I just want to consume. I want to consume multiple things at once in all senses. I want to chew, watch, hear, touch, talk, simultaneously, so it creates a cocktail of dopamine in my brain that is so continuous I never have to feel. Feel sad, feel lonely, feel bored, feel…alive. It goes both ways.

And I think that’s the line we humans have always walked this line—we want to learn and create and keep improving because that makes us feel alive. We must keep growing. Inside and outside. We must change because the grass is always greener somewhere else and we are still nomads within our souls and upon this earth. We are restless because this is not our true home.

But we are also broken here. Our bodies will fail us and turn to dust; our sin will eat us away. And we just want more, you can call it greed or pride or purpose. I think I was born right on the point of the exponential graph of humanity’s consumption where it starts to go up, forever, too quickly that we can’t control it anymore. Let me give you a diagram:

It’s a pivotal moment in time between the industrial revolution, the lightbulb, the automobile, the internet, and now my generation seems to be regressing, not creating more, but consuming more quantity, in shorter bursts. Unable to focus or think. 

I can’t just do one thing, at once. It makes me feel broken. Yet I feel pressure to do everything, right now.

And on these same apps that we fill our days with, it all just inspires us to consume more. I feel like the things I need to spend money on are endless, the videos I need to watch, the places I need to see, the side hustles I need to work on. Even reading books can feel like a means to an end, to check it off my reading list and write the review and be done. We never feel productive enough, we never feel enough at all. There’s always another video or image to scroll to, and another person to compare myself too.

All of this made me ask the question, what am I consuming all of this for? What do I need?

There is great spiritual mastery in needing nothing. We fast and pray and give up all Earthly possessions. This makes us feel close to the holy and the divine. And I like to do that. But sometimes the little things make me feel close to the divine too, in this world that is so hellbent on overconsuming our way into the future.

Underconsumption guidelines of 2025:

• Enjoy the taste of hot coffee made at home or cooled in the fridge, with sugar and milk.
• Paint your own nails with the nail polish at home, and do your very best not to bite them.
• Don’t cut your hair.
• Take the broken crayons and rub them on the empty coloring books.
• Put back that shirt, you don’t even love it in the store.
• You can pack a lunch from home. And you don’t need to eat everything before it expires, either.
• Use your quarters for diet coke.
• Figure out how to thread a needle and fix it.
• Read books from the library and your parents’ old paperbacks in between.
• Ride a bike.
• Drink what you have, and just enough to feel good.
• Put your feet in the grass.
• Romanticize the mundane.
• Sit on a park bench and look at the sky.

If you do these things as a 22 year old girl in America, you have more discipline and enlightenment than a medieval monk.

How lost will the art of sitting still be on my generation? Do I always need to put my airpods on noise cancelling mode? Why do I feel anxiety bubble up in me when I sit outside and breathe on a nice day?

All of this must directly correlate to the days of my life going by so fast lately. Time will move as fast as you want to feel it.

So I will try now, against the curve of the graph, to create, and go back to something primal in me. I have been thinking lately, and I always have, about my barbies. Their names and their stories and their little outfits I made. I am astonished at my creativity, at the way stories came out of me so naturally I could barely contain them, and I would rush home to experience them. I was a writer then, and I want to be one again. I want to feel it call out to me and pour out of me. And I think I will get there, I still hear creation calling out within me. God is calling it out of me. Though the light is dark, and I will judge it so immensely it may get snuffed out before it can even breathe, I promise to keep trying, harder now than I ever did before. To keep learning and growing. To gain momentum in it. That’s the goal. No, I mean, that’s the journey. And I want to take it slow.

Best, Karissa