Book Review, Summary, Highlights - Empire of Things: How We Became A World of Consumers

May 31, 2018 Catherine Agopcan

Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann: review, summary, highlights

"Men are forced to labour now because they are a slave to their own wants."

It took me some time to finish this book, but after several renewals from the library, I finally finished Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers by Frank Trentmann. It's a fascinating read! It reads a little bit like a history textbook. It runs through a range of histories of multiple countries to see show how goods traveled from one place to another. It should be noted that consumption isn't a new idea, but it has rapidly grown thanks to the Industrial Age and post Second World War.

Can We Grow Our Economy and Sustain Our Planet?

February 22, 2018 Catherine Agopcan

In our current system, the worker's life belong not only to the commodity he or she makes, but also increasingly to the garbage graveyard. When manufactured goods are trashed, so too is the labor that went into making them. What other productive, scientific, creative pursuits could we have invested in the time we were making cheap things? Garbage is not just nature, but human labor thrown away in the interest of the circulation of commodities and the extraction of profit.

I just finished reading Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage and I can't help thinking about the above quote. It makes me sad. I'm also struggling to reconcile my Economics and Sustainability brain. As someone who studied Economics in undergrad, economic growth was paramount, but the only way to have economic growth was to produce more. On the other hand, my Sustainability brain is screaming, we can't keep producing more. We don't have enough resources and we are not even recycling resources properly.

The Rise of Conscious Capitalism - Ecology and Economy

November 9, 2017 Catherine Agopcan

I've been struggling with the tenets of minimalism, zero waste and conscious capitalism for some time now. Not the practicalities of it, though I have my moments, but the idealism of it. We don't live in a perfect world. We don't live in a circular economy. The term "conscious capitalism" feels like an oxymoron. We live in a very capitalistic society that uses the GDP as the factor for measuring our economic growth. GDP means the creation and consumption of things. How can we be conscious about that and is that something that we can change?

Book Review - Making the Case for Solitude

October 6, 2017 Catherine Agopcan

I've been doing a lot of mulling regarding over our ever connected world. A few months ago, when I reset my phone, I purposely did not install Facebook because I felt I was constantly checking it. Not in a productive way, but in a way that was there to pass the time. I installed Instagram though and found myself using that more often anyways. The constant pull of the latest updates, the stories, the need to post was getting to me.

I recently picked up Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World and can definitely relate to the author and I agree with many of his points. Partly for me, I've been struggling to find this balance of Minimalism and Mindfulness.

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