BY SOFO ARCHON
Image credit: George Hinke
If you’re reading this, you are incredibly lucky.
Why?
Because it means you have enough to satisfy your basic human needs: a roof over your head, nutritious food to eat, and clean water to drink. In other words, you have what billions of others lack.
Sadly, many of us raised in affluent countries aren’t aware that we live in a tremendously unfair and cruel world. A world where the nine richest people on the planet possess more wealth than the poorest four billion combined. A world where almost half the human population lives on less than $2.50 a day. A world where 40 million people are enslaved.
Constantly distracted by trivialities, we remain ignorant of what truly matters. We might know the number of affairs our favorite celebrities had this year, but we don’t know that farmers in India are dying in the thousands from suicide annually due to the debt and unemployment crises caused by the corporate monopolies on seeds. We might know which of our social media “followers” didn’t “like” our latest Instagram selfie, but we don’t know that in Sub-Saharan Africa, one in nine children dies before the age of five from malnutrition and preventable diseases. We might know the exact release date of the next iPhone, but we don’t know about the inhumane conditions in Chinese sweatshops, where workers have to suffer day in and day out to produce it.
One of the best mirrors of our superfluous, misinformed, and profoundly sick culture is Black Friday—the busiest shopping day of the year. It’s the day we obsessively refresh websites, fight for limited-time online deals, and max out our credit cards, while hundreds of millions of people don’t even have a piece of bread to eat. Why care about them? It’s far more important that we fill our virtual shopping carts with more stuff we don’t need.
Soon it will be Christmas again. You know, that time of year when we do nothing but exchange gifts—products, of course—an act marketed to us by big corporations as the only way to prove our love to friends and family.
In our crazy world, even love has been commercialized. It’s sold to us, and we’re more than willing to buy it—often with money we don’t actually have.
According to a recent report, 48 million Americans are still paying off debt from last year’s Christmas shopping. But that won’t stop them from going even deeper into debt this year. In fact, the average shopper is expected to spend $825 on gifts alone this holiday season—about 50% more than just five years ago! (Should I pull out my hair now, or wait until I’m done writing this article?)
Our society is completely nuts, and being a nuthead is considered normal. Buying stuff nobody needs with money we don’t have—and destroying the planet in the process—seems perfectly fine to most people. In fact, if you happen to deviate from the majority and refuse to conform to consumer culture, nearly everyone looks at you as if you’re a pathetic weirdo. “Oh, you don’t buy anyone gifts this holiday season? That must mean you’re either stingy or have nobody to love in your life.”
Image credit: Steve Cutts
This is how deeply indoctrinated we are. And it’s not surprising—since the moment we popped out of our mother’s womb, the advertising industry has been bombarding us with countless messages trying to convince us that all we need in life is products. We are victims of our culture: our values, mindset, and behavior are the outcomes of lifelong social conditioning.
But what if we paused for a moment and questioned the ingrained belief that only through products can we find meaning and fulfillment? What if we pierced through the corporate agendas and realized that love has no price tag—cannot be bought, sold, or owned? What if we challenged the idea that more stuff equals more happiness and snapped out of the hypnotic spell of consumerism?
To me, what we need more of are intimate looks, warm hugs, kind words, and generous smiles—not candy canes, scented candles, or Christmas-themed socks. In other words, we need more human connection and less of the material things people can give us.
That said, I’m not suggesting that giving material gifts is inherently wrong. Gifts can be wonderful, depending on what they are and to whom we give them. If we give things that genuinely improve someone’s life, that’s fantastic. But what’s the point of giving stuff nobody needs that will soon end up in a landfill? Wouldn’t it be far better to spend our excess money helping those in need—the poor, the homeless, the underserved—or supporting individuals and organizations striving to make the world a better place?
This Christmas, my friends, let’s give each other more love instead of more stuff. Let’s gift experiences instead of products—experiences of connection, compassion, and belonging. And if we find ourselves in a place of relative abundance, let’s offer what we can to ease the suffering of our fellow humans.
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