George's Consumption Journal

I examined the amounts of time linked to my usage of everyday objects.

As we can see from the graph below:
Much of the time is devoted to comfort-related things. These included my bed, my chair, and lamps. It was hard to define someting such as a lamp as comfort-related versus being a necessity. While certainly not necessary for my survival, in order to do work at night to succeed in school and in life lamps are necessary.

This kind of brought up the notion of what is 'necessary' and what society requires as necessities. From a societal perspective, lamps would be an absolute necessity in order for people to work and go to school the way we do.



Another way I examined the data I collected was to classify the objects as being absolutely crucial to my survival and also the ones that were disposable. An interesting observation I made is that most of the disposable objects I used (plastic/paper bags) were in connection to whenever I bought food or did groceries. This was very interesting to me. The one thing, food, that was completely crucial to my survival (aside from clothes to keep me warm) was also the thing that created the most waste, due to the amount of bags involved.

This has made me think twice whenever I get food now. Vendors reach for the bags almost automatically now. If I really don't need a bag, I'll tell the vendor so.