Perhaps such a title would make you think that I believe that we should all just give into the all consuming beast of modern disposable income, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I still abhor idiotic spending, but I wanted to offer up a small defense of the consumer.
So we all know we ought to take reusable bags to the grocery store. It is simply wasteful to accumulate a billion plastic bags that will never get used again, but I recently have noticed that my local stores are virtue signalling about it. Why is it virtue signalling and not legitimate care/concern? Because the store STILL offers plastic bags for FREE. I only know of two stores who are serious about reusable bags; you either bring your own bags, or you have to pay for their's.
If this seems totally mundane, it is because it is, but it will help demonstrate this point:
We buy groceries, we get plastic bags; we buy meat, we get it in a plastic container; we buy something online, it comes in a cardboard box. Now, when politicians, globalists, and other human-haters get on their podiums to talk about environmentalism, who do they blame for such waste and potential pollution? The big companies that create the wasteful junk in the first place? Of course not, they blame you and me for buying it.
I do my best to repurpose things like boxes, cans of peanuts, glass, and other things that often get thrown away, but I sincerely doubt anyone tries to repurpose the black foam that beef is often stored on. Heck, if they just used butcher paper that could at least be used as fire starter. It isn't like the milkman dropping by in the old days with little glass bottles filled with milk and coming back later to pick up the empty bottles for refilling.
The consumer, no matter how dilligent, is still going to end up with some degree of waste, and the human-haters are going to use that as evidence of the necessity of depopulation of the so-called "useless eaters." But in reality, we can pin most of this waste on the producers. So instead of demanding these corporations to create better quality packaging or anything like that, our megalomaniac lords believe that we must live lives of total austerity to help save "mother earth" from climate change. The consumer is a scapegoat for their hedonistic excess.
By no means is this a defense of the mindless consuming moron who watches TV all day, watches porn, and buys stuff he doesn't need with money he doesn't have; no, I am specifically talking about the "elites" who pin all environmental issues, real and made-up, on the middle/lower class person as if it is his fault and not the jet-setting John Kerrys or pedophiles of Epstein's island of the world.
I know I demonstrated this using a rather mundane example of the grocery bag, but I hope it is clear to the reader that we cannot assign full blame to the consumer. By all means admonish the foolish consumer who wastes food, money, and time, but realize that the environmental aspect is mostly up to the producer and that the producer is usually going to use the cheapest and most disposable materials possible.
There are not any true solutions to the problem unless you know or can become a producer of something, but I want to get across that consumers are being gaslit as horrible "useless eaters" when very few people should be called such. This is a careful middle ground between placing full blame on the consumer (which is unjust, as demonstrated), and allowing the consumer free reign to indulge in hedonism (also unjust).