Increasing Consumerism-Decreasing Moral Values

Today our society is caught in a vicious cycle of, ever increasing pursuit of purchasing goods and services in greater amounts to satisfy desires that has been fostered by same society through advertisements and celebrity endorsements. In this race, timeless moral values like -- kindness, generosity, friendship, contentment, trust and honesty have either taken a back seat or have been completely forgotten. No one has time to stop to realize that this is the symptom of an ageless vice know as ‘greed’.

In fact today, being greedy is not considered that bad at all, but something that is acceptable and normal. Greed is at times fueled and celebrated through announcements of shopping festivals, seasonal discounts and offers of easy monthly installments (EMIs). Shopping malls are now new tourist destinations and gone are the days when family went to a picnic at well know monument or to see the sunset.

Our society is so much obsessed with consumption fuelled by frenzy of advertisements of products and services that people do not even stop and think whether they really need that products and services or do they have enough money to buy. Purchase of goods and services is no longer for meeting our basic needs. But an artificial need is created to fill our inner emptiness by lure of achieving higher social status by going for products of particular brands that people higher in social status are seen to be using. We immediately want the mobile phone that is endorsed by Priyanka Chopra or Akshay Kumar, and the one we already have is not good at all. In times of low consumerism this inner emptiness and lack of self esteem was filled by pursuit of higher moral values such as spending time with the family, visits to places of worship, helping the needy.

In this frenzy of getting goods and services we have forgotten to question -- do I really need this thing? Ironically, we go out of our way and undergo hardships in terms of exploitation at our workplace at expense of our self-respect and family-life to earn money for such undesirable goods and services. There is definitely some truth in the joke that, “the only reason a great many families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a discount and easy monthly payments!” No one has time to think about moral values today, which are best thought to remain in books of by-gone era.

Those who support this unabated consumerism argue that if we do not pursue this frenzied rat-race, we would not be able to develop as society and civilization and return to dark ages. And they believe that the idea that inexorable economic growth is the answer to everything, and, given time, will redress all the world's existing inequalities. If such people see its impact then they would realize how wrong they are. Increasing number of people are led to modern-age ailments like stress, unhappiness, depression, heart disease, hyper tension, nervous break-down, suicide, drug abuse, obesity. Such things were unheard of in earlier era when consumerism wasn’t so great in its vigor. In fact it’s considered to be normal if you are suffering from ailments such as constipation, obesity or stress. It’s now common and you are considered normal if people have psychological disorders like compulsive shopping disorder, compulsive eating disorder or personality disorder. This is because due to degradation of moral values, absence of human relationships has been quickly substituted by relationships with a product or brand name.

We must understand that we must not forget our cherished moral values as they are the ones which differentiate us from animals. Due to our over-obsessive behavior we have even forgotten how we can achieve them. Immaterial things like moral values can’t be bought and sold like other material things that we have become so used to, but have to be cultivated over a period of time. We must also understand that in our endless pursuit of consumption we should not loose sight of important things like impact of our consumption on the environment and limiting our consumption so that we can leave the scarce natural resources for future generation. Someone once said “Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.”

We should not completely stop consumption and live like sages but we should ask some very important and relevant question -- do I really need this product or service?

It is absolutely true that due to increasingly obsessive consumerism we are in danger of losing sight of what is important in life. Gandhi jee once said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.”