Consumerism turns what’s important into a everyday commodity

Oxygen doesn’t seem all that valuable until you can no longer breathe.

And clean water doesn’t seem that important until you can’t find a source.

We take things for granted–all the time.

We think if something is ubiquitous it must not be that important, until it’s scarce again.

(Or worse, we forget that not everyone is born with the same access to essential resources.)

Marketers have done an incredible job to blur these lines, to create urgency.

The industrial world has made stuff cheap. We no longer live in a world of scarce everyday commodities.

What’s scarce in our post-industrial world is leading, leaping, initiating, solving interesting problem, standing up, standing out…

What we need is more people with more guts to make things happen.