Too much stuff: can we solve our addiction to consumerism?

For example, fast fashion has become a problem in recent years. So companies have begun creating “tomorrow’s solution” with responsible manufacturing practices, sustainable materials use, and business models that promote a circular economy.

we also spend inordinate amounts of energy and money storing excess stuff rather than asking the hard truths of why we have so much in the first place.

The

global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. 

Human creativity and productivity are the basis of economies. Since it is assumed there are no limits to our imagination, economists believe endless growth is possible, and is the very definition of success and progress. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War provided the stimulus for global economic recovery. The transit

Hence the irony that consumerism, which we often denounce as “materialism,” is in fact quite happy to reduce things to nothingness. What makes such serial acquisition consumptive is precisely this treatment of things as disposable. While on the one hand this practice invests things with redemptive promise, on the other hand they can never measure u

In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of sel