“To live fully, we must learn to use things and love
people, and not love things and use people.”
John Powell
Work. Earn. Buy. Work harder. Earn more. Buy more. Want more. Work even harder. Wages stagnate. Prices go up. Use credit. Want more. Use more credit. Buy even more. Prices rise. Wages stay stagnant. Start giving up essentials; use more credit to buy more stuff. Get deeper and deeper in debt. Repeat.
Work. Earn. Buy. Work harder. Earn more. Buy more. Want more. Work even harder. Wages stagnate. Prices go up. Use credit. Want more. Use more credit. Buy even more. Prices rise. Wages stay stagnant. Start giving up essentials; use more credit to buy more stuff. Get deeper and deeper in debt. Repeat.
Therein lies the vicious cycle of the stupid, wasteful, excessive
consumptive capitalism that we have become trapped in. One in which companies
are driven purely by profiteering based on selling us more stuff; no longer
innovating or solving real problems but simply updating existing products with
more memory, larger screen sizes or higher definition. We in turn want to keep
up with the Joneses and even though there is absolutely no reason to discard
your iPhone 5, ROKU 1 or 2009 model 40” LG flat screen TV, we want the newest
gadgets and products because everyone else has them.
Even if you try to resist the urge to constantly consume (like our
family does), companies have started to ensure that we have no choice. Many now
make products with shorter lifespans, that fall apart in a less than a couple
of years. I still remember when all white goods and even clothes and furniture
from my parents’ generation lasted for decades. My father’s shoes and shirts
lasted him more than twenty years; mine last less than two. My mother’s fridge
stayed with us for more than a decade; our last one broke in one year. My
last laptop died two years after I bought it. I had to buy a new one after
Lenovo told me that the cost of replacing the broken part would be more than I
paid for the laptop. In fact, it has gotten so out of hand that leading up to
the financial crisis people were buying and selling homes as regularly as
people upgrade iPhones.
Today, it is as if companies exist purely for profit at all costs. Consumption
and consumerism has reached a fever pitch and are now bordering on insanity.
Amazon just introduced a DASH button that allows you to re-order household
products the moment you start to run low (Source: TechCrunch article). God
forbid we ever run out of paper towels or washing detergent, the world might
end; toilet paper is another matter entirely.
Perhaps, it started with Wall Street’s introduction of quarterly
earnings results which were presumably designed to gauge the health of public
companies and create greater transparency. Somewhere along the way it became a
measure of profits, with growth expected every quarter. Shareholders started to
expect their piece of this pie via an always rising share price and dividends
every quarter.
The problem with this model is that companies realistically cannot grow at
such a frenetic pace. Such rapid rate of growth is neither realistic nor
feasible and leads to putting the kinds of pressure on management that always
lead to ill-conceived and myopic decisions at best and totally dishonest,
illegal and fraudulent ones at worst. Essentially, we have created a system
where we reward short-term success, at any cost, and penalize long-term or
strategic thinking, the type that leads to real and sustainable growth.
This is not a viable model of capitalism and more importantly it is
based largely on false premises and unrealistic expectations. It is not the fundamentals of
capitalist theory that are in question but the people applying them who seem to
have become increasingly devoid of ethics, morals, principles and personal responsibility. We
have created a system where winner takes all, at the expense of everyone
else. If we continue down this path we are putting the wonderful system of
capitalism on a path to failure and also creating conditions for major social
unrest across the world.
It seems that all sins are permissible as long as companies continue to
produce profits. And when senior leadership fails, they simply move on to the
next job with a golden parachute, instead of into management oblivion or jail
where they really belong. After Enron, every senior executive learned to never
leave an email or paper trail; “when topics broached sensitive territory in
e-mails, they would often write ‘LDL’—let’s discuss live.” (Source: New
Yorker). It used to take generations to amass substantial wealth. Today, between
Wall Street hedge funds and Silicon Valley startups Rockefeller and
Vanderbilt-like wealth is being created in a matter of years, and is often
based on valuations pulled out of blue sky or based on misleading small
investors.
Even the world of academia has succumbed to this growing greed and
worship of money. Colleges, whose critical
role was to broaden minds beyond traditional spheres of influence and thinking
and to encourage generations to discover, are busy peddling sophisticated
financial models that help companies evaluate ‘risk.’ Professors have become
advisers to large corporations, showing up on company boards and espousing
‘financial and economic’ expertise via regular columns in newspapers or appearances
on television and basking under the bright lights of six and seven figure
celebrity.
There are numerous reports of how talk of becoming a doctor, public
servant, poet or teacher has long disappeared from the modern day dorm rooms.
Today, it is all about how kids can make their first million dollars before
starting their sophomore year in college.
We have moved away from the notion of steady, honest hard work as the
key recipes for success to a model that supports fast, easy, reality-TV-type
do-nothing success. Everything is about an exit and not about building
companies that span generations. Bluster wins the day while substance, it
seems, is considered old-fashioned and outdated.
With this approach to success we have washed away the fundamental human
values and principles that used to govern our inner consciences. We are
looking out for ourselves (in much larger numbers than generations before us)
and worried less about improving the lives of our employees, communities and
children.
So we can blame our politicians, the business elites, media and everyone
else for our woes and push for stricter laws and more stringent regulation, but
I don’t believe this will solve the deeper underlying problem we are facing; we
have made money our new God. It is this greed that we need to tackle; one that
forgoes ethics, principles and decency in a bid to get ahead.
Until we remember that each of us has a greater responsibility to
society and to the generations that follow, we will remain plagued by this imbalance
in our lives and in our little global village.
