The Death of the Weekend and the Rise of Consumerism
It doesn't seem that long ago (though it actually is) when, in my teens, Sunday's were the dullest day on Earth .. all that teenage angst and adrenaline surging through me and what was there to do ? Nothing ... zilch!
Well i was brought up in a small village in Lincolnshire in the UK, and apart from the odd kick about at football in the park, it was basically a case of lazing around until Monday came, along with school which I disliked intensly!
But even later in life when I used to spend weekends with a friend in Nottingham; after a night out, the next morning I would head into the City Centre and it was like a deserted Western .. just a few old beer cans rattling down the streets and not a soul in site bar the odd old fashipned Wino.
How things have changed now. A trip into town on a Sunday feels like a trip back to the time before Christmas and it makes me wonder what has happened to our psyche that the best thing we can find to do at a weekend is to shop!!
Of course, for some people this is practical and fits in with their working hours, but for many it is a choice and one I find increasingly strange. I'm not a subscriber that the Sabbath is meant for rest and all hell will break lose on those that disobey, but nor am I a subscriber to the most dominant religion in the West ... Consumerism!!
Surely we can find better things to do with our time off .. take a walk, see friends, cook,do something creative like paint (or of course write!) but no, it's off to town for a bit of retail therapy adding to the ever increasing burden of debt that we seem to so love.
And of course, the politicians and economists love playing with our mind on this one. On the one hand they tell us that we are in debt and shouldn't spend beyond our means, that is just bad money management, yet on the other they tell us that the economy needs to grow and it's all doom and gloom when sales fall.
So maybe we are now trapped in a spiral that is getting out of control and it may be too late to get out of it unless we look again at our attitude towards consumerism and the short term happiness it brings alonside the long term environmental problems and let's just enjoy our lives again in a more fulfilling way, rather than paying and expecting others to fulfil it for us.