HC Repeats: Obsessive Consumers – We are Addicts

An article by Frank    3 Comments

Since it’s the weekend, I thought it might be worth looking at taking the opportunity to repost some of the stuff that has appeared here on the Humanitarian Chronicle – HC Repeats. This blog has been running for well over a year and I think some of the past posts are worth having another look at now that the reading audience has grown a little. So here’s the first. There will be another tomorrow.

This was originally published in December 2008 when I was undertaking an exercise to spend less. I was reading it again last night thinking I probably need to do the exercise again.

Obsessive Consumers – We are Addicts

Allow me to make a confession – I have come to the realisation that I am an obsessive consumer. The sad thing is that in my world consuming is so normal, encouraged and needed for the survival of the economy in which I exist that I, like many other such addicts, have been mostly blind to my addictive compulsion. It’s placated so often without question that I’ve never been subject to the withdrawals and tendencies that drive my addiction to buy and consume.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not spending thousands of dollars a week or anything crazy that would get my family into financial trouble, we’re doing well on a modest income, in fact I would probably be considered a fairly average consumer – but I’ve been trying to reduce my spending and because of this, I’ve started noticing a compulsion I never noticed before because up until recently I would just act on it – now I’m trying to fight it. The scary thing is, I wonder how many others have this addiction but have never noticed it because at many levels it is socially sanctioned and deemed ok.

I stopped and thought about this a little while ago and asked myself the question “how many days do I actually not spend anything, nothing, nadda, not a cent?” The answer was not many at all. The purchases might only be small, but most days there is a spend of some sort. It might just be a soft drink or juice at a local shop, a magazine at a bookstore, chewing gum, a filled roll… something, anything, but most days the spend was there. Most days I expend spending energy, even if it is only a tiny spend.

In my quest to not spend I’ve discovered the little monster inside that has been driving that regular spend and that little monster feels suspiciously like an addiction. It’s a small niggling compulsion that I have never noticed before because I just acted on it before it would have a chance to grow into anything noticeable. It causes a fight within and has sometimes been leading me to spend small amounts even when my mind is telling me I don’t need to or shouldn’t. Like an addict I create justifications for any spend even in the face of knowing that I shouldn’t or don’t need to.

I can feel the process happening. It begins with a thought – “hmmmmm, I feel like a…” Presently I try to ignore that little thought. It’s that little thought I would have acted on with little to no qualms about doing so as I’m sure many people do. But now I don’t want to just act on each compulsion to spend. I have a problem though, when I ignore that compulsion I start to get agitated and fidgety. I consciously look for ways to distract myself from that desire to spend something. More and more I am becoming successful, though I have a long way to go.

It’s interesting holding this obsessive consumerism at a distance and examining what may have been feeding this addiction. I take full responsibility for it, but I can’t help but look around my world and see a system formulated to create obsessive consumers. Our current economic system needs obsessive consumers to survive. Consumption and buying have become so normal that I wonder if the non-addicts in relation to this are actually a rarity. The scary thing is that I look around and I think my addiction might actually be quite normal and I wonder how many others are actually aware that many of us have been shaped into obsessive consumers. How many of us see our niggling desires to spend and the many justifications that go along with that as a problem?

Check out this innovative blog – What Did You Buy Today?