Consumerism
The preoccupation of society with the acquisition of consumer goods.
kev and
Consumerism
correlation between consumerism & stress
Noam Chomsky - What We Really Want
youtube.com1. advertising induced wants. marketers realized they were not able to reach children, so advertising introduced nagging behavior to get their parents buy them stuff. but material things are not core to human nature.
2. people crave dignity and self-worth of doing something significant. Jonathan Rose has studied the reading habits of the British working class in the late 19th century. they were better educated than than the aristocrats. many efforts made to drive this out of people.
3. the natural thing for humans is to want to be independent and creative. mean maybe you work on a you know the fixing up old cars in your garage in the weekend instead of sitting in the watching television. you want to do something that's significant, that's worthwhile — maybe even if it's a ugly horrible job like going to coal mines instead of taking a government handout because people want dignity and a sense of self-worth and a sense of creating and doing something important. that's what we are.
4. huge part of the economy is devoted to trying to drive these things out of people's heads to make you think that all you want is more commodities so you should go shopping instead of reading/
5. wage labor is not very different from slavery.
6. market economy is supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. but that'd if there was an ad it would be an announcement by
say Ford Motor Company here are the characteristics of the cars I think that's nice,here's what consumer review says about them—that would create informed consumers making rational choices. but it's not what you see. there are huge efforts to try to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices to undermine market economies and turn people into people who believe that what they want is to sit on a couch and watch television.
Repair, maintenance, and restoration are about building more intimate, meaningful relationships with the things around us
Repairs store and tell stories. They are the equivalent of scars on objects.
Repaired objects help us redefine beauty.
Repair replaces wastefulness and shallowness with meaning and care.
Repairing makes us truly empowered and responsible owners of our objects as opposed to mere consumers.
Dense Discovery – Issue 264
densediscovery.com
from the ‘consumer story’ to the ‘citizen story’
Think about how intensely and beautifully social a garment can be…!!
About the Film — Objects
objectsfilm.com
To some, objects are the root of clutter and materialism.
To others, objects are a way to keep a treasured record of their lives.
some backstory about the 3 of us [Objet’s founders]. or how 18 moves across 4 continents in the past 15 years made us more intentional with the objects we carry in our lives.
the majority population don’t really like destructive consumerism, but have been bullied and seduced by capitalism into imagining that they like it, and therefore can perhaps be persuaded out of it again, provided that this persuasion is accompanied by sufficiently far-reaching institutional changes.
the majority population don’t really like destructive consumerism, but can’t desist from it because they have become addicted to it.
Consumer society…overwhelms us with a potentially limitless range of options…limitless possibility can be debilitating and a constant source of frustration. Simplifying choice by setting our own limits and by choosing ‘not to’…can then be liberating.
The idea that the only goal in life is to produce and consume more – an absurd, humiliating idea – must be abandoned. The capitalist imaginary of pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery, and of unlimited expansion, must be abandoned. Only men and women can do that.