The supply chain crisis is the universe’s way of teaching Americans about logistics. Before COVID-19, most Americans neither knew nor cared about the subtleties of just-in-time management. We remained largely untroubled by the tactics through which every possible efficiency had been exacted along the manufacturing journey of our trinkets, from raw materials to box on our doorstep. With prices rising by 6.2% year over year for October, we’re starting to pay attention to the architecture and management that we once took for granted.

As demand roared back, just-in-time production didn’t have the capacity to make enough in time. The effects ripple through to large and small purchases. Ongoing semiconductor shortages are partly to blame for why PlayStations won’t be found under the tree this Christmas. The number of new homes being built in the U.S. is constrained by supply chain issues. At America’s ports, backlogs are growing as warehouse space becomes increasingly expensive, drivers are quarantined, and capacity at every stage is limited. The number of ships waiting outside the Port of Los Angeles, a single-digit figure before the crisis, recently hit 100.

Increasingly, Americans are also learning about the final step, the most exquisitely crafted and then forgotten cog in the supply chain: us. It’s harder to identify how we ourselves have been schooled by the supply chain, in part because it has been happening for so long.

It’s hard to avoid spending, in a culture that has created “holidays” around it: Online retailers have introduced Cyber Monday, and there’s even the convenient (and important) karmic purge of Giving Tuesday. But resisting the rituals requires more than thrift, and a couple days of cold turkey from consumerism doesn’t solve the problem.

Recall what exactly we get when we open the box on the doorstep. Whatever the object, we don’t just purchase the right to use or tend something, to show it off or savor it. As David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” suggests, the defining feature of modern private property is the right to mistreat and destroy it. In the exercising of this right, capitalism has turned the world into a trash heap. Humans have precipitated the sixth extinction, the burning of the planet and the exploitation of hundreds of millions of workers.

Central to the consumer society, in other words, is an ethic of learned carelessness. The disruption of the supply chain is a long-overdue call to pay attention. Returning “back to normal” would be a tragic missed opportunity.

Consumerism is unfazed by Buy Nothing Day, if afterward we simply resume shopping as usual. But if we draw a deeper lesson from this moment of inflation and shipping delays, there is potential for lasting change. What if consumers come to see the supply chain more fully, not only as the reason we anxiously refresh the UPS delivery page, but as the long cause of social and planetary disruption? That awareness would be the foundation for an ethic of care.

To care is not to abstain from commerce, but to live with a clearer knowledge of how the meeting of our needs depends upon the web of life around us. We depend on one another, and the planet on which we live. Active care can be transformative.

Raj Patel is a research professor of public affairs at the University of Texas.