The Gollum Effect
ribbonfarm.com
The Gollum Effect
In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of
... See moreL. M. Sacasas • Ill With Want
Having substituted consumption for creativity and technical skills, shopping becomes a form of self-actualization--there's no small number of teenage girls who associate personal growth with changing their wardrobe--"retail therapy" becomes an active way of feeling good. Shopping,
Jacob Lund Fisker • Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence
We are formed by the structures of modern society to be insatiable consumers of an increasing range of commodified things and experiences and services. There is no art in this, because the tacit assumption that we must buy into along the way is that there is no limit to what we can consume.