Rule #2: The material world is zero-sum.
I'm not sure if these are lessons or observations... maybe they're interchangeable for the purpose of this series, but I just wanted to throw that out there. Anyways, hope you find this illuminating!
When I win money playing poker, someone else is, by necessity, losing money. There's no two ways around it: my gain is made possible by someone else's loss.
There's no anecdote for this - literally every time I win a hand at poker, someone else loses. This applies to most, if not all, forms of competition. Basketball, football, golf, spelling bees, and so on and so forth. If it produces a winner, then it also produces a loser (oftentimes, many losers).
Similarly, when we consume (in terms of using, not strictly eating/drinking), it comes at the expense of others. When I say consume, I am referring to anything and everything - from the things we eat, to the things we wear, and even to the technology we use. To be provided for, someone else must be doing the providing (unless you are doing everything yourself. That means producing your own food, clothes, whatever device you're reading this on, and so on and so forth).
How are we being provided for? Sure, it might be lovely that a dollar menu exists at every fast-food chain, that we can grab new clothing for as little as 10-20 bucks, and that every 2 years, we can upgrade our phones to something exponentially more advanced than whatever it is we had before (especially considering my old-ass phone...). But at what cost?
There are a myriad of consequences. Consider the poor conditions of animals who are farmed to feed our appetite for meat (and if you aren't aware, there a gazillion and one documentaries/youtube videos to illustrate the point). Or the underpaid, overworked, and/or otherwise disadvantaged workers who craft our shoes, shirts, and uniforms. Or even the workers who contribute some bits of your smartphone - some, most, or all of them work in conditions that are absolutely deplorable. Although it's easy to ignore these things because they don't get sustained time in the media, that doesn't mean they don't exist. And unfortunately, it doesn't mean you're free of blame either.
One common response to any problem is that people just "don't know what to do" (it's a feeling I'm not unfamiliar with). In many cases, such a response can hold water. In this situation, though, I'm not really sure that it does. Problems often have more than one solution. But if you can't come up with any alternative, sometimes you just have to go with what you know. So if we consume too much, what's the most obvious solution? To consume less. Barring some miracle, that probably won't solve the problem itself. But it's one step, and it is certainly more worthwhile to do something different in the hopes of making things better instead of wringing your hands and feeling bad about things. So, y'know, if you consider your needs - the need to wear something new, the need to eat meat with every meal, or the need to have cool tech - if you consider those needs so important that they warrant the continued existence of a slave class, that's okay. But after reading this, you definitely can't plead ignorance.
(And honestly I would hope that that's not okay with you, but hey ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I realize that we all have different priorities.)
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