Fasting in a Culture of Consumption

Part 2 of the Lenten Series: The Season We’d Rather Skip

Americans are the most consumed people in the history of the world. And I don’t mean that in some finger-wagging, shame-based kind of way. I mean it as an observation that should stop us in our tracks if we thought about it for more than three seconds. We are swimming in stuff. Our closets are full. Our pantries are full. Our streaming queues are full. Our inboxes are full. Our calendars are full. Our feeds are an infinite scroll of content we didn’t ask for and can’t stop consuming. We have more access to more everything than any group of humans who have ever lived on this planet and somehow the anxiety and depression numbers keep climbing.

There’s a reason for that. Consumption promises satisfaction and then immediately creates more hunger. That’s the engine. That’s how it works. You buy the thing, watch the thing, eat the thing, scroll the thing, and for about fifteen minutes you feel something. Then the emptiness comes back louder than before. So you reach for the next thing. And t…