Indonesia is well-known as a country with high consumption rate, especially the teenagers. Most of Indonesian teenagers are easily affected by what are their peers doing or buying, also what things are trending in the western teenagers’ community. This condition makes Indonesian teenagers tend to be consumptive. The word ‘consumptive’ could clearly describe how most Indonesian teenagers behave now. They often spend their money for things that they do not really need.
Based on the research that I have done among my friends, some of them admit that they buy expensive branded bags just to follow the trends or showing their high social status, not because they need to substitute their old bags. The other mentioned that they buy a thing after their mates are buying it too, not because they like that thing. These examples are only some of Indonesian teenagers’ consumptive behavior among the other awful cases. Based on my view, this consumptive behavior is influenced by two major aspects; environment and advertisement.
We cannot deny that environment plays the big role in teenagers’ character building. Most teenagers imitate how people around them are behaving. This means that when a person lives in a consumptive community, he or she will tend to follow the rest of people around him or her. A fifteen year-old teenager confessed that she buys a lot of expensive clothes while she is hanging out with her friends with the purpose of showing her wealth among others. Beside of that, advertisement also affects teenagers’ consumptive behavior. Another fourteen year-old teenagers mentioned that she buys a lot of clothes because her friends persuaded her to buy it with frequent advertisement.
This consumptive behavior of Indonesian teenagers will trigger some crucial problems for the society. When teenagers are consumptive, it means that they forget how hard it is to collect money in this world. On the long term effect, they will tend to be careless in managing their finance because they used to spend money all over the time. Also, this consumptive behavior will make parents allocate more money for their children’s unnecessary needs. Another problem that may come up is social status problems. A boundary will be formed between well-heeled and the poor communities and at the end, they will not socializing each other just because the different social status.
The consumptive behavior should be handled as soon as possible by planting strong moral values to the teenagers and also growing a responsibility in finance management. Parents should also play their important role in teaching their children to be a wise shopper so that they could select things that they really need to buy or not. At last, the most important thing is the individual himself/herself. When he or she has the strong life principle, he or she will not be affected by the consumptive lifestyle around him or her.
Pritamara Wahyningtyas (Tara)
X-D / 30
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