If we’re no longer consumers, what are we instead?

“The Day the World Stops Shopping: How ending consumerism gives us a better life and a greener world” is a fascinating book (and thought experiment). Currently, it is our civic duty to buy, buy, buy. Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. However, more and more people believe that a simpler life awaits us, if not through some great awakening, then because civilisation will collapse beneath its own weight.

Market failure

The consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all of these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction. Economists refer to them as “externalities,” as they are accounted for outside the chains of supply and demand. Climate change is the ultimate…