December is a month of a lot of spending. And if we get Christmas and its gifts, the outfit for the new year and the clothes for the new season. Is December a month with a lot of spending?
Of course we live in a consumer society, we have to buy to be able to eat and dress. But why do we need to buy so much? Why is the desire so great that it causes us to get into debt? Chile is the largest clothing consumer in Latin America; people have more clothes than they need, probably because there is a permanently unsatisfied desire in them.
In a recent online conversation carried out by Fashion Revolution Chile; Vanessa East, Psychologist, specialist in consumer society issues, said that talking about excessive consumption is a complex issue. Usually compulsive shopping was associated with certain mental health pathologies, but today it is a behavior that has become so common that it is difficult to separate it from the disease.
And this is where the debate begins: who is sick, the one who consumes excessively or the world in which we live? It is not necessary to attribute all the responsibility to the subject.
Every time you have to have more will not to buy. Black Friday and cyber days bombard us with discounts that are often imperceptible, the 2 for 1 prices almost force you to buy more and the lines to get to the checkouts always have shelves full of useless temptations that later remain under the sofa.
What happens with consumption is that many times we replace something, Vanessa says that this something is not a real need and what we do is replace a kind of permanent void. “Zygmunt Bauman talks about this era as the era of the void, in sociological terms,” says Vanessa.
Beatriz O'Brien, Sociologist and Director of Fashion Revolution Chile, was also part of the conversation and said that "in sociological theory, when consumption is studied, they talk about how it has become so important in our lives that it became be our way of relating, of living in the social world”.
Beatriz gives as an example the theory of Michel Maffesoli, who says that by losing the sense of community and human ties, we replace that void with a social activity that is consumption, which was also promoted by marketing and advertising, which think everything the day how people can keep buying more.
It is difficult to achieve change if the development of identity and the satisfaction of desires is always linked to the material, in a material world. But it is important to know that behind each new thing we acquire, there is a need within us that needs to be heard and the more we listen to it, the less we will need to consume to find ourselves again.
