Excessive consumption of the rich and famous
People within the sports and entertainment industries in America, and around the world, are adored and idolized while simultaneously being some of the main beneficiaries of the capitalist system that created and continues to fuel the climate and ecological crises.
These industries have a lot of money, and individually, many big-name athletes and entertainers own mansions, several cars, private jets, and advertise for corporations that aren't environmentally friendly. It's well known by researchers that income is closely tied with excessive carbon emissions.
The danger, outside of their own excessive consumption and high carbon footprint, is that their lifestyles are often followed and mirrored as what being a successful American/person means. They create unrealistic and unattainable standards that leave many feeling like we need to chase a higher level of external perfection, whether it's our looks, what we own, what we wear, or what type of car we drive. This drives a collective mindset of consumption and the need to reach these material goals in order to hold value and receive social acceptance based on the criteria set by dominant culture.
Most people in the global north overconsume because it’s what our current society expects and promotes. It’s something I’m still working on in my own life.
As a society, we need to decouple the belief that extraneous ownership of things, and high carbon footprint living, equates with happiness and success. Or, especially for females, that we need to chase the more superficial pursuits of buying more clothing or changing our bodies in order to receive social validation, while our inner pursuit for art, education, and other "free soul-foods'' are put on the back burner.
We need to collectively change what we value and how we measure success if we want to succeed at mitigating the ecological crises. Research has shown that we cannot sustain the same level of consumption even if we switch the grid entirely to renewables and solve climate change. The destruction of plants, animals, and ecosystems we rely on for survival, to extract resources to produce an endless stream of products for our capitalist system, is a bigger driver of the sixth mass extinction than rising temps.
Entertainers and athletes offer an important service, but it’s necessary that as a society we reconsider what lifestyles we idolize and what industries we support. A few people in my family even stopped attending big sporting events because the salary and lifestyles of professional athletes reached an “immoral level.”
The doughnut economic theory, in practice, would meet each individual's basic needs and create social equity and justice, while staying within planetary boundaries, in order to avert climate, ecological, and ultimately social collapse. This is the type of modest simplistic lifestyle we need to begin to idolize instead of what industry sells: the endless pursuit of newer, bigger, “better,” “trendier,” and more stuff.
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