Last Friday, I suffered from an unexpected power outage which affected my storage pool. Sudden power outage is always risky, unexpected shutdown may cause system failures; potential power surges may damage weak components inside the device. Fortunately, no device was broken. Sighed of relief, I slumped into the chair.

Large storage pools are expensive but weak in some cases. Additional capacity or fault tolerance require me to pay more, both money and time. As a modern saying goes: “Charge up, and you will be stronger”. Need more storage space? Buy it. Need extra redundancy? Buy it. Need better performance? Buy it. We spent money like waterfalls and endless time and effort we invested, mountains of products we bought, and they end up lie in the corner of our room, and mind.

However, there is a question: Why I “need” to buy so much that maybe I don’t really need, and what pushes me to purchase more.

The modern society has its alias: The age of Consumerism. Social identity encourages us to consume more. On the one hand, modern industry and massive producing require large number of consumers to consume their product to feed itself and its employees. And workers need money to buy products produced by which they are working for to survive the changing world. Like it is hard to distinguish the chicken-and-egg situation, producing and consuming constitute a cycle. On the other hand: What people consume reflects the exact social class they are in, and the consumer taste affects your social circle on some degrees. That’s why so many people on social medias such as “Red Book” and Instagram make their best effort to “share” their “exquisite” life.

Time back to a century ago, workers were struggling for their bread and wages. Unsalable products accumulated; the economy fell into the Great Depression. Grains were burnt, and Milk was poured into river. Greatly increased contradiction and crisis finally led the whole world into war.

After WW2, in 1960s, people finally realized the importance of consuming. Increasing needs bring more jobs, and higher consumption level make everyone live a better live. Everything seemed so beautiful. Consuming make the economy take off, and this is called the age of Consumerism.

The world is changing, everything has changed over the years. The Consumerism is no exception. Increasing consuming changed the consumers’ mind, the change of the consumers also reflected the consuming itself. Growing industry makes everything to change even faster, for consumers, everything changes too fast to let them have a short break to review their consuming decisions. At first, people consume for a better life, and then, they consume for the social circle. Now, we consume, for the consuming itself.

It is easy to find out that consuming makes people happy. The happiness of material abundance and wish come. However, happiness is always addictive. When we purchased something by impulse, we feel strong instant happiness the moment we pay. Such happiness cannot live long, it always ends at the time we step out of the store.

The gap of happiness makes us feel empty. We hate empty, as we are taught to live a meaningful life. However, we are hardly be taught how to face the empty and how to find out what is meaningful, we are just taught “empty” is meaningless. Instant happiness is always a good medicine to “heal” the feeling of empty. This process of increasing and decreasing constitute a cycle: we gain instant happiness, the happiness fades in short time, and we make better effort to gain new instant happiness.

Now, the conclusion is clear. The need of being “not empty” pushes us to gain instant happiness. Consuming is a good way to gain such happiness. The world needs us to consume the increasing products. “Charge up, and you will be stronger.”

Is there another way to face the bad feeling of being “empty”? Yes, but this is another question.