Phones, tweezers, lotions, cables, shirts, jock-straps, skirts - our lives are surrounded by things. And when I say our lives, I mean nearly every major country in every continent sans the dark one. A typical German owns nearly 10,000 objects; In 2013, an average adult in the United Kingdom had roughly a hundred items of clothing; and the United States - well, they have 5% of the world’s population but are consuming 30% of the world’s resources. To put this into perspective, as Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees have done, if everybody consumed at US rates, we would need 3 to 5 planets. Unfortunately, this side of the wardrobe to Narnia, we only have one earth fit to inhabit the Daughters of Eve, and Sons of Adam...

It is reasonable to claim that people have always used things; and used them not only for the purposes of survival, but ceremonially, ritually, and even for fun. But the claim might not be a completely accurate one, since the possessions of things in pre-modern or indigenous communities pale in comparison to our perpetual hoarding of goods. For in the last few centuries, the possession, surge and use of things - consumption - has become the defining feature our lives. Yes, it would be foolhardy to suggest that people, at any given time, have a singular identity. But it is quite accurate to suggest that there have been periods when certain roles have become more important than others in shaping a society and its culture. Today, we perform the lead, in this tragicomedy of a life, as the ‘consumer.’

Consumption is a hard concept to pin down. Originally derived from Latin consumere, it meant “physical exhaustion of matter”. Food, water, wood were consumed. As was an illness stricken and disease ridden body - recall the English use of consumption for tuberculosis.

Peculiarly, Latin also has a similar sounding word consummare, which meant “to finish” - for example Christ’s last words: consummatum est or “it is finished”. Thus, ‘waste’ and ‘finish’ were in actual usage rolled into one. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the term consumption went through a complete transmogrification; it ceased to mean waste or completion, and started to become something positive and expressive. In the 1860s Leon Walrus argued that it was “consumption not labour that created value.” The 1960s, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, saw the emergence of a consumer society or an “Affluent Society”. Presently, at the apex of a consumer society, we consume everything: not just goods and services, but emotions, experiences, feelings, education, cultures, information - everything.

And yes, to a certain degree markets promote prosperity. And it may be true that freedom to choose is the bedrock of democracy. But somewhere on this work/spend/consume hamster wheel, we have been made to forget the questions: consumers of what; free to choose what; made out of what; at the cost of what?

Our economic system, the heart of which is consumption, assumes a rational-agent, perfectly informed and free to choose. This is a false claim; neither do we always behave rationally, nor are we perfectly informed. If we were either of those things, we would be able to know and account for the consequences of our choices in our rational calculuses. Not to mention, the hamster wheel doesn’t yield us the time to access our higher rational capacities; to ponder, think and reflect. For we cannot see that the costs we pay as members of this sapien race, far outvalue the costs we pay as consumers. Mainly because the costs are externalised by the corporation: as profit-maximisers, it off-loads indirect costs and forces negative effects to a third party - a society or a group within a society. Let’s take our obsession for mobile phones as an example. Which pushes electronic giants to mass produce a ‘newer’ edition every few months. Coltan, a black metallic ore, used to make tantalum capacitors, is essential to the production of these devices. In 2013, Congo accounted for 18.6%, and Rwanda accounted for 25.4%, of the total global mined tantalum production. These countries pay dearly for our phones. They pay by irrevocably depleting their natural resource base and their lives; kids in the Congo pay with their future—30% of the kids in parts of the Congo now have had to drop out of school to mine coltan, and about 90% of young men are doing this. Because of uncontrolled mining, the land is being eroded and is polluting lakes and rivers, affecting the ecology of the region. The Eastern Mountain Gorilla’s population, now critically endangered, has diminished as well; miners, far from food sources, have been hunting these gorillas for food. Much coltan from the Congo is being exported to China for processing into electronic-grade tantalum powder and wires. All along this system that satiates our consumption, people pitched in so we could get this newest phone at a price fitting only for a consumer. And none of these contributions are recorded in any accounts book. In fact, in 2003 a United Nations committee investigating the plunder of gems and minerals in the Congo listed in its final report, that approximately 125 companies and individuals involved were breaching international norms. That is what I mean by the company owners externalising the true costs of production.

These facts must make us question if there are, indeed, totalitarian aspects to consumption; is Apple the new Auschwitz? Has the Gulag been replaced by Gucci? Two concepts that might help in answering these queries are ‘Perceived Obsolescence’: a phenomenon by which corporations convince us to throw away stuff that is still perfectly useful, and ‘Conspicuous Consumption’: the spending of money on luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power - think furs and exotic skins. Both concepts intertwine social status and prestige with consumption. Annie Lenoard explains the former, thus: “Have you ever wondered why women’s shoe heels go from fat one year to skinny the next to fat to skinny? It is not because there is some debate about which heel structure is the most healthy for women’s feet. It’s because wearing fat heels in a skinny heel year shows everyone that you haven’t contributed (by consuming) recently, so you’re not as valuable as that skinny heeled person next to you or, more likely, in some ad. It’s to keep (you) buying new shoes.” We consume and waste because we’re told to.

Among the most visible unintended by products, of the consumer’s infinite wants chasing finite resources to oblivion, are problems like pollution and landscape degradation. Nearly all the world’s ecosystems are shrinking to make way for consumers and their homes, farms, malls, and factories. WWF’s Living Planet Index, which measures the health of forests, oceans, freshwater, and other natural systems, shows a 35% decline in Earth’s ecological health since 1970. World Watch calculations show that the planet has available 1.9 hectares of biologically productive land per person to supply resources and absorb wastes, yet the average person on Earth already uses 2.3 hectares worth. These “ecological footprints” range from the 9.7 hectares claimed by the average American to the 0.47 hectares used by the average Mozambican.

Should we then not begin to trace our way back from I, Consumer to I, Citizen? Or should we wait till we are done consuming a dying planet, ourselves, and the futures of others after us.