Choked by Greed: A Modern Epidemic of Consumption

Last updated on November 1st, 2024

We live in a world of abundance where everything we could possibly want, and more, is right at our fingertips. No longer do we have to hunt in the wild for our food, and do things that actually take effort to survive. This new effortless society plays to the laziness in all of us, and a majority tend to take the easy road: ordering food delivery, reducing the amount of physical activity, and avoiding social interactions altogether. Advertisement budgets of companies big and small push us in the direction of consuming more, telling us we are insufficient and that the only way to be happy is to buy more things we don’t need.

With all this modernity, we are told that our lives should be better than at other times in history, but in reality, everyone is more miserable than ever before. This alone should be a reason to take a step back and examine what is happening. Not only are people suffering mentally, but they are suffering physically. Basically, we are suffocating ourselves on this profound level of abundance and convenience.

A good example of this is that we are eating so much food (a majority highly-processed) that we are killing ourselves and actually reducing our life expectancy by doing so. Another is that we are overworking ourselves to death, and not taking time to simply enjoy the gift of life because we have been taught that “working hard” is something to be proud of. We are consuming material possessions at an ungodly rate, and it is bringing us no real happiness, just making us chase more and more things we don’t need. Constant chasing on the hamster wheel of life is a never ending endeavor, unless we wake up and observe.

We simply don’t need what they are selling us.

If all this overabundance is killing us, the only logical solution is to go in the other direction, which is by focusing on the concept of “less is more.” In my personal self-development journey, I have found that the process of becoming wiser is all about letting go. Specifically, letting go of the attachment to ideas that I once held as truth. Buddhism teaches us that attachment is the root of suffering.

To start reversing this negative way of thinking, we can start by learning to differentiate between desires and needs. A step further after learning this concept is to intentionally deprive ourselves of things.

Hear me out.

When we constantly live lives of complete comfort, life becomes less joyful because we don’t appreciate what we have as much as we should. Everyone knows that stepping out of your comfort zone is the way to grow yet we have created lives that have too much comfort and everyone has become miserable in the process.

Making everything faster, more convenient, and efficient is actually making us worse off. If we accept having less we can learn to really savor and appreciate all that we have. Instead of speeding up and taking our minds to the future, we can slow down and focus on the present moment. As soon as we leave this moment mentally, the mental health problems start.

So ask yourself, why are you chasing what you’re chasing? Is it a requirement for your survival or something you’ve been preconditioned to chase?