Illusion Of Abundance

The abundant availability of natural resources in South Africa has sustained an illusion of economic convenience that has made many citizens and their households overlook the cost of manufacturing energy in any form for the consumption of an ever growing population.  

The illusion of ubiquity of these resource regimes also exacerbates the disregard for  
the environmental cost of extraction and manufacture of commodities consumed on  
a daily basis; and the waning predictable pleasure of abundance recedes to fear  
when these resources become scarce. 

With consumer and media culture geared to deluding the young of affluence and   aspirations of grandeur, we are now faced with an entitled populace; lacking in conceptual innovations that can leverage their livelihoods and enrich their bloodlines for posterity.  

Each one is seeking momentary satisfaction at the expense of future joys, bypassing the present as invaluable, but the indigenes have to cultivate a subliminal resistance to those virulent distractions, feeding our common disregard of poverty, our collective needs, as well as love for ourselves and others. 

But when we contemplate the inevitable demise of all ecosystems due to our insatiable lust for forcing the earth to yield to our muster, we are left with a solemn picture of a derelict place inherited by generations who never revered splendour. 

In a country where descendants of missionaries and settlers have overthrown  
indigenous people’s sense of determination, now emerges a spiralling nationalist fervour that assimilates even their most sacred identities as symptoms of difference  
from their African brothers and sisters.  

When contemporary political discourse has veered us far from ancestrally ordained   futures, to the detriment of life systems of the planet, what ways are there for us to  
rediscover life? 

Can an economy of minimal things align our desires to be cognisant of the impact of our consumption on the planet when the illusion of abundance is feeling ubiquitous exhibitionism? 

And as our fear of “missing out” and conspicuous consumption has altered the  
architecture of our cognition, as a species, we have to develop a vast ecology of intimacies with other species on the planet. We need to encounter our eternal entanglement with all that is around us in order to venerate and evolve an empathy that is beyond curiosity. 

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