Consuming Consumption

Conscious contributions through our work, paid and unpaid, enable cities that serve citizens well

I experience the thrill of consuming, and the indulgence and addictive feelings that surface when buying and acquiring new things. (I’m thinking of addiction here as “an unusually great interest in something or a need to do or have something (Merriam-Webster).”) I recognize, deep within in me, cravings, compulsion, and fixation to consume. I am consumed by consumption.

Some definitions

A shiny new object can cause me to collapse into wanting joy, to tease myself into thinking that fleeting joy is meeting an actual need. I understand this if I am honest with myself in those moments when I observe myself. I understand a bit more when I allow my curiosity to explore what the word “consumption” means.

Consumption as a noun:

• the act or process of consuming: by using up (use, utilization, expenditure, depletion, exhaustion), or waste (squandering, draining, dissipation)
• the utilization of economic goods in the satisfaction of wants or in the process of production resulting in their destruction, deterioration, or transformation
• a progressive wasting away of the body especially from pulmonary tuberculosis

To consume as a verb:

• to do away with completely: destroy
• to spend wastefully: squander
• to use up
• to eat or drink, especially in great quantity
• to enjoy avidly: devour
• to engage fully: engross
• to utilize as a customer

These words hold a range of possibility. “To consume” can mean the simple use of something or it can mean wasting, destroying or eliminating something. To “be consumed” can mean the energetic thrill of focus and, in contrast, “consumption” can mean the physical wasting away of the human body. Could it also mean the wasting away of humanity?

Consumption as distraction

Here’s what I experience: when I use economic goods with a fixation that feeds my cravings and compulsions, I create the conditions for my own wasting away. I experience a pull away from self; I distract myself from myself.

When I use economic goods with a fixation that feeds my cravings and compulsions, I create the conditions for my own wasting away.

In economic terms, at the scale of the city, we consume resources and services: economic goods. This is neither good or bad; it is a necessary and natural connection between ourselves, and between ourselves and our physical world. When we are in a poor relationship with the physical resources around us, we risk over-consumption and the depletion of the very resources that nourish our lives.

It is necessary for us to pay attention to what we consume, how we consume, and if we consume in ways for ongoing nourishment for ourselves and the habitat that nourishes us. My fixation to consume makes me blind to consequences of my consumption, to myself, others, my city and my planet.

Mindless consumption means I contribute to the wasting away of humanity. To be in a better relationship with the world around me, there is work for me to do to be responsible and responsive to both my needs and the needs of our habitat. In our cities, there is work for us to do meet the needs of citizens and our habitat. The place where this work happens is our social habitat — where we acknowledge and wrestle with the relationship between our physical world and our actions. This is where we do the hard work of noticing, accepting and mitigating the consequences of our actions.

In an underdeveloped or unhealthy social habitat, we are unable to see that we are fouling our nest. And if we are unable to see (or resist) we are unable to take action. And when we are able to see, and choose to, the result can be overwhelming. We can be paralyzed by what we see, so we need the support of each other to find our way through. Our social habitat means connection and care.

Distraction consumes

Five leaders of social service agencies in a North American city gathered a few years ago to explore how to integrate their work, rather than work in competitive silos. They were the leaders of the local food bank, the United Way, the Boys and Girls Club, the women’s shelter and the community foundation, all in their 60s, each with four decades of experience in their field. They tenderly entered into a conversation about the impact of their life’s work and realized that despite great effort, nothing had changed. In their words, “the needle hasn’t moved.” Women, children, families and men in their city all continue to have significant unmet needs.

They startled themselves with an unexpected confession: their life’s work didn’t improve anything. Yes, they served individuals and met basic needs on a daily basis, but their deep desire to have a world where people’s basic needs are met remained unaddressed. They were consumed with their work meeting short term needs and distracted from their primary objective: a city where the basic needs of food, shelter and physical safety are met for all citizens.

They startled themselves with an unexpected confession: their life’s work didn’t improve anything.

These five leaders were doing important work meeting the needs of citizens. They did not want to revisit the value of their work, but they were leaning into a change in stance. Instead of operating primarily from a place of urgency, the panic work that consumed them, they wanted to ensure they made specific efforts to change the values of the wider community. They wanted hunger, violence, racism, unwanted homelessness to become unacceptable to the wider community.

I witnessed these community leaders digest and grieve their new understanding. They recognized that they were consumed by “urgent work”. For example, “We can convince ourselves that our work matters by giving food hampers to hungry families, but when the number of families who need food each week does not decrease, what have we resolved?” They found grief in a conundrum: the short-term importance of our work (feeding the hungry) distracts us from the fact that our work is insufficient (the number of hungry people does not diminish). Somehow, the care for other citizens they longed to foster in their city remained absent.

Work of the soul

We can both consume and be consumed. We can lose our sense of self in consuming, and we can be consumed to the point where we lose our sense of self. When this happens, the value of our contributions remains present (feeding the hungry) and is minimized because we are making tiny or no improvements.

The antidote to the consumption trap is awareness, of self, others, and the quality of social habitat in the places and spaces we make to foster awareness. Without awareness we allow ourselves to be drawn to the short-term fix. With awareness, we can evolve in and with webs of relationships that support awareness and wise action, fully conscious of impacts and consequences.

This is work of the soul, our souls. Our work either comes from our soul, when we do the work we are called to do, or is driven by how we want to appear to the outside world. The latter is driven by status, by having and accumulating, keeping up with the Joneses, and with endless consumption (the kind that wastes our bodies and spirits). The latter also compels us to do work we don’t want to do because we need to pay the bills that come with mindless consumption. When we do the work of the soul we are consumed in ways that energize, rather than deplete us, and we make significant contributions to the world around us.

Conscious work is a survival skill

Here’s an economic term to consider: opportunity cost, the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. While consuming goods with abandon I abandon who I am. I consume to feel more like me but it is a trick because it takes me away from me. Consuming connects me to the material world outside me but it also distracts me from my inner world, where I connect with myself and find the work that I truly want to be doing. The same thing happens at the scale of the city. The more we work with abandon, to consume more and more, we are distracted from who we truly are and the work we truly want to be doing. You know this.

When I make conscious contributions through my work, I improve how well my city serves its citizens.

The cities we make, physical, social and economic, are only as good as we choose to make them. So the choice of work we do, and how we choose to do it, is a survival skill. If our work feeds addictive consumption we create cities that will waste away. Making conscious contributions through our work enables us to make cities that serve citizens well by connecting us to, and integrating, our physical, social and economic worlds. More simply: when I make conscious contributions through my work, I improve how well my city serves its citizens.

Note

Definitions from oxford dictionaries.com and merriam-webster.com.

Reflection

• Does the work you do feed your soul, or feed your desire to distract yourself from yourself?
• What is the world you do (or long to do) that feeds your soul?
• What is the next contribution you’d like to make to the work around you?