Imagine that one late night scrolling through social media, you decide you need a new fidget spinner. The actual cause is unknown to you, because you did not consciously observe that seven posts ago one of your friends was talking about her husband, which reminded you of your last breakup, which in turn reminded you of your childhood insecurities, which in turn caused you to habitually touch your pocket to reassure yourself that your keys were still there, which caused you to notice your fidget spinner, also in your pocket, and take it out. All you notice is that one of the metal pieces in your spinner is loose, and this annoys you. So you search up fidget spinners of the sort that you like, and pretty soon you’re staring at a sleek, modern website full of pictures of fidget spinners in a dizzying variety of styles. You can’t decide which of two you like best, so you order both and go to bed feeling satisfied. Two or three days later, because the fulfillment warehouse is located in flyover country between you and the San Francisco company headquarters, you receive a well-packaged small box. You eagerly open it and immediately start playing with your new fidget spinners. They feel premium and well-made, although they are a little smaller than you wanted, and in natural lighting that shade of red reminds you of an unpleasant tomato sauce and rice dinner, which triggers a certain dissatisfaction, although your conscious mind chalks it up to buyer’s remorse. You take one of your new spinners to work. Next week, after a long and difficult day, you’re browsing social media again and remember a cute banana-shaped fidget spinner which you decided not to purchase at the last moment. You open the same company’s website and discover that they have just announced a set of limited-edition fidget spinners. Pretty soon you’re on your way to a collection.
If you haven’t experienced something like this yourself, the odds are good that you know someone who has. Western society encourages us to consume material goods at astronomical rates which leave us, like Faust, eternally unsatisfied, turning to ever greater consumption to feed our growing hunger to have something that, we have a terrible suspicion, we do not have and can never buy. There is no rational good which comes of the vast quantities of plastic consumer trash which are daily transported across the Pacific at our request. Yet consumers purchase it, by the shipload, in an increasingly desperate attempt to fend off spiritual starvation.
Of course, the sheer amount of nonessential consumer goods currently being produced is not sustainable. Eventually, the abundant fossil fuels which have made the conditions which create such things possible will dry up. Long before that point, rising economic pressures will force all but the wealthiest to give up their habits of mindless consumption or suffer the consequences. Sooner rather than later, the company in San Francisco will go out of business, and the Midwestern warehouse will turn to shipping more economically desirable goods, or suffer the same fate.
If people addressed the reasons for their habits of consumption, their psychological need for overconsumption would vanish, and so would a great many profits. Many people accumulate goods which they subconsciously know to be excessive in an attempt to fill spiritual holes in their hearts. Yet a picture of food cannot satisfy hunger any more than a story about love can substitute romance. The only way to sate spiritual hunger is through spiritual sustenance. Methods of doing this are nearly as infinite as human experience, and nearly all of them are unfashionable in a society which encourages us to do more, work more, play more, eat more, diet more, watch TV more, achieve more, be depressed more. Whatever Mephistopheles encourages us to do, when its relentless pursuit inevitably produces a profound dissatisfaction in the spirit, it is probably a good idea to stop doing that and do something else. That requires a certain capacity for independent action, which is one of the few things that Faustian society pressures us not to pursue at any cost.
If, in the opening scenario, you had decided not to buy a new fidget spinner, a number of things might have happened. You might have attempted to fix it yourself, in which case you might have developed a new skill and hobby. If you’re not mechanically inclined, you might have asked a friend to repair it for you. You might have looked for a substitute and discovered a whole variety of small objects which make for excellent fidget spinners. Finally, you might have addressed your underlying childhood insecurities, so that the psychological need which you had satisfied with a fidget spinner evaporated.
The difference between this and the first situation is simply that you were willing to put in the effort. This may not seem groundbreaking, but it is one of the foundations of spiritual advancement. In order to get anything meaningful out of your efforts, you must do the work yourself. This can take any number of forms: as noted, if you’re not inclined to arts and crafts, you can have someone else repair your fidget spinner, or buy another one and go back to your own way of making something meaningful. It is the habits of thought that result in deciding to repair, reuse, make, or go without which run contrary to our modern programming. This is discouraged not because handmade goods are inferior to mass-produced ones (often enough, the reverse is true), but because it threatens the spirit of greed.
When we do our own work of making, thinking, or laboring over something, we simultaneously address our own spiritual needs. Our spaces are rotting with items made indifferently, soon forgotten and unwanted. It can only be an improvement to stop buying these things and to gradually replace them when they wear out. Making your own handmade goods cannot address all potential sources of spiritual malnourishment, but it can certainly help. And while I can’t claim that it will solve our society’s greater problems, I very much suspect that those of us who do so generally find ourselves happier and more satisfied with the things we make ourselves.