consumption and production

Consumption and production are two modes of being. Human experience is either consumptionistic or productionistic (I use the term “productionistic” to avoid muddying interpretation with existing connotations one may attach to the adjective “productive”). Let’s compare them:

• In consumption, you place the object in front of you, to consume it. In production, you place the object behind you, to drive you, even as you also project before you an objective, a vision of something to be brought into existence. Therefore consumption is at best non-destructive, while production is at best creative, if not ex nihiloI should not presume that anyone but God can create something out of nothing, but perhaps the highest form of creativity involves coming up with something asymptotically new.
• Because production involves doing something that changes your surroundings, it is a high-agency activity. Consumption not so much.

In the Christian worldview:

• Love is a productionistic attitude. Self-centeredness, greed, and lust are all consumptionistic attitudes.
• Work, as a pre-fall institution, is productionistic. Entertainment, in its most popular forms, is consumptionistic. So, as the internet is packages most information as entertainment, it tends to be the case that most people’s time on the internet molds their minds toward consumption.
• Study, or reading a book, or listening to a podcast, is consumptionistic by default, unless it is transformed through note-taking, written reflections, and other products of understanding into something productionistic.

I find that it takes a lot of deliberate effort to switch your mental mode from consumption toward production, but it takes no effort at all to switch back to consumption. Yet it is clear by most of the examples above that the productionistic mode is the more virtuousI’m using this word in a roughly Aristotelian sense: it seems to me that, at least in modern Western culture, leaning a bit more productionistic may help correct the excesses of consumptionism and guide one back toward the Golden Mean. and desirable one for bringing about long-term good to one’s life and the lives of one’s neighbors.

Hence, if you want to work well or love well, do not start the day with consumption. And if you do find yourself in this mode—as we are wont to if, for example, we need to use the internet for work—do not spend too long in consumption, lest you mire in an antiproductionisitc inertia that grows ever harder to overcome.

This piece of advice also overlaps with an insight from my entry on the danger of aboutness: to avoid engaging in too much aboutness, you can convert an aboutness activity into isness by declaring it to be a thing to be done in itself. Notice that doing this also helps you convert a consumptionistic activity into a productionistic one by turning a usually passive activity into a proactive one. What remains missing in this heuristic, however, and which would then be good to add, is to “productionize” that activity by adding a commitment to create some deliverable on the thing that you are consumingYes, I know, this ends up adding in yet another layer of aboutness, but that layer is immediately converted into isness by being embedded in a goal—a thing to be done in itself.. So if you wish to live more in isness and production even while consuming otherwise useful information, consider converting that activity into a task with a predefined deliverable.

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