Easy, Everything and Fast: How Over-Consumption Fuelled by Microtrends Kills our Souls!

Is Voluntary Simplicity a Truth Escape from Over-Consumption or Just Another Fashionable Trend from Commercial Marketing?

By Marcelina Horrillo Husillos, Journalist and Correspondent at The European Business Review

According to the Guardian, consumption rates differ wildly from region to region, but on the whole, we’re consuming the planet’s resources 1.7 times faster than they can regenerate. This means that in the long run, we’d need 1.7 Earths to sustain our current levels of consumption, which is obviously unsustainable. It wasn’t always like this: back in 1961, humanity only needed 0.74 Earths to support its consumption levels.

For instance, between 1970 and 2021, U.S. consumer spending has increased by 400 percent, however the population has only grown by 60 percent, meaning individuals are consuming more than they used to. Yet the worldwide population has more than doubled since 1961, and our use of resources has closely tracked that growth. Between 1985 and 2005, worldwide resource extraction increased by around 50 percent, according to a report by the environmental non-profit Friends of the Earth.

Meanwhile, Dr Gray draws attention to the negative influence of overproduction and consumption: “Higher production rates meant the water footprint of our textiles increased by 8%, totalling 3.1 billion m³ which is enough water to provide more than half of the people in the world (53%) with drinking water every day for a year. Similarly, increased production has also slashed the actual carbon reduction to just 2%. That is the consequence of overproduction and overconsumption.”

The social narrative encourages us to keep consuming and over consuming, however not only over consumption kills our planet, but it also kills our soul. Increasingly sophisticated marketing and sales strategies linked to our inner psychological drive, put the individual under emotional pressure, exploiting his weaknesses, leading him like a wimp towards the goal of over purchasing.

Constructed trends and sneaky aggressive selling tactics aim to interfere our identity, creating confusion in our decision-making ability, affecting our natural self-development capabilities, and our genuine capacity for self-creativity. Marketing strategists for online retailers invest large amount of time and effort meticulously studying user and buyer psychology and try to find out how to exploit our psychological triggers. There are even designing casino-like shopping experiences, and intentionally preventing critical thinking to sell more.

Internet and any space outside the net is filled with an endless list of terms such as in one single click, buy and pay later, easy buy, dress for less, easy jet, easy learning, simple business etc., which promotes the idea that our modern societies are evolving to become a global system that makes life easier and simpler for people. Yet our life hasn’t been ever more complex and difficult to handle, only the process of purchasing things is rapidly becoming easier!

Online shopping fuelling over-consumption

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital channels, have become by far the most popular shopping alternative for consumers around the world, sparking an extraordinary increase in online purchases. In June 2020, global retail e-commerce traffic reached a record 22 billion monthly visits and a staggering US$26.7 trillion in sales.

Orchestrated shopping “events” such as ‘Singles’ Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, retailers have monopolised the global economy such as Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba, and smaller companies, are trying to keep up to stay afloat within the industry by pressuring people, to purchase products under the spell of discounts and limited time. Though this year these three events, which all take place in November, recorded enormous online sales billions in sales.

Easy, Everything, and Fast

• The concepts of effortlessness and easiness are aligned with our over-consumption and online shopping patterns. The so-called modern societies, are named it pretty much due to the fact that our lives have almost a compulsory goal of pursuing “easiness”. Less effort to achieve and do things is synonym of effectiveness, success and smartness in our days. Easy is synonym of modernity, while the opposite is generally perceived as old fashioned.
• Achieve everything is another mantra in today’s society. Deprivation of anything and austerity, are almost synonyms of failure and poverty in today’s world. We repeat to our ourselves that we need to be in a position to provide us and to “our families” ‘Every Thing’; and we get depressed and perceive us a failure if we don’t get to do it. The ideal of perfect parent is the one that provides everything to his kids. The image of a failure parent is the one that cannot provide everything to his family.
• We pretend to worship time while we are absorbed by the maelstrom of over production and over consumption, and we keep rushing, trying to catch it all, rushing to get everything, rushing towards nowhere, while there is not even time to stop for a moment and think what are we really doing.

Online shopping is knowledgeable of these three factors and provide to meet these requirements, and so the dynamic represents a perfect circle without a gap, as “while purchasing goods becomes easier for people, it also becoming significantly easier for sellers to get these goods into people livelihoods and so on…”

From a psychological perspective, being able to access everything in the easiest way and in a fastest manner, brings us a false feeling of inner peace and comfort, as it reinforces the idea of control and alignment with the right path to modernity. From an objective perspective, we are ‘swimming in the mud’, getting lazier, fickle, demotivated, anxious, over-indulging ourselves, persistently looking in the outside for solutions for the inside, walking miles away from our real selves. Yet we are placed in the right perfect spot where over consumerism wants us to be!

Microtrends

Short-lived trends or microtrends are impossible to keep up with, they are also extremely detrimental to the environment, and they also kill our sense of individualism. In our pursuit of social integration, we let ourselves to be dragged by what’s supposed to be fashionable and socially acceptable.

Ciornea (2020) defines clothing overconsumption as “behaviour that implies frequent purchase of more apparel than needed and substitution of clothes while they are functional, due to reasons such as social integration, status communication, personal desire to be fashionable, impulsive purchase”

The creation of endless microtrends is a designed and planned sales strategy that connects directly to our inner psychological drives at a cognitive level. It creates a blockade effect in our minds that makes us feel trapped in endless disquisitions over product-focused choices. Although our psyche interprets these decisions as linked to our values. For instance, choosing what dress to buy seems like a simple action that requires a simple decision. However, this decision is tangled with the “endless microtrends” effect, which links it to disquisitions such as status, self-perception, self-esteem, socialization, our connection with the world, and how would we like to be perceived in this distorted image of the world and the society these trends keeping building and redesigning.

Subtly microtrends impose the imperative rule of ‘what’s right and what’s wrong’, ‘what’s in and what’s definitely out’; and this subtle imposition creates pressure on the individual, killing his natural processes of choice, which are part of his evolution, his growth and his growth in consciousness.

The microtrends sales strategy aims to erase this natural process and replace it with the imposed trends. The aim is to create insecurity in the individual, to unbalance him as much as possible, targeting his emotional state, precisely his emotional weaknesses. This is a pernicious and merciless psychological tactic aiming to control as much as possible the individual and his actions, where for instance a simple act of spontaneity to try to escape the psychological trap, will translate into an impulsive purchasing action to release the inflicted pressure.

“It is another of consumerism’s ironies that, although it functions like a mental trap, we often think of it as an escape” J.B. MacKinnon, addresses in his book “The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves” the paradox of over-production and over-consumption in modern society, seeking for ways to scape it.

Voluntary Simplicity

Sometimes referred to as “simple living,” “the simple life,” or “downshifting” is a lifestyle choice that minimizes the needless consumption of material goods and the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, it aims to achieve a lifestyle not linked to the accumulation of material possession. It aims to reclaim the long-time forgotten inner self and seeks self-rencounter.

A century after Thoreau, the hippie counterculture brought a voluntary simplicity vibe to the 1960s and early ’70s, with its rejection of material goods and its embrace of communal living and a back-to-the-land movement. By 1971, former Beatle John Lennon was urging fans and followers to “imagine no possessions,” in his song “Imagine.”

In our modern developed societies, the “simple living,” trend represents the psychological escape panacea from the trap that presumably consumerism inflicts on people. In undeveloped countries such concept as “voluntary simplicity” would be often hard to grasp, and impossible to sustain, when for instance basic needs in a community are far from being covered.

The trend of voluntary simplicity is born as a result of the tiresomeness and chronic dissatisfaction of human beings feeling betrayed by a societal system that failed them and didn’t address their real needs. The dream of achieving Simple life is based on the hope for escape of a gloomy system, that extracts human’s souls while keeps promoting rosy feelings of happiness and freedoms.

Objectively speaking, voluntary simplicity is a lifestyle choice that only strongly privileged people (versus 733 million people -1 in 11- go hungry every day) can afford to even think about. Therefore, seeing it from a global perspective, voluntary simplicity seems like a whim from people whose basic needs are not on risk of being uncovered.

Finally voluntary simplicity seems like another emerging fashionable trend, in which commercial marketing can put its rags on, thus the societal narrative can integrate as part of its endless speech. While we keep conforming societal status quo, voluntary simplicity seems like a weak escape attempt for our damaged souls already sold to the over production – over consumption devil.