Today our capacity to be creatures who love—who have long-standing and deep attachments that are irreducible to sheer animalistic appetites—is threatened, left to atrophy, by the consumerist mode of life we inhabit.
What does it mean to say that our mode of life challenges our capacity to love? It means that we are increasingly encouraged to think about desire and longing in ways detrimental to long-term commitments. Consider: I can get anything I want. But do I know what I actually “want” at all? Our world is awash in accessible consumer goods and pluriform forms of life, but this flood of consumables has seemed to go hand in hand with a growing sense of skepticism and even indifference to any good in particular. At the same moment when the good life, in multiple flavors, is being offered to us, we seem increasingly incapable of wanting any particular form of it for more than an instant. We live in an economic culture of immediacy and consumption, in which the idea of patience or waiting has no home to rest its head. Consumer culture “takes the waiting out of wanting,” encouraging us toward a kind of constant appetitive channel surfing, as one fickle appetite follows quickly upon another. This condition does not so much directly reshape us as indirectly mislead us: for it tells us, or sells us, a story about ourselves, and through that story seduces us into believing the illusory promise of immediate satisfaction. This promise is a powerful one; if we come to believe in it, we come to see ourselves as being the kinds of creatures who have only the sorts of short-term desires that consumer culture can satiate.
That last line is haunting. Already, we seem to be far down the road of desiring little beyond our short-term, animalistic appetites. I’m reminded of Lewis' famous line: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Of course, I still believe that those desires are deep within each person, but they are getting smothered. Such desires lack the time and quiet and patience to bubble up; they’re shouted down by lesser desires before they find the space to come to expression.