Eco-anxiety and consumer behavior: mutual influences

Abstract

The economic and social problems facing today's global society are increasingly varied. One of these is the concern about the environment status, which has as main directions, in the future, especially the following: the depletion of resources, the decrease of their quality, the increase in the level of pollution and in the prices of basic resources, the negative impact on human health, etc. All these forms of concern are found in a new concept: eco-anxiety, considered an emotional disorder. Specific studies and research show that the most affected segment is that of young people, especially from developed or developing countries. Paradoxically, regarding the presence of this disorder, an inverse relationship proportional to well-being and progress is identified: the higher the level of development of a country, the more present this state of eco-anxiety is. From another perspective, today's society has predominantly become a consumer society, and the interest of individuals to buy more and more has almost become normality. This phenomenon also prevails in developed and developing countries. In addition, in the last 3 years or so, the orientation of purchase and consumption, towards ecological or at least more environment-friendly products and services has been observed. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the mutual influence between two issues of major interest for today's society: ecoanxiety and consumer behavior. It starts from the hypothesis that these two concepts influence each other. The research methods are: observation, literature review, synthesis and interpretation. Thus, it follows that the manifestation of ecoanxiety stimulates interest in the purchase of environmentally friendly products, and the compulsive buying style - a socalled emotional remedy - generates hyper consumption and, implicitly, has negative consequences on the environment, such as: pollution, resource depletion and impressive amounts of waste difficult to manage.