What follows is a piece that my 12 year old son wrote when he got annoyed at people buying things for no reason. I suggested that he should write his thoughts down, and this is the product. Chips off blocks are not mentioned, but cheese definitely is!
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People consume. It’s only human, but we need to stop and think before we make the trip to the checkout. Do you really need the item you have picked up? Do you really need five of those cheese things your mate likes? If everyone were to think like this, the world would be much cleaner and it would help Global Warming. But, I am not going to write about Global Warming. Instead, I will write about consumerism and how you can prevent it. I have already asked some questions you may ask yourself, whether they apply to you or not I do not know.
There are many more cases of consumerism, not just when shopping but when clearing out your own home. This may include phrases like: ‘let’s keep it’ and ‘for the sake of it’. If you are sure you don’t need something, then throw it. Not literally, of course, depending what it is (who knows, you may like to take a nifty shot at your recycling bin!)
Anyway, the most common form of consumerism is the ‘LET’S BUY IT ALL’ malarkey. If you have cash burning a hole in your pocket then you may be able to buy what you like, but it doesn’t mean that you need to! You should get what you need and not just consume. If you have a sustainable amount of money the ‘Ooh there’s a deal’ dilemma may be more common.
Picture the scene: There is a 4 for £5.00 deal on processed cheese (why not!) and you have heard that your cousin likes the stuff, so you spend some money on him/her. Reasonable? When you get home you discover that you have bought the wrong cheese and are unable to get a refund. Now ask yourself, where does this unwanted cheese go? If you were in this situation what would you do?
A- Bin it, no one wants it.
B- Eat it yourself, waste not want not
C- Two words: Charity Shop.
D- Keep it, who knows when you might need it.
If you said A, you need to think more about your waste. Think of all the time and effort it took to inject perfectly good cheese with horrible chemicals and ship it all the way to you. If you said B, give yourself a pat on the back to wash all that rubbery goodness down. If you said C, you are on the right track but you may be overdoing it. Just a bit…
Option D is another type of consumerism entirely: the horder. As I mentioned earlier, briefly, another way to consume is to collect and to keep. This means that when you are having a clearout, you decide to keep a lot of the things that you really do not need and won’t give a monkeys if you never see again. BUT! This does not mean that you should bin it, you should take it to a charity shop or give it to a younger relative (unless it is cheese).
Consumerism happens everywhere. Just in the space of time that I have been writing this I have seen an act of consumerism. I am not going to explain it in detail but I will state that it involved a 10 year old and an Itsy Bitsy Spider CD. One last thing: don’t think I have anything against processed cheese, you can eat rubber if you like!