I can’t consume and emit at the same time.

As I stood eating a biscuit, looking around at the mess of my packing for an urgent, unplanned, week-long getaway starting in the early hours of tomorrow morning, this occurred to me. I ate one biscuit, then another, still my head was empty. No thoughts came, only calories.

There are different kinds of consumption: eating things, buying things, watching things, destroying things. Consumption doesn’t just consume the object of our desire, it consumes us too. Consumption is an antidote to thinking. This rings true with those periods when I do my richest thinking, they always coincide with eating little or nothing at all. I say coincide with my tongue in my cheek, because it is causation not coincidence at play I think.

Consumption feeds creativity, I could do nothing without consuming food and other people’s ideas, but consumption also has a tremendous power to placate.

Conspicuous Consumption, Symbolic Consumption, Addictive Consumption, Compulsive Consumption and Sacred Consumption are five main categories defining distinctive consumption styles. Basic characteristics of consumer culture can be summarized in the transforming of needs to desires, utilitarian/hedonic needs-values, commodity fetishism, conspicuous leisure and consumption, cultural values, aestheticization, alienation, differentiation and speed. A consumer society is one in which the entire society is organized around the consumption and display of commodities through which individuals gain prestige, identity, and standing.
– Kutucuoglu, Arikan Saltik, Firat & Tuncel, 2013