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Consumerism Fuels Doomerism

Ben Thomas
8 min readNov 24, 2024

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Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

Have you ever bought something purely out of boredom? Maybe you were stressed or felt kinda down. Nothing wrong with an innocent reward, right? Have you, for example, spent hours scrolling through Amazon in a desperate attempt to escape from any awareness of yourself or your surroundings? And when you’ve finally found the object of your desires and anxiously awaited the coveted delivery day, did you find yourself happy? Or was there a twinge of disappointment, a hopeless empty gnawing at your soul? You fell for it again. And you will, again and again, the horrid cycle from factory to consumption to landfill to those sad environmental news stories that perpetuate the same doomerism that advertising execs so desperately need in order to create demand.

Sounds outlandish? Here’s an interesting paper. researchers have proposed that societal and environmental disruption and decay is primarily caused by individual stress that is, in turn, causing poor decision making and behavior. And this dysregulation in executive dysfunction is the exact same sort of poor impulse control that advertisers need in order to sell us the very things that fuel the state of the world that leads to such stress. In other words, the pessimism we feel in looking at the world is causing the same sort of issues in decision-making that are furthering the things we are stressed about. What a nightmare of a feedback loop!

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Ben Thomas
Ben Thomas

Written by Ben Thomas

Creator of Sisyphus 55 and currently pursuing my Phd in Clinical Psychology.

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