Consider the Environment

There’s also an ecological dimension to all of this. Without being able to buy certain consumer goods, I, at the very least, have been learning how to do without certain items and not missing them at all. Where I am, for instance, it’s been about impossible to get the latest phones for well over a year.

My current cellphone is over five years old in terms of its release date, and it works just fine. As of now, I’ve skipped two upgrades that I would have otherwise have gotten, and saved myself about a thousand dollars in the process. There are also two fewer phones in dumps around the world.

If we multiply that kind of thinking over the whole American population, I think we can all learn to become a lot more resilient over time. We’ll also likely become a lot more conscious of how much, and why, we buy certain things.