I was watching someone on YouTube buy and talk about sneakers and thought about consumerism, hyper consumerism, individualism and how marketing and advertising has convinced us that we can buy our way out of despair that the very nature of capitalism keeps us in.
I remember having to sit with my thoughts about how travel is sold to us as an experience and yet it is just another way to buy something with little to no regard of the places we are going to, environmental impacts of travel and the indigenous peoples who live in the places we go to.
I mean even how it seems we are missing out on something if we don’t buy it – I find that to be so ludicrous. Advertisers are basically creating desire. Out of nothing. We don’t need most of the things we are buying or even as much as we end up buying. What do those many shoes do for me?
And I think this is the insidiousness of celebrity and/or influencer culture, because it predicates everything they are trying to sell as though they have uncovered the key to what life means and they will show the rest of us how to achieve it, by buying things. These are people we are meant to admire and want to be like so OF COURSE we must want whatever it is they are selling. “I am worthy because I bought this thing that a celebrity uses” LOL, please.
Anyway – I guess, actually I know – that contentment is KEY. And to achieve that, self awareness is important such that you know that you are consuming/buying things for specific reasons. A high sense of self is also important because then you aren’t deriving your worth as a human from things you consume and mostly you are good with where you are at any one moment.
Ciiku 