ever made anything, really. But that is probably not the correct way to rebel against consumer culture, by buying nothing. After all, there were markets and consumers before we were all thought of as "just" consumers. It's the excess in which we buy, and our insistence on buying as the only thing worth really doing. We save up money to buy things, not to even necessarily use them, but just to have them. We buy pools and cars and bicycles and exercise equipment, and we have so many things that no one person could properly use all of it, and yet we are compelled to buy more, because there is no money to be made by convincing people that they already have enough, by pressing people to do their own gardening, to just go out in the sun and play with the toys they already have. No money to be made from driving consumers out of stores, and isn't that all we are, just consumers? It's frustrating. I would like to spend a lot less time consuming.