Black Friday Creates Chaos

One morning, as I prepared to leave for the university, my three-year-old daughter came bounding up to me with a glossy toy catalog in hand. With unguarded certainty, she asked, “Papi, I want everything in this catalog for Christmas. Do you think Santa will bring me all these toys?”

I smiled, trying to meet her wonder with gentleness. “Maybe it’s better to ask Santa for just one toy,” I said, “because there are children who have very few.”

She paused, thought for a moment, and replied with disarming logic: “Okay, then I’ll ask for two.”

What I heard was not greed but the early rehearsal of a cultural instinct.The belief that more is always better. What begins as innocence becomes habit, and habit soon hardens into expectation. Even at three, her eyes were already absorbing a message the world whispers to us all: that abundance equals joy, and joy can be bought.

I want to begin with a confession: I am a consumer. You are too. We all are.

The word feels like a stain—something to hide beneath more virtuous titles: educator, parent, citizen, friend. Yet, almost without noticing, we participate daily in the choreography of consumption—ordering coffee, streaming a film, scrolling a feed. Even our moral gestures belong to this dance. We buy fair trade to feel responsible, vintage to feel authentic, minimalist to feel pure. We tell ourselves these are ethical choices, but they are also aesthetic ones. We curate not only our homes but our consciences.

I often think about Captain Fantastic—that film about a father raising his children off the grid, away from the corruptions of consumer culture. Yet even there, in the wilderness, their identity depends upon the world they reject. None of us can escape the grammar of consumption. Even our refusals are written in its syntax.

To live, after all, is to consume—food, stories, objects, identities. The question is not whether we consume, but what our consuming reveals about who we are becoming. What does it mean to eat, to read, to buy, to scroll—to participate in an economy that shapes our desires before we even name them?

Look around your room. Each object tells a story—the coffee mug inscribed with optimism, the sneakers promising vitality, the phone through which you read these words. We dwell among artifacts that mirror our longings. They do not simply fill our space; they narrate our hopes.

Aristotle reminded us that human flourishing requires moderation, yet our economy is built on insatiability. Satisfaction is deferred so that longing itself becomes the product. Desire sustains the system more effectively than fulfillment ever could. Nike whispers, “You can’t win. So win.” Apple’s Think Different ad invites us into a communion of the “rebellious”—a brand of belonging disguised as freedom. Both sell the same dream: that through consumption, we might become more ourselves.

But when everyone “thinks different” in precisely the same way, difference becomes conformity. Starbucks markets belonging, yet what we sip is a carefully branded individuality. Ben & Jerry’s sells compassion in a pint, as if conscience could be churned into dessert. Our brands do not merely reflect our choices—they shape our understanding of goodness, identity, and worth.

To confess that I am a consumer is to acknowledge dependence. Every object around me—the shirt I wear, the coffee I drink, the device I hold—bears the fingerprints of others: the worker in Dhaka, the coder in Bangalore, the farmer in Colombia. We are bound together in an invisible communion of labor and need. The market can quantify cost, but not meaning. And so awareness becomes its own moral act—to ask, Who made this? Who profits? Who suffers unseen? What story am I endorsing when I click “Buy”?

Awareness alone does not sanctify our choices. I still order from Amazon. I still upgrade my phone. I still drink coffee harvested by hands I will never shake. But awareness reshapes posture—it turns denial into humility, shame into responsibility. It invites us to see differently.

A Christmas Carol taught us this long before social media turned generosity into performance. Scrooge awakens not by renouncing wealth, but by learning to see the person behind the ledger line. Ethics begins not with guilt, but with recognition—with the courage to look again and act differently because we have seen.

Perhaps this is the first step toward a more honest ethic of consumption—not to stand apart, but to participate consciously, to choose in ways that honor the interdependence that already defines us.

Maybe it begins with three quiet movements.

First, a shift from denial to awareness—to recognize how our desires are shaped. Denial shields us from discomfort; awareness reclaims agency. It teaches us to ask, with gentleness: Why do I want this? Who benefits from my wanting?

Second, a shift from shame to responsibility. Shame paralyzes; responsibility liberates. Shame demands purity; responsibility invites participation. Repairing, reusing, refusing—these small acts of care are gestures of moral imagination, reminders that we can live otherwise.

And third, a shift from individualism to community. Consumer culture isolates us by convincing us that meaning is privately purchased. But meaning, like joy, grows in relation. Acts that strengthen relationship—gratitude shared, objects repaired, meals prepared—become quiet forms of resistance to the loneliness markets mistake for freedom.

These are not grand gestures. They are practices of remembering: that we belong to one another, that desire can be retrained, that even in a system that automates wanting, we may still choose to want well.

To humanize consumption is not to romanticize materialism. It is to recover wonder within it—to remember that consumption, in its truest form, is relational. We consume food, art, conversation, and ideas. We are sustained by what others produce. The goal is not purity, but presence—not ownership, but connection.

What if consumption could become communion? What if, in place of endless appetite, we cultivated gratitude? What if we measured value not by possession, but by relationship? There is no outside to consumerism, but there can be depth within it. Every act of purchase can become, if we let it, a moment of acknowledgment—a pause to see how the lives of others sustain our own.

Because in the end, every object tells a story, and every story reveals who we are becoming.

I am a consumer. So are you. The real question—the moral one—is this:

Who do we become in the act of consuming?