Why we are all doomed

I'm admittedly as shallow as the next person when it comes to wanting new stuff. For some reason, we feel better when we buy or receive consumer goods. A new doodad can often lift our spirits and convince us that all is right with the world.

Alas, with the passage of time, that lovely sense of warmth is replaced by a sense of obsolescence, of emptiness. Somehow, filling the cart doesn't fulfill the soul as much as we thought it would when we first walked into the store. It gets pretty old pretty quickly.

In my blatantly biased opinion, this product, Chia Shrek, spied at a Florida pharmacy, typifies the rampant consumerist ethic that's threatening to destroy any depth of being that remains in modern society. It is obscenely cheap, unbelievably useless, and most likely to end up forgotten and forlorn mere days after it crosses the threshold into your home.

The world seems to be populated by countless factories pumping out massive amounts of pure garbage that we neither need nor truly want (think, would you actually set out from the house with your heart set on buying one of these?)

At some point, the buying-for-the-sake-of-buying has got to stop.