What an awful title that doesn’t make any sense! Well, good evening dear toastmasters and welcomed guests, let me slow down, and set up some context first.
Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. It is infamous for its contribution to materialistic lifestyles and unsustainable development on our planet, thus it is bearing a lot of criticism. However, in my own experience with consumerism, I found it is not all negative. Actually I learned a lot of lessons from it, real and meaningful enough for me to even call it my mentor.
Of course, consumerism is not a person, but a systematic entity in our society. Like it or not, it has already thrived in our day to day lives. Its ecosystem includes all the TV commercials that we watch, all the convenient gadgets for our non-essential needs (such as avocado slicers), time limited promotions and coupons, store membership and loyalty programs, credit cards with cashback rewards, and periodic shopping carnivals during festival time: yes, I’m talking about Black Friday.
It is a complicated ecosystem to explore. The beginning of my mentor-protege relationship started with a simple question: how much discount could I get out of it? It was a very meaningful question to me from many years ago. At that time I was a poor student without much life experience, nor a real income. I had a lot of confusion, as well as desires, such as a new iPhone. I probably needed some guidance, as well as some purchasing power. And I seeked both by putting efforts into this ecosystem, with a short term goal of getting an iPhone at 50% off, and a long term goal of, well, I didn’t really know.
If we give consumerism a persona, what has it done to me in this journey?
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It provided incredible motivation. Even in the form of “I want to buy this, I want to buy that, at this discount level”, these motivations and goals are very effective to keep me engaged, and drive me to figure out a way to stack up all the possible discounts in one shot, and make crazy low prices happen. Trust me, it is not an easy thing to do and requires practising a whole bunch of skills, such as maths, statistics, communication, driving, heavy lifting, etc.
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It provided supportive and non-judgemental feedback. Of course, nobody will tell me that I did a good job in this “mentorship”, but I know that there will be a message in my mailbox saying “your package is delivered” if I actually did a good job. Play within the rules, and get rewarded for doing that. In my opinion this is something very hard to teach, but consumerism has delivered this concept to me successfully in a very effective way.
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It would be there for me, with visions and patience for me to stretch myself. As long as we still live in a commodity economy, there will always be some cool stuff with good potential discounts in the future, which I wouldn’t be able to see with my own perspective. And if I fail to seize the opportunity, I can always try again on Black Friday next year.
As you can see, even if consumerism is not an actual person, my engagement with this entity highlights a couple of key components to make a mentor-protege relationship. It didn’t teach me anything directly, but I’ve learned a lot from it through real life experience. And the most valuable one comes at the end of our relationship, a question that I need to answer to myself: I wanted this, I wanted that, I can have them all at an affordable price. I wanted a new iPhone, now I have two, which I don’t really need. Am I satisfied? If the answer is no, if I failed to satisfy myself by hurting our planet, now what?
And that’s where my long term goal comes from, and the moment that I realized that I can become a better person.