Nourishment or Consumerism?

In the early nineties, I lived in India for several years and felt deeply blessed to experience its beautiful spirit. I was drawn by a longing for simplicity and for a way of life beyond the comfort and standards I had known in Germany. I lived mostly in simple village settings in Tamil Nadu. And Yes, even with the simplicity, life had its challenges…but I was deeply happy.

Most days I bought fresh milk from the milkman who rode his bicycle down the dirt roads, calling out “Pal, Pal” (Tamil word for milk). I stepped outside my small home with a steel container, he poured the milk from his large cans, I paid him. My only small concern was checking whether the milk had been watered down to stretch it a bit more…otherwise everything else felt easy and sweet.

Years later, I moved to California and on my first day, I walked into a grocery store to buy milk and froze. One entire wall offered endless choices…fat-free, low-fat, full-fat, half-and-half, pasteurized, ultra-pasteurized, homogenized, pasteurized and homogenized, fortified, with added calcium, added vitamin D, chocolate-flavored, strawberry-flavored, in countless sizes and packages. I had gone in for something simple and felt completely overwhelmed. I left without buying milk, already sensing how different this world was. Of course, I quickly adapted and learned what “normal milk” was and which one to choose, but I never forgot that moment.

Nowadays, I see the same “more is better” trend even with something as simple as water. Walking into a grocery store in California, the water aisle alone can feel overwhelming: spring water, alkaline, artesian, purified, distilled, hydrogen-infused, CBD-infused, Charcoal-activated, sparkling, flavored…the list goes on, it can make your head spin. And if I don’t watch it, I can easily spend thirty minutes in the water aisle, seduced by the promise that the right choice will somehow make me feel even better.

This pattern of excess shows up in almost every aspect of our lives.

Have you ever heard of ‘decision fatigue’? I remember when I first heard about it, it really touched me. In psychology, it describes the gradual depletion of mental, and eventually physical, energy, after making too many decisions. When we live in a state of “too much,” we become overwhelmed, it’s exhausting. Yet, overstimulated and inwardly disconnected, we reach for more, hoping it will nourish us… only to need more and more.

So why do we add more?

Because consumer culture trains us to believe that nourishment comes from outside, from the next option, the next purchase, the next promise.

Clever marketing, constant internet access, and everything being available at the push of a button exhaust our inner sensing capacity. We no longer listen inwardly for what we truly need, but move from the urge: What will quickly soothe, distract, or fill me? A poor substitute for real nourishment.

My Siddha teacher, Pal Pandian, often says, “The mind is like a beggar, it always wants what it does not have.” So it can never be satisfied, always reaching for more, mistaking consumption for fulfillment and nourishment. In this way, consumerism lives in the mind: it offers only a surface taste, never deep nourishment, and therefore creates the need for more and more.

The same pattern also shows up in the spiritual world as kind of spiritual consumerism. We collect many mantras and practices, attend different satsangs, listen to teachers on YouTube, or even ask AI for a new mantra each day…often to feel good or blissful for a moment. Nothing wrong with it, yet we might miss the deeper invitation, to stay with one practice long enough for its full nourishment and depth to unfold. That takes dedication and patience. It is a real journey, with many facets arising, and not necessarily an instant feeling of bliss or enlightenment. When nothing goes deep enough to truly nourish us, we again move outward, grasping spiritual practices. What is often missing is digestion and integration.

So how do we begin sensing again what we truly need, rather than consuming more? A first step is slowing down and sensing again…stepping out of the demanding mind and back into the body. Inviting more simplicity into our lives. Perhaps next time we feel overwhelmed and notice the impulse to scroll endlessly or buy something online, we gently interrupt the pattern: take a short walk, drink a glass of water or a warm tea, or put on some music and dance. Just enough to feel ourselves in the body again. Then we pause and notice… has something softened? Has the need to distract or numb shifted, even slightly? This can be a very good beginning.

When everything is instantly available, the habit is to move outward again and again.

For me, the question became clear: what truly nourishes us, and what merely keeps us consuming? I have found that the Siddha path with the Minimalist Movement practices I learned from Pal Pandian, invites the opposite movement. We begin by sensing the body again…where we are numb, blocked, tight, loose, or overactive. We allow an unwinding. From there, a sense of nourishment is felt again, and the journey naturally deepens, wider and deeper, more spacious, one step at a time, through listening.

This is not about limiting life, but about restoring intimacy and nourishment from within…so life can flow beautifully from this inner overflow.