When you enter the Chauvet cave in France, you are transported to a different world. This cave that remained untouched for thousands of years is rugged, ancient, and yet familiar. Horses, lions, owls are suspended on the cave walls, and drawn with such perfection in chiaroscuro some 30,000 years ago that it feels like the herd might pounce on you. And, in case you have any doubts on how life got there, there are hand-prints, likely marking the artwork’s creators or cave inhabitants. If the depiction of animals, drawn to perfection were not enough to burrow into your thoughts as a declaration, these handprints exalt an instant ping of proclamation. A proclamation from our ancestors that, “we exist”. In even the everyday struggles of survival, humans don’t want to simply live. We want to perceive, create and thrive.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about this idea of creation and its importance in helping people thrive. As a modern day human, what do I perceive and what do I create? Do I create? As questions like these started to swirl in my head, I felt a sense of loss, loss of this drive to create. Living in a city, where life is as efficient as you want it to be and stimulation possible every step of the way, I realized a lot of my time revolved around consuming. There were lots of opportunities to consume – media, food, art, culture, you name it.
Was I consuming a lot of stimulating things? Yes. Was I perceiving most of what I consume? Maybe. Did I have an outlet beyond perceiving? Often not. I realized what had thwarted my ability to fully perceive and create was the way I took in things around me – my consumption habits.
In this piece, I touch on the dangers of going with the flow of modern consumption habits that highly prizes variety. It holds out this carrot that promises attainment of “variety” through “efficiency”, all the while also providing a veiled sense of control that we are actually the ones who wanted the stick with the carrot to be held out in the first place.
First mindset shift we need to have in thinking through consumption habits is seeing the ability to consume not as an end in itself but simply as a way of enriching our lives. Secondly, it is important to internalize that “creation” doesn’t have to be something magnanimous and it certainly doesn’t even have to be anything tangible. It can be the smallest thing in our life and can even be about simply “creating” a worldview based on what we perceive.
I look at modern day consumption habits across three main areas – Food, Products (makeup, clothes, gadgets etc), Media (social media, television, podcast, books etc). Food and products are the glaringly obvious forms of consumption. The behemoth of the three is media which can be consumed standalone but also circuitously impacts other forms of consumption deeply.
Going back to the concept of variety, one of the best things of the modern world is that it is full of possibilities to consume a vast number of things. And, with so many different ways we can “consume”, we want to be an “efficient” consumer. One such area where people used to take a much more active role as creators was in their homes by cooking. Through the process of cooking, people were attuned to the ingredients needed to create a dish. People also intuitively understood the impact of seasonality and ergo ingredients sourced on the taste of that dish. Pollan in his book, Cooked, details how Americans not only cook less than people anywhere else in the world, but, on average, spend only 27 minutes a day preparing food, compared to 60 minutes in 1965. Along with the impact on health, this dependence primarily on pre-prepared food alienates us even further from our food systems. Even simple questions like where this food was grown is difficult to answer for all of us. Concerns around time required to cook for busy individuals are often brought up and while I can see this could be a case for a few. But, for the vast majority of Americans when this is looked at in conjunction with the amount of time they spend on their phones everyday, which averages around 5 hours (not including work related use), the hole in the “time theory” becomes glaringly evident. There is a huge opportunity for us to capture this “lost time” used in other forms of consumption and take a more active role.
In the New Yorker, writer Susan Orlean calls preparing a meal a Sisyphean task, perhaps because of the resolute nature of hunger which makes eating a necessity, like breathing. However, another way to look at this could also be from a place of intense gratitude. To create a meal takes effort – from the farmer growing the crop, the food arriving at your local supermarket to you picking out the head of broccoli and preparing it. It can be intensely gratifying to go through the entirety of the process of preparing a meal – to see something come together on your plate, your creation.
Another concept that consumption has often been associated with is “agency” as modern consumers are offered a variety of choices. However, we have reached the evolution in consumerism where choices might be abundant but the choice in participating in the movement is limited. For example, while there are countless beauty products to choose from, there is little choice in not choosing to participate in the “anti-aging” or “self-care” movement. We can consume any type of content we want on our smartphones and yet the type of content we gravitate towards the most are ones that we have to set limits to so we can tame our worst inhibitions (guilty of having to do this myself). What this variety of choices does is it leaves us with a veiled sense of control where we feel we are the decision makers but the decision is already shaped around a monolithic consensus.
The behemoth of the consumption forms, media, has always had a deep impact on consumption habits. There have been different milestones that have changed the dominating media form – printing press in the 15th century, radio in the 19th century, the TV and internet in the 20th century. The Internet, however, has changed this landscape forever. It has made access to information easier than ever before, opening the multi-faceted viewpoints of people all over the world to the forefront. But, the ease of accessibility has also increased social pressure to be constantly informed – be it knowing minute by minute of news stories or the vast archive of shows that people need to constantly catch up on. To satiate ourselves, it is possible to listen to podcasts or even watch a whole movie sped up at 2x speed. We are exposing ourselves to more information today than ever before which has shown to lead to information fatigue, stress and a reduction in the ability to process information.
One of the main things I started to do was ditch this practice of listening to podcasts at 2x speed. I found that the need to be hyper productive if anything thwarted my ability to understand information fully. Curiosity is important but overconsumption seeks primarily to fulfill the dopamine feedback loop, leaving the “consumer” for most part stressed and fatigued. Ask yourself – Does the quality or quantity of what you learn matter more? Of the excess of information that we absorb every day, psychologist Lewis Rosen makes the perfect analogy. “If you’re thirsty, it’s sensible to stand under a faucet, not the Niagara Falls,”. Information is valuable, savor it.
Something interesting about consumption is that it is heavily intertwined with macroeconomic conditions. There are boom times like the late 1960s when the US was at the peak of its prosperity and people had a large disposable income (something businesses like Trader Joe’s that started during this period rode on). Then there are times like during the Covid 19 pandemic that gave rise to different types of economic pressures for people – panic at the beginning but then a stimulus infused economy kept afloat by the government wherein people had high purchasing power. Due to inflationary pressures in the past year, though, people have had to tighten their purses yet again. Economic pressures like these tend to have a large impact on consumption appetite such as for restaurants, retail, travel etc. However, it is concerning that the behemoth of the consumption types, consumption of media, has free reigns for most part. Social media usage has continued to only climb year over year despite economic troubles. This is definitely in part due to the fact that much of social media is completely free – most things on the internet are – which makes it difficult for people to temper its usage. This makes it even more important for people to practice direct mindfulness around the usage of our phones.
Our society idolizes people who are well dressed, well read, well traveled, well dined, basically someone who is a repository of all human experiences. In short, our society idolizes these perfect consumers. There is a wide glorification of this perfect consumer and many people strive to be this person. But, in the context of continual economic to psychological pressures, consumption patterns of today can alienate us even further from ourselves and our community. The best thing we can do in our life is to practice active mindfulness around our consumption habits and harken our creative instincts to fight the pressures around us.
30,000 years from when the artwork at Chauvet Cave was painted, the way we humans live our lives has completely changed. Yet, I think our base urge to want to proclaim ourselves remains quite similar to that of our ancestors. In search of this path to proclamation, we are all trying to find our ways.
Perhaps, for me, this blog is my “hand-print” – my very own modern-day way of proclaiming, “I exist”. It’s my way of declaring that I want to perceive, create and thrive.
What will be your hand-print? Do you want to leave one?