CONSUMPTION VS CONSUMERISM 🔺🔻

Consumption is the action of using up a resource. Food, water, a roof on top of your head, the oxygen available in scare all around us among the abundant carbon-dioxide pollution are the basic needs that we consume for our existence.  We basically don’t consume a lot and also can’t. On the other hand, Consumerism is a behavior/ideology that encourages acquisition of goods and services with an increase in cash flow and growth in socioeconomic status. When we start categorizing our requirements they broadly fall into 3, needs, wants and likes. Anything that falls under your basic needs are the things that we consume on a day-to-day basis. Consumerism determines what things fall on your wants and likes list. That’s actually true, you heard it right! We don’t fully determine our wants and likes. They are primarily influenced by our environment. Consider a colleague/friend gets a brand new smartphone and he flaunts its features to everyone around. That instance triggers a stimuli of consumerism, your current smartphone that served a purpose, satisfied your needs, created a sense of happiness now reaches a state of dissatisfaction. As a ripple effect, you start noticing all the tiny glitches that never existed or noticed before. Your environment starts doing its responsibility of pushing you towards that purchase decision via TV commercials, newspaper ads etc. At last, it’s a triumph to Consumerism, making you one of its victim. Studies say, people buy a lot of stuff these days mostly falling under their wants and likes. Being content satisfying our basic needs is a responsibility of every human being. All the resource we have is this tiny little planet that provides the sufficient resource for our CONSUMPTION. Consumerism was never part of the equation, it’s an artificially added ingredient that disrupts the output.

Now it’s up to us to decide whether we are going to understand the environment and act accordingly or become a prey to Consumerism.