Dangers of over-consumption

One’s life can very easily be wasted away on non-consequential, “time passing”, filler, short-term hedonistic experiences.

It’s a blessing to enjoy life’s little pleasures, but it’s perilous to lead a life consisting of only discrete pleasures and experiences that are not, or cannot be chained together in any way shape or form. Essentially, a life spent as a passive spectator through and through, observing the years scroll by.

That feels like an egregious squandering of the most precious gift we’ve been given: life. Chaining experiences together and compounding them into a product that amounts to much more than the sum of its parts is one of the most intriguing, addicting, but most of all, rewarding parts of life.

Benefits of production

Building up years of study to land to land a job that takes one out of poverty, raising a child into a full grown adult, building relationships consciously into heartwarming friendships or a loving family, writing a book or article that not only helps oneself but also many others, building a successful company based on years of networking and experiences.

They require considerable amounts of deliberate actions where different experiences are aggregated, chained and combined in novel ways that add value to a system. Value is produced.

Best of all, society rewards you for that! If something you produced is deemed to be of value and (directly or indirectly) consumed by a fellow human being, you can get compensated in currency, recognition, access, friendship, amongst others. As the products of your labor expand and compound, an even more interesting non-trivial effect starts to happen that could not have been predicted in the first place. Personally, both articles and a presentation I did resulted in interesting job offers that I didn’t plan for, nor could I have predicted.

But it’s not easy

Discipline, self reflection and the hard work to plan and aggregate different actions and experiences, are the most important ingredients to consistently produce value.

If this would be easy, everyone would be doing it by default. That’s why self help books are such a profitable business. This difficulty stems from our inherited hardwired behaviours that optimize towards immediate gratification, which served our late ancestors to such success that these traits got selected and filtered through the ages as an essential part of our species.

However, in the context of our modern societies where resources and entertainment are abundant, these traits backfire and when left to their own devices, can easily stray one into a life of misery and value bankruptcy¹.

The antidote. Self-discipline workout.

Just like any other muscle in our body, self-discipline requires consistent and intentional work to stay strong, but relying solely on will power, a scarce and fleeting resource, is often not enough. In order to protect this precious resource, one can set up an environment to block out frivolous distractions and non-consequential instant gratifications. In my case, I don’t have video streaming subscriptions (since I’ve come to realise that most series and movies add little to no value to my life), I have blocked distracting websites and videogames on my computer and expelled junk and sugary foods from home².

Remember, any time spent in over-indulging consumption, is time not spent producing value.

Instead, create the habit of self reflection and journalling, organize events (at work, with your friends or loved ones), write articles and publish videos that can be seen and judged by others (like this article), welcome accountability and reposability, clean your room. These actions are very likely accessible to you now, at (close to) zero cost. ³

Replace non-consequential consumption with fruitful production. Start anywhere, start now.