Treadmill Of Consumption Quotes

Get off the treadmill of consumption, replication, and mediocrity. Begin lifting the weights of creativity, originality, and success.

Had our tour group sat down to draw up a manifesto, it might have gone something like this. We the young, urban, middle class tend to lead a rushed life working for corporates that care more for their bottom-lines than for their employees or the environment. As stressed, unfulfilled, moneyed individuals we then seek satiety in consumption, a treadmill which, besides drawing us further into the same trap, is environmentally unsustainable and has far-reaching consequences. If we would only be willing to to lead a slower, simpler life, we might not have all the shiny stuff, but our work might be better aligned with our talents and dispositions, and we would have opportunity and time to introspect, explore, and lead more fulfilling lives. Everyone would then be growing according their own genius.

Inequality makes people feel that the material goods they have are inadequate. We constantly want more, not because we need it but because we want to keep up with the Joneses. The more our friends and neighbours have, the more we feel that we need to match them just to feel like we’re doing OK. The data on this is clear: people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more equal societies.21 We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers). We find ourselves spinning in place on an exhausting treadmill of needless over-consumption.

As societies become more egalitarian, people feel less pressure to pursue ever-higher incomes and more glamorous status goods. This liberates people from the treadmill of perpetual consumerism.