Yes. That sounds bad, but consuming less would actually be a benefit. Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle, and reduce is probably the most important part.
Now it is my time to consume: drive a nice car, buy things I always wanted, travel a lot.
I am honest to you, my opinion is not noble as yours: I want to consume, I want my things cheap, because I would not be able to afford otherwise.
There are billions like me on this planet who did not grow up in a nice middle class family in a 1st world. Those people want to move up and consume such as the Western middle class did until recently. The new generation that grew up in a very stable, rich world and had everything suddenly realises that they do not need consumption and hence talks noble things.
But you cannot and must not force it to all those people who did not grow up in fanciness.
Not having it in the past is not an excuse to waste in the present.
I understand your point though, but let's see examples.
For how long you're intending to keep that nice car? Modern cars easily last well over a decade, so if you do get a nice car, and keep it for long, that is a good route to take.
Or another one: instead of buying plastic garden furniture and replacing it every X year because you're bored with it, buy locally made, wooden ones. Higher initial investment indeed, but those last for decades with minimal maintenance of re-painting every few years.
The current idea of consumption is near equivalent to wasting, but it shouldn't have to be like that. When purchasing, plan ahead, and take arcane factors into the process: what is it packaged in? how far it was shipped from? for how long I'm intending to use it? And so on.
Try not to waste, that's all.
So much of the "piled up cargo" is cheap, bad quality, throwaways stuff, that nobody really needs or should need when better options are available.
EDIT: fyi, I'm from eastern europe, so I had plenty of time in my childhood to learn how to be patient to have something. When you to save money in small bits for a "grand" purchase, like a bicycle, a guitar, a PC, etc, one leanrs how not to spend it on things they don't actually need.
I remember learning in school that there were 6 billion people in the world. Recently I realised that we are over 8 billion already.
And all of us want to have a good life and those who grew up poor want to consume. 100% understanable.
Tech makes a big difference: If humans didn’t farm our population would be ~100 million; If we tile the world in greenhouses, and if we’re careful with our resources, we could have ~10 trillion.
Where? Physically, where? Compressed into tiny apartments all over the planet, like sardine cans?
I’d only be happy with that population level if we had a lot of Arcology-style mega-buildings to give each of us enough space and parkland, but that’s rather my point: tech enables the otherwise impossible.
63% of protein and 82% of calories come from 23% of agricultural land, which is itself 51% of habitable land, which is itself 71% of land, which is 29% of the surface. That agricultural land mostly isn’t greenhouses, which are far more productive than open ground, but even greenhouses are not the most productive food sources we know how to make.
Even without changing the ratio of farmland where greenhouses or better are used (a cunning trick if you can do it, given you’d need something like a greenhouse or aeroponics to turn uninhabitable land into farm land), that takes us up to 7.7-fold increase in carrying capacity for pure land use and 26.6-fold if you add in potential aquaculture.
Most of us don’t have a reason to care more about efficient use of farmland. Some places do, which is why greenhouses, hydroponics, and aeroponics exist at all, but most of us don’t.
And then, separately from greenhouses (probably before but I don’t know how to account for it), there’s better crop choices, and finally GM crops.
If everyone wants to live and consume like a 21st century American, we need to make sure the world only has around 2 billion people (this is based on a fact I read that we need the resources of 4 Earths to sustain American style consumerism globally).
As our quality of life goes up more, the number of humans Earth can support gets smaller. Depending on the target global average lifestyle, we probably already have too many people by a significant amount.
As I said increasing technology and life comforts genrally reduce population growth, let's hope for other technology miracles as well. This is a reasonable position. I spent the weekend in the Pennsylvania wilderness in an area that in the mid-1800s had been stripped bare by logging and was now a preserved and expansive wilderness. Humanity can and will adapt. Believing so helps me sleep at night.
Yes, its true that if global population was 10 million and all lived in 50-ppl villages you could shit in the streets and still not get the Plague, pollute to your heart's content and still be fine, practice slash-and-burn agriculture and still have forests left. But then you wouldn't have most products of civilisation in the first place.
Once you start getting cities, you cant shit in the street, you need suers and restrictions on pollution
I suspect the main barriers are political. There is a lot of suffering in the world that has little to do with lack of resources, yet persists for political reasons.
As much as I care for the environment, I still drive around in my car to sightsee with my partner (burning fuel for no reason).
We order take away and it gets put into plastic containers which go into the trash.
We do our best not to pollute, be wasteful and recycle what we can, but modern life will always have waste and excess.
It's like the company that wanted to build a modular phone that all tech people got behind, yet now we're buying more and more highly embedded computing devices which are harder to reuse/replace/recycle.
We need more leaders, particularly tech/science background people in governing roles with power to change our course.
It's fancier/easier to sell fast electric cars and promise people we'll go to Mars than proposing to fix our problems here and now apparently
Countries like China and India are still in the industrialization phase as they pull millions out of poverty. India is far behind though, as the quality of life for an average person on the ground is still depressingly terrible. Sometimes I stumble upon random channels like this: https://www.youtube.com/c/WalkEast/videos - and the QoL in China is in the stratosphere compared with India.
I always thought you can compare China and India. After that trip I must say: My assumption was just so wrong.
China is cleaner, way more modern, more reliable and way more industrialised than India. I made the mistake to go out in Old Delhi after 9 PM and I was fearing for my life. People just lie down on the road and slept away, dogs followed me, people followed me. People were making open fires on the road, others were defacating. The air was terribly poluted, it is not recommended to use tap water for brushing teeth.
And yet, I liked the people there very much. It was great to be able to communicate in English, to speak to the normal taxi and uber drivers and to learn about their life.
Again, the biggest takeaway for me was: China and India are separated by 30-40 years of Chinese high-speed development, I would assume.
https://qz.com/india/404758/once-near-equals-china-and-india...
There is no way you can get the entire population to collectively reduce CO2 emissions if they feel like they will lose out. Most people are "lazy" (in the sense that they cannot care about millions of different problems) which means high moral standards for CO2 emission reductions will turn them off.
It's unrealistic and hypocritical to suggest that everyone should pitch in equally to reduce consumption while the developed world probably consumes 10x of the developing world.
I doubt that they all grew up in an equivalent level of poverty. When climate change takes major effect, it won't be western countries that first bear the brunt of it - it will be the poorest.
What a sad state of affairs. New generations completely internalised the fact that living = consuming goods and traveling (or more accurately consuming travel destinations).
> The new generation that grew up in a very stable, rich world and had everything suddenly realises that they do not need consumption and hence talks noble things.
This should be a warning rather than a motivation. We fucked up and realised consumerism is hell, now you're thinking "I want to be part of it too". I get the sentiment but I don't get the logic. I grew up in relatively modest family and we couldn't afford much besides our basic needs, now that I earn three times what I need I still live frugally. I'm focusing on working less and enjoying life rather than earning more money to buy more BS, all it does is create artificial needs that are, by design, _never_ fulfilled
I was reading "A brave new world" again recently and the "conditioning" part of the education made me think of the modern view on the economy, from our earliest age we're bombarded by ads and talks about how we must live for the economy, work for the economy, consume for the economy, production must go up, new products must be created continuously, &c. It's like we built a monster and it took control of us. Don't fool yourself, "you" don't want to consume, we've all been conditioned to think consuming is our main goal.
The trick was really well played, once consuming is your main goal you don't care about much besides a salary allowing you to consume more and keeps the wheel spinning. I think a lot of people will have very hard realisations once they get old enough to start thinking about death and reflecting on the best years of their lives, all this time, energy, money spent on long gone gadgets of instant gratifications which faded away decades ago.
A few quotes from a book written in 67 by Guy Debord, during the infancy of mass marketing and mass consumption, he must have had a good crystal ball back then:
> The proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity.
> Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent arousal. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.
> To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or "service" sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities at a time when increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increas ingly unnecessary commodities.
> The economy's triumph as an independent power at the same time spells its own doom, because the forces it has unleashed have eliminated the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity with a necessity for boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs (now scarcely met) with an incessant fabrication of pseudo-needs, all of which ultimately come down to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy.
> the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.