In one of my initial posts (Personal mastery and the journey within), I had introduced the concept of personal mastery. In this piece, I would like to highlight the relevance of this concept to dealing with potential challenges and mismatches of world consumption levels.

Research on global differences of consumption levels done by Professor Jared Diamond of UCLA highlights that on average a person in the developed world consumes 32 times more than his counterpart in the developing world. The developed world represented by the US, Western Europe, Japan and Australia accounts for about 1 billion people, the rest of the world’s population being 5.5 billion. As developing countries, led by China and India, aspire to match the consumption levels and lifestyle of the developed nations, the world is likely to face a major resource crunch – for food, oil, metals and so forth. Now, just China’s catching up with the developed world would roughly double the global consumption rates; India and China together catching up would triple the same rates. If the whole developing world were to catch up with the developed world one day, Professor Diamond argues, it would be equivalent of feeding a world population of 72 billion people – something our world is not known to be equipped to provide for (at least not at the current time).

What can we do to meet this future challenge? As I had mentioned in my post on personal mastery and communities, the real challenge with some of the global issues like poverty is not that the world does not have enough to feed the poor, it’s the inability of the human race to share and distribute the existing wealth to raise the overall standards of living across the planet. Will we continue to have the chase of higher consumption levels and eventually run out of resources; in consequence, creating high inflation and a new band of poor population – in this case spread across developing and developed nations? Or, will we have the ability to find better and more sustainable ways to distribute wealth across societies? Will the latter option mean people in the US have to give up their current consumption levels? Probably not. Firstly, as Prof. Diamond highlights standard of living is not necessarily directly correlated to the level of consumption? Despite higher per capita consumption in the US, the standard of living in many parts of Western Europe are higher in terms of life expectancy, health, financial security, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Maybe there’s a straight case for reducing wasteful consumption. Secondly, there’s the whole debate of living with what we need versus what we want. Do the top echelons of the American (or Chinese or Indian) society need all the luxuries they buy or aspire to acquire – a US$15,000 watch or a US$20million yacht and so on. And, that’s where the concept of personal mastery comes in.

To me, personal mastery is the journey of self-discovery leading to consistently living the purpose of one’s life. It requires a high emphasis on self-knowledge, clarity of one’s personal vision and its interconnectedness with the people and the world around.

As more people advance on this journey, it is easy to see the ability towards living with what we need rather than pursuing a never ending chase to acquire newer luxuries in the hope of finding that elusive happiness, joy and meaning in our lives. The inner peace arrives from knowing that we will be supported by the universe to meet our needs and that we don’t need to constantly hold on to what we don’t need. Also, as the above definition of personal mastery suggests, as more people pursue this goal, the sense of interconnectedness will grow tremendously; and empathy and compassion for others will support our ability to share and give. That’s why I do believe that as more people, leaders, and societies become motivated to undertake this inner journey, everything in the world will appear well balanced and the human race will have an unprecedented chance to minimize the mismatches that plague our society today.

Related Search Terms:
Per capita consumption, sustainable consumption, captive consumption