More Dollars than Sense

consumerism — noun (derogatory), the preoccupation of society with the acquisition of consumer goods

We’re all guilty of it to some extent. Don’t try to deny it! We all have something of the magpie in us. Our quest for stuff can stem from a place of one-upmanship, searching for meaning, or having been injected with packrat genes, but you can’t deny that we exist in a society where the things define the person. To paraphrase, ‘The stuff makes the man!’

I wonder when it started. Did Urgh leave the cave one morning and look across at Grog’s cave and think, “Grog have new mammoth skin door on cave. Me do one better. Me get saber-tooth cat skin door!”? Did Mrs. Urgh send their cave-kids to cave-school in nothing but designer vole-fur tunics? We will never know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that the pursuit of newer, shinier, and better started about as early as Adam.

“Eve, darling, you simply must upgrade to these organic, cruelty-free fig leaves!”

...apparently Adam was flaming.

Anyway, fast forward a few gazillion years, and now we’ve got the trappings of affluence. Class systems developed over the millennia, and they were based on — guess what — material wealth. The Haves ruled over the Have Nots. It is a truth universally acknowledged that one man, in possession of an iPhone, must be in want of the iPad, iPod, MacBook, and Apple Watch to go with it — and if he has these things, he must be a Big Deal. We’ve been conditioned to base our worth on our accumulated belongings at the expense of our actual selves and to the benefit of the corporations.

And it starts so early in life! I remember lunch boxes and sneakers being status symbols as early as preschool. The fads changed from year to year, but there was always something that was cool, something that was ‘in’. I was never either of those things, mostly because I was born cynical, and maybe that just served to heighten my awareness of my peers and their pursuit of the things that would make them appear to be upwardly mobile.

Ha! Mobile. There’s one. The old Nokia plastic rectangle. If you had one of those in 1999, you were something, man. Especially if it had a novelty case.

It extends to everything, really. The cars we drive, the places we eat, our personal technology, what we wear, where we shop (for anything), the trends and styles we follow… it’s endless, and it’s relentless. I mean, it extends to coffee, for fuck’s sake! My office supplies coffee — free coffee — but we still have a handful of people who go out daily to get Starbucks. The free coffee isn’t great, no, but it sure as hell beats five bucks a day on a frou-frou latte!

I certainly don’t live in a glass house on this subject. I have my own brand loyalties: Ray-Ban, Samsung, Prismacolor, Chevron, Best Foods… (Seriously, don’t ever buy house-brand mayonnaise. That’s just wrong.) It’s not wrong to want to have nice things. It’s nice to have nice things. Everybody likes nice things — because they’re nice. If you have the means to buy yourself and your kids/significant others/whoever fun and new and exciting essential and/or non-essential items, you get down with your bad self. I fully condone buying things (within your means) that you genuinely desire because they interest you.

What I find ridiculous is when people refuse to have anything that isn’t somehow designer, or promoted by some famous person, or the latest and greatest because God forbid they should be caught using last year’s model of whatever. If you live your life thinking that if it ain’t Versace you’re somehow subhuman, then you, friend, are the advertiser’s dream consumer. You have fallen for their trap. You have seen the water at the bottom and tumbled head first into the pitcher plant. There is no need to have a new phone every year, or a new car every five, or wear nothing but Burberry, or only use Aveeno because you’ve never gotten over your Jennifer Aniston obsession from when you were in junior high! There just isn’t! Think about what you could do with all the money you didn’t spend on labels if you pooled it up for a year. I bet it’s more than you’d think.

I know you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and that’s fine. Personally, I just look at it this way; “Does the old one still work? Will this alternative brand of the same item accomplish the same thing? Hooray! I saved $15!”

My hat is off to the advertisers, really. I mean, if they can make Pennzoil look sexy, then I guess they deserve to have us all clamoring to buy their shit.

Now, do you really need that fancypants cup of coffee?


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