Trying to understand why people overspend and get themselves in trouble is like trying to understand why water needs to be in a container. You only realize the reasons why through experience. No textbook is going to fully explain the fact that modern culture is trained and ingrained in us to spend versus conserve every day and every hour.

We Forgot How to Survive

Much of the problem has to do with the fact that, unlike centuries before where every resource and every asset was conserved and used to the fullest extent, today we we waste everything. For example, when hunters took down prey, every part of the animal was used, from the bones to the skin to the body to the intestines. There was very little wasted. In fact, from an archaeological perspective, most of the trash that’s found on ancient sites today involves rock, clay, chipped elements, metal with later cultures but that’s it. And then there are bones. If buried in dry earth, bones tend to last for a very long time, and they are the only thing that typically is found, unless there are special tools buried with somebody. Just about everything else was used and used extensively until they broke to the point it couldn’t be used.

Now We Worship Waste

Today our consumerism is a communal behavior of massive waste. We buy things at grocery stores that we never eat. We order things online that end up in piles of discard halfway around the world. We pull down a tremendous amount of inventory, which close to half of it never gets used and instead goes to the trashcan and landfill waste. Granted, some small fragment of our consumption gets recycled, but for the most part, it’s literally consumed and wasted.

Why have we gotten to this point where it is so comfortable to spend and waste and give very little attention on what’s needed for resources? While aside from the fact that we’re not being chased by every scavenger and predator on the Earth anymore, and the fact that we live comfortably in environment that we control, the other factor is that we have more than we know what to do. Finally, we’re trained to spend and waste.

Can We Blame Our Parents? Not Quite

From childhood, we learn from our parents that one does something called "work," and that turns around and provides the ability to go buy things. From there, buying provides pleasure as well, as entertainment and fulfillment. So, from as an young age as a toddler, we learn what to do. We’re not stupid; we calculate we need the means to buy to get the things we want, but nowhere in that formula do we learn that by accumulating and saving we’re also able to take care of our survival and our well-being a hell of a lot more. It doesn’t help that modern business fully takes advantage of this modern culture phenomenon, pushes and emphasizes the buying even more. We even couch it as national policy to boost our economy, with spending because jobs in the country depend on it as a result. We become nations of debt-ridden wallets and bankruptcy left and right. So, how do we change it? Well that’s a good question.

Change Your Neighbor First

The fact of the matter is, no one‘s going to change an entire cultural by themselves. That takes decades, even a generation or two, to switch things around. What people do need to do is focus on their own individual situation and, as an old song goes, you can’t change the world but you can change it one person at a time. That starts with us.

Some folks have the unlucky circumstance of being in a disaster and losing everything to then realize what it means to be without. These few individuals learn quickly how to make do until help arrives if they want to survive, but even then the mindset is temporary. Once safe, then it's easy to go back to the way things were, especially with the safety net provided by insurance. 

It's Possible to Evolve

We do not need to be trapped in a concept and a culture and mindset of spending for our entire lives, but we do need to understand where it comes from. Spending is far more pervasive than simply blaming someone in our past or a credit card company. It’s our entire way of being in modern society, and that’s very hard to go against both mentally and psychologically. It’s only when a group realize that we need to utilize resources far more than we do that anti-consumerism becomes a logical next step. It's then that we realize how to change our culture as a whole.