We are in a world that conditions us at every moment of our lives. It’s one thing to be bound by the limitations that a universe imposes. Things like gravity or nature, things that evolved generally beyond our own reach and independently of our meddling as an ‘intelligent’ species. How fast light travels, how much energy is used to walk, how plants and animals reproduce, how oceans and planets form. Every single one of them is something that’s developed or set independently of us. But today, it’s like we live in a parallel bubble world made of only people and things that people make and this is taking much more from us than we’d like to believe or that we could even imagine.
Fittingly enough, the allegory of the cave is relevant. I guess you can extrapolate the core tenet and expand it into anything that fits a frame of ‘narrow-minded’ or ‘(un)willingly ignorant’ or anything else that talks about a bigger world outside. But I think there are gradients to the cave system. Like, maybe the very first allegory alluded to the deepest part of the cave where even the dimmest of lights can cast visible shadows. And as with every group or community in these caves, we are tasked with exploring it as soon as we become curious enough or ‘get over’ our fear of what makes the shadows and the world ‘exist’ in front of us. Let me guide you through my thoughts and let’s not get too specific or else I’d have to type a novel’s worth of words to get it right (I’m sorry).
Let’s say you’re in the deepest part of the cave, the ‘original’ allegory so to speak. In it, you sit in complete darkness. But you aren’t afraid, not necessarily. You can feel things like the dampness and jaggedness of the rocks that surround you and maybe you hear another person beside you breathing slowly. Your whole life as a cognisant and conscious being has been this. Maybe you don’t even realise you have eyes because in the dark, you’re unlikely to really need them.
Then one day, you hear a noise from afar, the pitter patter sounds regularly timed and it is getting louder. Your senses heighten, you feel a nervousness that you hadn’t felt before, you could make a grumble but maybe making a sound will scare them away or worse, make them aware you’re there. Slowly, you start to notice that there may be a color to the rocks that surround you, that there are a spectrum of them, and that the shine from the dampness is an impressive display. You’re using your eyes for the very first time as the world is presented to you in a new form. Light has come through as a lit torch. Whoever created this torch, a person or an alien or another creature altogether, they have left it right behind your corner of the cave. You see this being live their life and, as in the allegory, you assume that this is all there is to life. Some people may grow curious enough to test their strength and venture towards the source of the light. You are some people. You are crawling, still touching the ground that you’ve always been accustomed to with your two feet, one hand planted firmly on the indented steps and the other hand reaching towards the light (Quick side note, which hand was your stability hand and which hand was your reaching hand?). Remember that you’ve always seen life in this way, first in complete darkness only using your other senses to navigate your small safe section of cave. Then the light trickles in and you begin to see forms and shadows play out their lives and begin to assume that this is just how ‘life’ and the world functions. And now, you crawl towards the light that you realise is broadcasting the lives of the people and creatures that just happen to pass by it. I don’t know if you’re the type to get sweaty when you encounter something that challenges some very core beliefs or experiences you’ve had; that it could be bigger or simpler than we thought it to be. But I get really nervous, anxious even, at the thought that I’d have to change everything up again.
Anyway, so you have this process of crawling out right, and you are slowly moving towards the light, of becoming part of the cast of creatures and folks that happen to cast shadows onto your cave’s walls. Maybe you get used to this, maybe you go back, maybe you nudge your other companions within your original subcave so they would be part of the cast and not merely the bystander. This becomes part of your new rhythm, whatever choices you make. Sometimes, you miss being part of the cave, other times you revel in the images you’ve begun to create and imagine on behalf of your original people. This agency is interesting and may even be liberating to some. But something doesn’t fully add up, and you see just a glimpse of why. Sometimes, you see just at the corner of your eye a glimmer that can’t possibly have come from this torch. It is elusive, like it outright refuses to be seen and maybe, it even intends to go unnoticed but isn’t perfectly concealed. At this point, you feel a growing determination to follow it the next time you see an unnatural glimmer.
As the light catches your eye, you rush towards it, droppping whatever it is that you may have been doing before then. There are people around you, other people who recognise you as ‘one of them’ but not fully so. And when you made a sprint for the light, they enter a panic. As the reader, you know they’ve worked to keep you in the dark still. Giving you enough agency to travel one level but no more. And this leaping sprint that you want to reach works them in to a frenzy. For the first time, the pitter patter of footsteps sound dominating and boundaried. As you run further away, you remember the people of the original cave that you’ve left behind at this moment. I mean, how far can you sprint in a cave anyway?
Moving through crevices small and large, but still guided by the offshoot rays of the light that you’re chasing, you eventually land in a fork in the cave. The light comes from a bright source but is being bounced around by crystals inside this fork. Eventually, the cast of people who were there to cosplay life in front of the torch catch up to you. They don’t try to bring you back but they are disgruntled which you feel as they hold you back just a little too firmly from pressing forward. You see a brighter light in the distance which illuminates the room but you also see the other darker sections of the room, paths that lead to other veins with their own subcaves. It’s a wonder that you’re the first person here (or are you?).
I’m no good at writing thrillers or essays or anything of the sort. But I think the allegory I’ve described from my own imagination is a smattering of thoughts which represent the main idea I’m putting across. At the end of the day, there is a bright light somewhere at the entrance of the cave. It reflects and makes itself known but very scarcely. You could live your whole life in the cave not knowing this world outside exists. And even if you ‘break free’ from the initial cave, your entire life is an exercise in the lunge towards the light, whatever that light may be for you. While some people are definitely predisposed to curiousity as evidenced throughout our history, I think most of us are content with being part of the cast and feeling this sense of agency over our lives.
But those people are also just part of a system where, even if they hold more knowledge, they are unable to determine for themselves how else to go about their own freedom. So okay, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to build a connection but what’s with the title and why do I refer to it as ‘overconsumption’?
We are all part of a cave, there’s a cave we came from, maybe even multiple caves which converge and which we explore. But the constant is that we are caved in. And no matter how we play around it, we are forcibly limited by this caving in. The paths we tread are constrained by the availability of veins which remain connected to our original cave. This, to me, is our hypercapitalist, dystopian, and inhumane world. It will grant you enough agency only to join the cast but never to investigate and understand the light that proverbially exists beyond the cave.
Such a bummer, I know. I generally don’t hold on to a lot of hope. I know in some ways I’m both cast and audience in this situation. But I also know that my powerlessness to have agency over my own life is a feeling of unimaginability. Like, I have such a difficult time imagining a world beyond consumption because I am consumed by it. I have such a difficult time imagning a world where I am not dispassionate because all my passion has burned me through. I have such a difficult time imagning a world where I am human because all my humanity has been dispossessed; like the severing of a rope that binds me to you. Admittedly, acknowledging this may even lead to the hastening of this severing process.
We live in a bubble that exists somewhat independently from the world that our universe has laid out for us. Not that it was very clear in its guidance, we had to figure out most of ‘society’ as we know it ourselves. All nature ever really gives are nudges and subliminal signals, rarely does it speak directly to us. But the bubble that we are in, with its constraints and complexities, is so dislocated from nature that bringing yourself to the other side, the one that nature built, no longer makes any reasonable sense. In this bubble, we consume everything. Videos, information, ideas, gossip, food, land, time, life, death… droning on and on is a futile effort. Everything is a commodity, even chance is a commodity. And I don’t think we have control over it anymore. Maybe capitalism is a memetic virus that, once it infiltrates the mind, will consume every single aspect of our lives until we are all but meme replicant machines with no real method of escape, at least not without sacrificing everything in our bodies to achieve that process. Or on the other hand, maybe being raised in this bubble is so deeply incompatible with moving to other bubbles that it requires the destruction, a death of bodies, before it can assimilate new forms of itself.
Anyway, today I don’t think I feel very hopeful because in today’s world, fleeting joy is only ever found in ever fleeting consumption. Like my staiation only comes from consumption, that my worldview and my existence is only acknowledged through consumption, that everything that matters to me is a matter of consumption.
Who am I beyond what I consume? I am always unsure and a little skeptical about these existential questions because I know that the answers I have for them are mood-based. Anyway, I think I’ve said what I’ve felt and I know I’m playing loosely with the connections between the cave and my conclusion. Heck, I spent more time writing a shit story than discussing my actual conclusions.