Inner poverty: Consumption as hollow consolation

Modern consumerism exploits inner emptiness, driving endless buying that exhausts people and planet, until self-understanding replaces consumption as meaning itself.

- ACHARYA PRASHANT

A woman stands in a store at ten in the night, her cart already full, her phone buzzing with messages she will not open. At home, her daughter has fallen asleep waiting for her. She picks up a packet she does not need. Six identical ones sit unopened in a drawer she has forgotten about. What she remembers is only the feeling that preceded each purchase: a tightness in the chest, a whisper that something is missing, a hope that the next object might quieten it. It never does, but she refuses to acknowledge that, and the store is still open.

Somewhere in another aisle, a man holds a shirt against his chest, though his wardrobe already overflows. He will wear it perhaps twice. Neither shopper is poor, yet both wear the expression of people looking for something in a place they have never been.

In the 1970s, the average person encountered roughly five hundred advertisements a day. Today, estimates range between four thousand and ten thousand. Global consumer spending now exceeds sixty trillion dollars annually. Household debt in the United States alone has crossed eighteen trillion dollars. The fashion industry produces over one hundred billion garments each year; ninety-two million tonnes of these end up in landfills, a rubbish truck of clothing is buried or burned every second. These figures are usually discussed in the language of economics or environmentalism. But they are symptoms, not the disease. The Earth is being exhausted by people who are themselves exhausted within.

Every civilisation tells itself that its achievements lie in technology, wealth, or progress, but the real engine behind human activity has always been simpler and sadder. Man cannot sit peacefully with his own incompleteness, so he learns to bury it under objects. What appears as an economic system is often only the organised expression of inner hunger. What looks like demand is usually psychological discomfort in disguise.

The world buys because the mind aches.