People and their possessions puzzle me.

As long as they have the flash car, phone, television, kitchen and so on and so on, all is well in their world.

It’s a competition; who can spend the most, who can fill their lives with endless empty vessels.

Yet, look a little closer and everything isn’t quite as rosy as it appears to be. All they have, isn’t even theirs. It’s all paid for by the never never. The credit card, loan and finance option, the Neverland for all goods bought and sold.

People demand the ‘necessities’, which used to be called luxuries. Consumerism is now the prerequisite to the picture perfect life. They believe the latest products make life worth living. People eagerly buy into the product and the myth ‘you need this, and this will make your life great’.

For me it is all show and no substance. Can happiness be found in buying the latest gadget or redecorating for the eight time in a year? I doubt it.

How can any object be worth more than what is going on in life, in relationships in the world?

Why spend money you don’t have on things you really don’t need? How many washing machines can a person really use in one house?!

Now I appreciate the finer things in life, but not if it means I am lumbered with debts I struggle to pay every month, just so my neighbours are green with envy.

Maybe then, if we all stopped buying, and considered for a moment why we are buying, perhaps we might decide we don’t need to take another trip to the checkout. We might discover we can actually be happy, and, happy with what we already have!

One pause for thought might convince us that saving our money doesn’t mean our lives will come to an end.

If we thought before we bought maybe we’d see how buying a 3D TV won’t make us better people or somehow more interesting. We might also consider the conundrum of a society that throws away so much just because it’s deemed unfashionable or technologically redundant, and therefore consuming just for the sake of it makes no logical sense. We might realise that the never never is economically foolish, and a sure way to make us more depressed than not having a new car or latest iPhone.

Ummmmm, money in the bank or credit on a small plastic card. I know which I’d prefer, and it’s not the latter. Give me cold hard cash any day; it’s not out of sight out of mind like a charge on a credit card. With cash you can see your money, understand the real value of it and know that once you’ve spent it, it won’t grow back on trees!

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies to live their lives. The theory behind it is limiting their participation in the conventional economy, and indulging in minimal consumption of resources. Freegans see themselves as embracing community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing. They are opposed to materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.

For many years Freegans looked to avoid products from unethical corporations who they seemed to be responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, and animal abuse. Yet Freegans soon discovered that whatever they bought they ended up supporting something they classed as deplorable; realising that the problem wasn’t just a few bad corporations, but the entire system itself.

Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system.

They believe that profit driven motives have eclipsed ethical considerations. The complex systems of production guarantee that all the products we generally purchase, and don’t think much about, have detrimental impacts. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company, Freegans believed they were only lending their unconscious support to another.

Freegans now buy as little as possible!!!

The word Freegan has it’s origins in ‘free’ and ‘vegan’. For those of you who don’t know; vegans are people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on animals.

Freegans however take this a step further. They have come to recognise that avoiding abuses in our mass-production economy is impossible. Profit driven industries abuse humans, animals, and the earth; this is the by-product of production.

Freeganism aims to avoid supporting; sweatshop labour, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of indigenous communities, air and water pollution and eradication of wildlife on farmland as ‘pests’. They are against; overthrowing popularly elected governments to maintain puppet dictators, compliance to big business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and pay-offs to repressive regimes. These too are stated by Freegans as impacting on the consumer products we consume every day.

****The above adapted from information at: http://freegan.info/

**** Above image from same website