Desaturation is key to reducing consumption

When traveling around Bozeman, how many cafes and coffee shops do you pass? If you’re like me, you can see one nearly every time that you look outside your car window. After noticing this, a question was raised in my mind and I began to wonder: What is America’s obsession with overconsumption based in. The answer? Oversaturation.

The sheer number of products available and advertised at any given moment – from coffee shops to class supplies – makes it difficult to step back and consider what we actually need in the first place. Faced with overwhelming pressure to purchase products, I often find myself buying more than I later realize I need. For example, if you were to search on Google “lined notebook” simply because you need to purchase one, you would be immediately overwhelmed by the hundreds of different links that would pop up on your screen. Not only are each of these links promoting essentially the exact same product, but they are all advertising as if their product has something that the others do not have. When you think about it, a notebook is a notebook. You really do not need anything special in order to write down notes that you need to remember on a sheet of paper.

Overconsumption is a problem that has plagued this country since the 1950s when the government encouraged everyone to spend what they had for what they did not have. In this world of constant bombardment of products, our minds can get confused and misled and we eventually figure out we cannot make a decision as to which specific product we want. This idea of trying to get everyone to buy anything and everything they see does not have the power that it was originally supposed to have. Nowadays, people are noticing the oversaturation of everything in this world and this is leading to a new rise in popularity for minimalism. When thinking about it this way, it can be deduced that economic trends seem to help dictate nearly everything in our world. The overconsumption era that we seem to be leaving is leading us more into a minimalism-based world. 

This is not necessarily the best way to be either. It could lead to even higher inflation than we are seeing now since companies have grown accustomed to a certain amount of revenue and now that the trend is no longer maximalism, they are not reaching that number as quickly as they used to. Thinking like this only shows that this balance between consumption and the economy is very delicate and is not something that is easily achieved.

In this world of constant influencing and de-influencing each other into buying or not buying products, it can seem difficult to make up your own mind. The question to ask yourself is: how can we as a society work together to desaturate the market to make only the most reliable and worthwhile products available to us? This is not something that is easily solved, which is probably the reason why it hasn’t been yet. 

The next time you find yourself shopping for something and you are traveling through multiple different links to try to find the best one, think about which product you would rather have as the only choice available. In my eyes, this is the only plausible way we can possibly desaturate the ever-growing market that we live in.