By Rosario Badilla
December is a month of heavy spending. And if we take out Christmas and its gifts, New Year's outfits, and new-season clothes, is December a month of heavy spending?
Of course, we live in a consumer society; we have to buy things to eat and dress. But why do we need to buy so much? Why is the desire so great that it drives us into debt? Chile is the largest consumer of clothing in Latin America; people have more clothes than they need, probably because they have a permanently unsatisfied desire.
In a recent online conversation with Fashion Revolution Chile, Vanessa East, a psychologist specializing in consumer society, said that talking about excessive consumption is a complex topic. Compulsive shopping was usually associated with certain mental health conditions, but today, it's a behavior that has become so common that it's difficult to separate it from the illness.
And this is where the debate begins: who is sick, the overconsumer or the world we live in? We shouldn't attribute all the responsibility to the individual.
We're increasingly forced to resist buying. Black Friday and Cyber Monday bombard us with often imperceptible discounts, two-for-one deals almost force us to overbuy, and checkout lines are always lined with shelves of useless temptations that end up under the sofa.
What happens with consumption is that we often substitute something. Vanessa says that something isn't a real need, and what we're doing is replacing a kind of permanent void. "Zygmunt Bauman speaks of this era as the age of emptiness, in sociological terms," Vanessa says.
Beatriz O'Brien, Sociologist and Director of Fashion Revolution Chile, also participated in the conversation and said, "In sociological theory, when we study consumption, we talk about how it has become so important in our lives that it has become our way of relating to each other, of living in the social world."
Beatriz gives as an example Michel Maffesoli's theory, which states that by losing the sense of community and human connections, we replace that emptiness with a social activity called consumption, which has also been boosted by marketing and advertising, which constantly think about how people can continue buying more.
It's difficult to achieve change if the development of identity and the fulfillment of desires are always tied to material things, in a material world. But it's important to know that behind every new thing we acquire, there's a need within us that needs to be listened to, and the more we listen to it, the less we'll need to consume to find ourselves again.