Consumerism, Baby!

There is nothing quite like the rush of clicking “place order” or swiping your credit card in a store for things we don’t need.

We want them. So we buy them.

The dopamine hit is short-lived, but glorious. We patiently wait for our goods to arrive or take them home with us, bask over our new items for 10 minutes to a day, then put them away maybe only to be used a handful of times or forgotten about completely until we clean out our closets.

Consumerism is nothing new. It’s a by-product of late-stage capitalism and the two will always co-exist. After all, capitalism has existed in some form since the 16th century. It isn’t going anywhere.

Why am I writing about this? Because the stuff we buy is forever. We may not keep it forever, but it ends up in a landfill where it will stay until a black hole maybe consumes the planet. I’m kidding.

As humans, we have bought into the idea that the stuff we have is intertwined somehow with our self-worth and that leads to excess materialism and potential stress because we want to continue to BUY, but our bank accounts say no.

We distract ourselves with things in order to avoid confronting things in our internal world that may need addressing or because our own egos want us to have the new, next best thing in order to feel valuable in a capitalist society that values goods over people.

In my overly caffeinated, sleep-deprived world, I am over the notion of buying things just to buy them, posting just to post because your followers want new content or pretending to like things all for the sake of keeping the status quo.

Call me idealistic, but all I want is for human beings to show up authentically as themselves and not what the world has ingrained into them.

You know yourself the best and if you haven’t met yourself yet, you will one day. We have to experience our shadows and open the parts of ourselves we have long buried in exchange for 85-inch TVs and “free” Prime shipping.

It’s okay to buy things. I think we need to challenge ourselves on WHO and WHAT we are buying these things for.

Friday thoughts of a girl living in a corporate world.

Until Then.