A dear friend sent me this fascinating Substack around consumerism in December (as traditional and predictable a subject around this time as the gifts and excessive decorations it decries). It was clever writing, which I largely resonated with, despite the fact that I am a huge Christmas consumer myself (oops, busted). I love the decorations. The gifting. The tree. The treats. The fairs. The movies. All of it.
When we run out of time, we start spending money.
Says the article I was reading, and I couldn't agree more. It seems a lot of people get caught up in excessive holiday spending to prove their love to one another, and with only two weeks to go until Crimbo, we're all hard-pressed on time to finish Santa's shopping, set the table, and fill our emotional stockings.
At the same time, for me, Christmas is entirely about time.
Visiting the Christmas Fair isn't about buying (though I did pick up a few beautiful stocking-fillers, as well), it's about spending time with the person(s) accompanying you. Nobody goes to the fair alone, and if you're lucky enough to have a Christmas fair in your town and have the extra few dollars to spare on mulled wine, I do think you should take advantage of it and enjoy it, because there may come a time when you don't have either.
I was just saying last night how I love the way the city lights up for Christmas. Is it consumerism? Or is it, perhaps, a more firmly-rooted fear in my ancestry of these nights, the darkest we'll see?
We are still some eleven days to Solstice. We are traversing a period of immense darkness, both externally and (often) internally. It hit me yesterday, while writing, and for a moment, I couldn't do anything. I just sat there thinking how filled with darkness 2025 has been.
So while it might be quaint, morally righteous, and not entirely mistaken to decry excessive decorations and spending on street-lights, maybe having a few weeks of excess lightedness to combat all the terror and sadness isn't such a crime.
Another point the Substack article made was that
We must create more than we consume.
Which led me to my title question. I'm someone whose entire year revolves around creation of some kind, which also means I'm a natural consumer. I take in a lot, both in an artistic sense, and in this kind of sense. December is, agreed, a month of excessive consumerism. But much of my life is also a period of excessive creative output, which does make me wonder, can one eventually reach some kind of balance?
For a long time, the seemingly obvious answer to the consumerist dilemma was an extraordinary leap towards purism. But what if the answer isn't not to consume anything, but simply to put back what you take, perhaps in some other form?
I seldom have a problem with consumerism in my private life because I'm generally happy with the forms it takes. To me, the main issue with this "take, take, take" culture isn't that it spends money. Fuck money. It's that it tends to leave us depleted and to tear us away from the people who matter.
But that's not a given, and it's not the only option.
I tend to consume a lot. Let's go to a movie, the theater, a concert, a market, an experience, an art gallery, a new place, an old place, the same place, the other place. I take in experiences. Things, also, but I never take them in as an objective point of value. In other words, I don't think my life would be meaningless or unhappy if I didn't spend this money.
I feel quite balanced, typically, and I believe it's because I'm fulfilled and content with my output into the world. It's not a mentality of I deserve this because I give that. But most of my consumerist behavior revolves around spending time or in some way helping or treating the people I love. There exists a tightrope that I've learned to walk because I spend rigorous amounts of time each day taking of myself and putting elsewhere, so that I am never brought to overfill, the way consumerism often does for other people.
Is it, then, a problem of consumerism at all? Or is the key problem really that many of us don't live creative, intrinsically satisfying lives?
I know plenty of "consumerist" people who are, indeed, miserable. The sort of people who work too many hours in jobs they despise, so that they can pay for expensive shit they don't really need, thus existing in this endless loop. And certainly, corporations and brands thrive off these people's misery, but it is not the existence of the market that leads to them being miserable, in the first place.
It's encouraging children to find respectable, rather than fulfilling, jobs.
It's convincing each other adulthood is meant to be a misery, and we just need to grit our teeth and take it.
It's taking and never making that leaves us confused as to our own self-worth, which in turn accounts for the consumerist hell most of us seem to inhabit.
So maybe the answer isn't to ritualistically decry the consumerist plague simply because 'tis the season, but to start looking into how we can build more meaningful, productive lives that leave us in no uncertainty as to what we contribute to the world.
I realize this isn't really in keeping with the ready-made concept of white-walls/wardrobe-declutter minimalism. But I do believe learning this balance between what we create and what we deplete from this world is closer to the true minimalism ethos in some ways. Hence this post being here.
