This article originally appeared on the blog of Heretic, the magazine of We Are Libertarians.
View our regular COVID-19 series here.
For the first time in my life as a market consumer, I cannot run to Walmart and get any grocery item I want. For the first time, I cannot turn a random impulse entering my brain into an Amazon package on my porch two days later. For the first time, I’m being forced to put my consumerism and materialism in check.
Thank goodness.
Over the next few weeks (possibly months), almost all of us will have to learn to go without luxuries and decadent services we have grown accustomed too. It will be frustrating and annoying, I’m sure. But personally, I am looking forward to being less of a mindless consumer, habitually and indiscriminately buying stuff and being more of a man who enjoys and appreciates what I have.
The dampening of consumerism brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic will be temporary, but hopefully the decrease of materialism won’t be.
(My intention is not to take away from the harm that the coronavirus is wrought on earth. If what I’ve said here as came across that way, please forgive me. All I have meant to do is to look for a silver lining to all of this.)
