The Death of a Material World

Are you happy where you are in your life? Are the material items around you what make you happy or is it the relationships with people, such as your friends and family, which determine your satisfaction? Many people feel it is their relationships that are what makes them happy, but yet mass consumption of products continues to grow throughout many economies and has a negative affect on our earth. Madonna couldn’t have said it better, “I’m a material girl, living in a material world.” Now, more than ever, consumers are purchasing more products than before. The article “Limiting Consumption Toward a Sustainable Culture” by Alan Durning discusses how present economies are consuming mass amounts of products and are not recognizing how these products are effecting our environment by polluting our air, wasting our natural resources, and more. He states that the start of this habitual mass-consumption originated in the 1980’s and has continued to grow with rapid speed.

After being presented this information you may start to ask yourself, “If I am happy with my life based off my relationships, then why do I feel the need to purchase so many items?” The article “Thinking Ahead: The Value of Future Consciousness” by Tom Lombardo tries to answer this question by compromising several theories into one. He begins by stating that we are all either optimistic or pessimistic. If we think optimistically, we might set future goals for ourselves that we may never be able to truly meet causing disappointment and frustration, but if we think pessimistically, we will not ever set future goals because we feel that we could never meet them and that we are doomed to failure. He then continues to explain that the reason we purchase items is for a feeling of self-completion. When an optimistic person fails, they purchase an item to make them feel more accomplished, while a pessimistic person will purchase an item to make themselves feel less worthless. He suggests that through different types of psychotherapy people must learn how to handle their failures and set more attainable goals for the future that they can accomplish.

The idea of looking into the future and picturing where our planet, or even where someone’s life, is headed can be quite scary and intimidating. So, while we must learn how to manage our failures and set attainable goals, we still have to learn how to view the “bigger picture.” As the article “Visioneering: An Essential Framework in Sustainability Science” by Joon Kim and Taikan Oki discusses ‘‘We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.’’ This essentially means that the “bigger picture” we must envision is one of creating a sustainable future for the generations to come. This idea brings about the term visioneering, which stands as the cooperative triad of governance, management, and monitoring. Visioneering is not a new term and comes from the idea of engineering a vision.

My idea of visioneering includes a future that is sustainable using different developing sciences that we have now. As seen in the video 2057: The World, scientists are researching new ideas that could help us to be sustainable in the future with our resources, but are being forced to slow their process as it is not sustainable for our Ozone layer that is being depleted by toxic fumes. As of now, to reach my vision for the future we must start small by doing things that Fixing the Future on PBS suggest, such as Co-Operational (Co-Op) companies, where employees are able to own part of their company helping to rebuild communities and better people’s well-being. If we start small and continue to work at being sustainable, we will not be borrowing from our future’s generations.