Reflection on the Role of Consumption in Everyday Life

Reflection on the Role of Consumption in Everyday LifeMeghan TenorioConsumption in Everyday LifeEating a hamburger. Buying a t-shirt. Buying a car. Buying gasoline. Just a few things that everyone will do or will most likely do in their life duration. Consumption is the using up of goods and services by consumer purchasing or in the production of other goods. Someone in the field of international studies can be looking for a relationship among consumption and its role in the environment, national identity, gender, and scotch development. Consumptions role in daily life is inevitable, and as we advance further into the 21st century we can see sightly how much it connects the people as a whole.A pound of sugar is only a quantity, a convenient load, not an object in itself. The book, however and here it prefigures the durables of our time is a distinct, self-collected object, exactly reproduced on a large scale. One pound of sugar flows into the next each book has its own eremiti c self-sufficiency (Anderson 34). This quote is just an example of the simultaneous consumption of the report-as-fiction. Consumption may never be predictable. While particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour, and that, only on this day, not that sugar, the use of which proceeds in an unclocked, continuous flow it may go bad, but it does not go out of run into (Anderson 35). Consumption is also not limited to one thing at a time it may be and usually is simultaneous. As the same newspaper reader reads on the subway or in the barbershop while getting his hair cut, he is performing multiple acts of consumption at at one time. This assures the reader that the gentlemans gentleman is visibly rooted in the act of consumption in everyday life. Print-capitalism, a possible form of consumption, is a way that communities can achieve a sense of national identity and connect on a profound level. Hence, the printers office emerged as the key to North American communication theory and community intellectual life (Anderson 61). Assuming that consumption is a social process says that our identity focuses on symbolic aspects rather than the actual material consumption.In the book Eaarth by Bill McKibben consumption is spoken almost in the sense of environment water, land, and especially forms of energy. It is one of the main reasons that the earth is where it is right at a time slowly (or perhaps not as slowly as we thought) degrading into earth where any kind of adaptation will sustain impossible. As he states, Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. Its our reality. Weve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways We need now to understand the world that weve created, and consider urgently how to live in it (McKibben Xiv). The Swedish pill pusher Svante Arrhenius offers the idea a century ago that we were evaporating our coal mines i nto the air, and calculated that this could eventually raise temperatures, but nobody seemed to pay much attention. Were not sack to get back the planet we once had. Were like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top ccc and had a heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue (McKibben 16). Through high levels of consumption, weve burn down the coal and the oil, and released the first dose of deoxycytidine monophosphate, that carbon that raised the temperature enough to start the process in motion. Once its in motion there is nil to shut it off but can only be slightly lessened. Without even realizing it now, weve turned our cars and factories into junior volcanoes, and so were not just producing carbon faster than the plant world can absorb it were also making it so hot that the plants absorb less carbon than they used to (McKibben 23). From the time that we wake up, the second we turn on that coffee pot till the second we turn off the lights and go to bed (dont forget the furnace or the air-conditioner that is probably still running) we argon burning coal and gas and oil. Our tendency for consumption not only consumption but more specifically over-consumption is why we are where we are environmentally. Richard Heinberg, the analyst who was one of the first to alert the world to the impending oil peak, once compiled a list of things made from oil that ran from ready reckoner chips, insecticides, anesthetics, and fertilizers, right through lipstick, perfume, and pantyhose to aspirin and parachutes (McKibben 30). These are just a few products that we all consume in one way, or another. This consumption, the overuse of oil, is leading to international warming. It is possible to slow down the growth but only with the cooperation on a small scale small, not significant dispersed, not centralized (McKibben 120). any this can add up to the results we are looking for. This means reshaping our society. Growth and expansion requires a kind of centralization a concentration of resources and the need for consumption. What we are looking for is the opposite. Our earth may never be the same, but at least we will still have an earth to thrive on in whatever shape or form.Consumption has a huge involvement in economic development in the way that whatever we consume benefits the frugality. This holds authentic to many products food, beauty products, intangible items, and even something as simple as a plain white cotton t-shirt. In the book The Travels of a tee shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli it shows many examples of how consumption all over the world can have effects on the growth of the economy in the U.S. The shirts that have the Made in China label are usually made out of cotton that comes from Texas. Texas cotton doesnt brag about where it was born and raised Desolate, hardscrabble, and alternately baked to death, shredded by windstorms, or pummeled by rocky hail, west Texas will never have much of a tourist trade (Rivoli 3). However, there is a very good chance that your t-shirt and mine were born there in a urban center called Lubbock, the self-proclaimed cottonest city in the world. Cotton may seem like an unlike candidate for economic success in the United States, but the consumption rates prove it to be a good candidate as most of cotton comes from the U.S. Cotton growers can also appeal to other aspects of consumption than only t-shirts. Connoisseurs harmonize that when it comes to frying chips, cottonseed oil is best (Rivoli 52). Colgate-Palmolive is also a major customer when it comes to cottonseed oil. This just proves the fact that consumption occurs in multiple ways at once from the cotton to the cottonseed oil and, therefore, can help the economic growth and stability more rapidly. Although, because of the abundance of cotton growers in the U.S., other countries fail to find economic stability throug h cotton production itself as well as the U.S. has.Consumption is an everyday thing and starts as soon as you wake up right up until you turn the lights off at night. It has its benefits up to a set point but also needs to be regulated if we call for to maintain a livable planet. Consumption can be a social act, as well as materialistic. Either way, consumption as a whole benefits our national identity and economic development, though if not taken down to the local level it could be harmful to our environment and planet as we know it.Works CitedAnderson, Benedict R. OG. Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London Verso, 1991. Print.McKibben, Bill. Eaarth Making a Life on a Tough bare-assed Planet. New York Times, 2010. Print.Rivoli, Pietra. The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy An Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade. Hoboken, NJ John Wiley Sons, 2005. Print.