Consumerism is at the heart of today's modern economy, in today's society we are under the belief that the more we consume the better our lives will be and it is this ideology which makes shopping our most popular past time.
One of our major problems in today's society is that many of us are unaware of the cost our consumer products have on the environment. For example, certain products shipped in from overseas put a far greater strain on the environment when compared to products that are made and manufactured locally and greenhouse gases are higher now then at anytime in the last 650 thousand years. The idea of consumerism all started as a survival instinct, a person's need to acquire more then their basic needs and as civilisation got bigger and stronger, it became respectable to consume and to flaunt's one consumption of materialistic products. A man by the name of Adam Smith created a vehicle that would drive the world's economy into the future by encouraging economic growth by unleashing the individual into the materialistic world. He stated that the 'pursuit of luxury worked as an economic driver that would make everybody richer, capitalism was born and consumerism would be at the heart of it.'
What we need to realise now is that in today's society we as consumers are targeted everyday by people trying to sell us products which claim to improve the quality of our life, when really we need to ask ourselves what is the price others are paying for those products and how will it eventually affect our future. In today's market, it's not about how badly you need something but rather how that one product can change your life. Manufacturers have realised the importance of targeting certain aspects of the human mind in order to increase the amount you buy and in doing so they have created a massive problem in today's society. The only way to fix this problem is to make consumerism work better for us and our planet. This can be done in a variety of different ways, both as an individual and as a community and it has already started. Technology already exists, which can radically change our lifestyle and in effect decrease our impact on the environment, the only problem is convincing people to make use of these technologies. People who are uninformed are still under the conclusion that the world can continue to survive even if we continue to grow in population, however climate change is a real problem and although it may not effect you directly just yet it soon will affect everyone in the nearby future if changes are not made to the way we think and act.
