Over consumption is the reality of our life. Well funded marketing campaigns and consumerism propaganda resulted in huge accumulation of useless items. We pay huge amount of money to accumulate items which in most cases useless trash.

Consequences :

1. Wasted money. Useless items in most cases cost less, but ending up in big among of money.
2. Wasted time. In order to buy items you have to work. You spend countless hours of life just to buy trash.
3. Maintenance. As more items accumulated as more time needed to maintain it.
4. More storage. Storage of useless items for which you pay.
5. Credit card. Consumerism dictates acceptance of credit cards and loans. From this only banks benefit. Regular customer believes that gain more from using credit card over a debit card because of the perks (bonuses, miles, cashback, freebies, etc.). But there’s nothing free in this world.
6. Accumulation of material items instead of spending money on memorable moments. There’s not always enough money for traveling, gift for important people, self education, better self care. Why there’s not enough money left? Because of emotional shopping, mediocre dining out, luck of planing.
7. Rat race to make more money just to buy more stuff.
8. Depression, anxiety, feeling of self disappointed. This mostly affects females.
9. Purchasing too much of groceries. When did last time you finished all purchased groceries? Biggest problem with vegetables and fruits.
10. Health problems. Instead of solving a problem people prefer to search easy ways. For example, to fight obesity (overweight) required exercise, right diet, discipline. What people prefer to do? People prefer to buy magical pills which in a short period of time will make them slim.
11. Climate and ecology. To fuel consumerism, natural resources needed.
12. Water problems. It’s impossible to manufacture without water. After manufacturing dirty water dumped in rivers and water bodies.
13. Recycling disaster. How do you think which percent of household waste recycled?

Consumerism directly influences on growth of economy and industrial production. Variety of available products and services create unnecessary cravings for it. I don’t say that variety is bad, but I try to communicate that better to own multipurpose items than a single purpose. Variety of products do not mean quality. Especially if the item cost not enough for described specifications.

Modern shopping mostly done online. Not every item meets expectations while delivered, but it cost so little that buyers feel that they need to spend more time to return the item than to keep it.

Everyday number of consumers increase. More consumers move out of poverty means bigger impact on ecology. According to http://www.theworldcounts.com:

If everyone on earth lived like the average American we would need 4.6 planets to support us. 2.4 for Japanese and about 2.3 for Europeans. And the number of people in the consumer class is growing…

Over consuming is real. Check chart below from The World Counts.

Shopping used as a time pass ritual which does not bring joy anymore. It’s something like shopping therapy: avoid solving problem, just mask it by accumulating more items. Your shopping should be planned.