Be wary of our consumer culture
I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff this past week.
No, truly, I mean it. Stuff. As in all of the clothes, books, gadgets and other things I own, and why I’m starting to think I don’t need most of it.
In my geography class last week, we watched a video called “The Story of Stuff.” I highly recommend giving it a watch, although it did terrify me to a certain degree. It’s about the ethical and environmental consequences of our consumer culture, many of which are invisible to us unless we go looking for them ourselves.
One part of the video that’s stuck with me all week is when Annie Leonard, the narrator of the video, discusses the idea of planned and perceived obsolescence.
Planned obsolescence is when companies construct a product so that it will stop working properly within a certain time of the consumer purchasing it.
iPhones are a great example of this. Apple loves to keep updating its iOS software so that within a few years after you’ve bought your iPhone, it won’t be able to run efficiently or effectively anymore. Eventually, you’ll get so fed up with the utter slowness of your phone that you’ll cave and buy the newest iPhone.
Perceived obsolescence is when other people can perceive that whatever product you have is not the newest one available to buy.
Again, iPhones illustrate this well. It’s pretty easy to see when someone has an iPhone that’s more than a few years old, because all of the old models are thicker and less sleek than the newer ones.
Perceived obsolescence, then, works to pressure us into buying the newest, most stylish items. This could be technology, clothes, shoes or anything else, really.
On a more superficial level, I think this works because we don’t want to be perceived as being out of touch with current trends. On a deeper level, this strategy works so well because — as Leonard points out — contributing to the economy by purchasing things is hugely valued in the United States. It’s to the point that shopping is basically a ritual within our civil religion narrative.
This all makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of manufacturing companies: if they can convince us that the completely functioning things we own aren’t good anymore, we’ll continue to buy more goods from them. Then, of course, all of the items we replace with new items end up in a landfill somewhere.
All of this is starting to disgust me, largely because I’ve fallen prey to it so many times myself. It grosses me out to think of all the times I’ve bought new shoes because mine aren’t the most stylish ones at the moment, or all the times during high school that I just had to buy that year’s tennis team shirt because not owning the current one would be a fashion faux pas.
So please, give that video a watch. Or, at the very least, whenever you’re about to buy something, think about the invisible forces at play prodding you to buy it. I think you’ll find that there are an awful lot of them.
