Lately I've been thinking a lot about my consumerist tendencies and how they have shaped my thinking over the years. I'm not surprised by them. I've grown up in a culture where consumerism is touted as the means to solve just about every one of our problems. Our system is so completely geared towards this, that most of the time, we can't even think of ways around it.
I'm poor though, and even though I plan on one day not being so poor, I do plan on trying to live as frugally as possible. With this in mind, I've been trying to examine how consumerism has shaped my thoughts and actions. I'm not really doing this as a denouncement of our culture as a whole. It is what it is, as they say. This is more of a personal thing.
Honestly, it's not even overt consumerism that bothers me so much. For instance, I play Sims. Sims is a stupid addiction to virtual dolls who can have babies. Occasionally, they come out with expansion packs that make the whole thing even more expensive. It also gives me an easy thing to ask for during the holidays. It's my playtime and diversion and I'm not going to feel bad about it.
I'm talking about the deeper levels of consumerism. Capricorns are, by nature, very materialistic. We think in cold, calculating business kinds of ways. For instance, if I was ever dating someone rich and their parents offered me a million dollars to leave them, I would leave them in a heartbeat. After all, relationships usually don't last. I could do a lot with a million dollars. And yes, I realize how horrible that sounds. It's practical though.
What isn't so practical is when it comes to feeding spiritual needs with consumerism. That kind of 'if you throw money at the emptiness inside you, you'll eventually feel better.' I think this is the deepest, more despairing pitfall of how consumerism can screw us. And I have such a great personal example of this.
When I first started to explore paganism, I set up a shrine to Kali in my apartment. I would offer up flowers to wilt and sing to it. I kind of had no idea what I was doing. Eventually, I realized she probably wasn't that interested in wilting flowers and opted to stop.
Then I found a pagan book store. It was seriously the coolest place my little early twenties self had ever seen. I started using whatever spare cash I had to buy things. I would buy pendants of the goddess and crystals and wall hangings with fringe on them. I would buy candles and tarot packs and aroma therapy stuff.
Most of all, I would buy books. I bought books over Norse traditions and Irish traditions and fairy traditions and feminist traditions and Starhawk and just about anything else that struck me as very important to me. I felt so damned good about myself and my new religion.
But notice what my actions towards paganism amounted to here. I BOUGHT stuff. I spent three years deciding to walk away from the religion of my childhood and explore something that I felt would be more to how I saw the truth. My way of walking down this new life path was to . . . buy a bunch of shit.
I wasn't BEING a pagan. I was BEING what I had always been, a child of consumerism. I just happened to be purchasing pagan books now instead of obsessing over which bible cover would make me look the most devout. Buying a bunch of shit as a way to be a good pagan was about as counterproductive as buying a bunch of shit to be a good Christian. I had actually been better off giving wilting flowers to Kali than this nonsense.
This was one of those life lessons that I'm glad I caught in the midst of it happening, but I'm still really disheartened that it did happen. I learned a lot from it, but at the same time, I think it kind of stalled a lot of any kind of spiritual exploration I might have been doing. It's taken me a long time to even really feel emotionally ready TO consider that kind of stuff again. Even now I'm kind of hesitant. I just don't want to fall into the same traps.
The biggest trap is the high, you know? We are so conditioned to be happy when we spend money, that I honestly truly felt like a great little pagan when I would buy stuff. I felt like I was supporting the cause and helping other like minded people and learning stuff. Because, you know when you buy a book, you automatically know all the crap that is in it.
I suppose it's been good for me to learn this. It's helped me to be more critical about my choices to spend money on self-improvements. When I set up my steps, I found the idea of only spending around two dollars per paver be about where I needed to be on the project. Better than some super expensive thing that would probably break.
I know where a lot of this comes from for me. When I was a kid, you know I tended to feel pretty powerless. I was also very poor. Like most poor kids, I mistakenly believed that having more money would make my problems disappear. Some of them would have disappeared, but not all of them. Money became power to me. And any time I had some in my hands, I felt like I had this moment of being able to alter my circumstances, even if it was only for a few seconds.
The way our society is structured, yes, money can change a lot of things. It can't change everything though. THAT is the part I need to keep in mind.
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