We pay for things we wear, eat, live on, can or cannot touch but still buy because we need to survive and thereafter please ourselves. I want to talk about the prices of these things, prices that are never going down because we just don’t want them to.
We love struggling to buy things we need for a mere survival, and then we struggle more to buy things that we consider to be luxuries. You think I’m blaming only the readers and not myself as well? I beg to differ.
We have all become part of this never-ending process of life, where we are born to study, study to earn, earn to get married and then multiply. The estimated population of Earth exceeds seven billion (2012) as I sore-heartedly write about its consequences on our lives.
Of course the rich ones are buying land in places where we can’t go, and someday in the near future there won’t even be that. Why? Overpopulation.
The uncontrollable rise in the overall population of mother Earth is affecting our lives on a daily basis by making natural and artificial resources more and more scarce, ergo more expensive to avail.
We sometimes let out that sigh of disappointment and tell our friends and family how much simpler the world was when we could buy everything we wanted because their prices were within our reach, and then we could save, not just for rainy days, but the sunny and snowy ones too.
Many of us can’t do that anymore because we have that urge to contribute more to our population than to our future. Don’t get me wrong here, I love babies. But imagine the world where we can’t feed our babies anymore and have to watch them die of malnutrition because we just couldn’t afford their milk.
Of course the closest reference here is that of Somalia, where kids die on a daily basis, and theories like that of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (with all due respect) just don’t work because sadly, and shamefully enough, people would rather waste than give away.
And just how many children can big-hearted people like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopt to feed and give a proper life to? Not too many.
Before I go on a tangent, let’s talk about the soaring prices of necessities in Bangladesh alone. There was a time when, as my father used to tell me, a chicken could be bought for 10 paisa (equivalent to approximately a dime or 10 cents today), and for someone like my grandfather, a father of 10 children, feeding a family was a piece of cake.
Wait, did I just say piece of cake? Well, even that is quite a luxury today. What we could have for lunch just within Tk40 two or three years ago can’t be bought for even Tk120 today.
Of course, the global economic recession has taken its toll on us ever since 2008, creating massive differences in exchange rates of currencies whose values are fluctuating to date. And governments are struggling to keep prices right for people to survive like proper human beings.
Yet their struggle is in vain because no matter how hard we try to keep prices steady, the rise in the world population is causing necessities to become scarcer, and the old theories of economics are crying out loud because those graphs of supply and demand are just not that useful anymore.
Moreover, every single day, more and more people are migrating from rural regions to cities for a better shot at life and to reach for the stars, not knowing how much their migration is affecting not only the overall congestion, but also the city’s ability to withstand its population.
Everyone deserves a shot at their dreams, but the question is: “Is my dream bigger than the sake of humanity and its survival?”
Why aren’t we trying to raise awareness of this population problem? I don’t think it’s solely the duty of WHO and other counterparts, but all of ours.
We know we don’t want a dire future where basic needs become unaffordable luxuries. Then why don’t we comply with that thought and work for it? In case you were sitting idly and musing on some food for thought, voila!