Consumerism

How many times have you went to the store intent on buying just one thing -- maybe you forgot breadsticks, maybe you need milk, whatever -- and you end up buying way more than you thought?

We laugh at it, it's a relateable situation. But isn't that horrifying when you really think about it? You go to the store, you only want one thing. But you leave with others. Without any words being said to you, you've been convinced to hand over more money. Things that, most of the time, you don't really need.

As an example, I'm making candles. I need wicks. I go to the store and buy wicks. Then I realize my jars are too big, so I go to the store again and get jars. But as I'm walking, I see these small glass jars with corks and little spoons on the side. I think 'oh, that would be perfect for my tea'. So I get three, for my tea types. But why? I was getting along just fine by eyeballing my tea measurements, by keeping them in the stock plastic bottles. For what purpose did I need to buy these jars? I spent some of my hard-earned money on this. It's ridiculous, isn't it?

And before I went into that store, I was at a different one. I walked into a discount store. Started looking through the aisles. Nothing really caught my attention. I saw some sunflower seeds, and remembered that I'm out. I got them and got in line for the checkout. Then I realized, what am I doing here? I got distracted and went to a different store. I got an item I didn't need, and when I had ran out I had said to myself that I didn't need to get anymore because snacking is a bad habit. So what was I doing there, telling myself I needed it? I didn't need it, I didn't even want it. I got it half out of habit and half because I didn't want to go to the store and not buy anything. I felt guilty, for not buying from a multi-billion dollar corporation. What was wrong with me?

So I snapped out of it and left. But it made me think just how much I do that. Buy something not because I want it, but because I'm at a store and that's what you do. It's very childish. You see something shiny or appealing and think "I MUST have this!" even though it doesn't really provide you anything. It's miserable. People got along fine for thousands of years without pre-packaged sunflower seeds, I think I'll be fine. But that has been drilled into my mind, by constant propaganda from birth. If I buy this useless item, I can be happy, I can be at peace, I can find love, I can be popular. But none of that is true. I'd really go so far as to call it criminal. After all, false advertising is a crime, is it not? How many times have you seen ads of the Dos Equis guy, the distinguished, mysterious guy with all sorts of women. You subconsciously think 'I can be like that if I drink that beer', that's the point of the ad. People see something and link the product to that, and think it can happen to them if they buy the product. But it won't, it's a subconscious psychological trick, it's a lie, it's deceptive. That's the nature of advertising really, just convince someone they want something they don't need. It's very profitable.

Look at the third world countries, the ones with the beaches overwhelmed by garbage, plastic packaging. Soda bottles littering everywhere. It really is miserable. Earth didn't look like this a few thousand years ago, even a few hundred years ago. You didn't find litter washed up on desert islands. This sort of rampant consumerism, the focus on cheap goods by consumers and low cost by producers, leads to insanity. Products designed to fail quickly, to increase corporate profits. Products made out of weak or toxic materials, made with slave labor, so the customer saves a dollar. Because of all this consumerism, this focus on everything being made of plastics and made as cheap as possible, designed for cost and not for longevity, waste is more of an issue than ever. Especially with some products like printers, where it's cheaper to chuck the old one in the trash than to buy more ink in many cases. It's miserable.

I don't know where I'm going with this. The moral is just that consumerism is bad. Don't buy something you know won't last. Don't buy things you know will end up in a landfill. Don't buy items just to buy items.