Part Two
Last time I explained why I buy almost nothing new, this time I’m going to explain why even when buying used I try to buy as little as possible. You should read the first part first, or this won’t make any sense.
Buying used is harm reduction, not harm elimination
I previously gave a series of reasons why I don’t buy anything new if I can avoid it. I believe that doing so is morally wrong and fiscally wasteful, but more importantly I think it’s also usually psychologically and morally harmful.
While buying used does, to some limited extent, ameliorate the first two issues, I don’t think it on its own does anything to address the third. Explaining why involves expanding on some of the things I wrote in the first part of this article about the consumer culture we all currently live in and the systems of propaganda needed to maintain it.
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda.
Propaganda divorced from the images in your head of old news reels and racist posters is just advertising.
We live in a world saturated in advertising, for every imaginable product and service, delivered in such enormous quantities across such a variety of mediums that it can cease to be noticeable or intelligible. Our society and economy is ordered around continually buying more and more superfluous stuff, and we are constantly propagandised (advertised) to in order to perpetuate that end.
You are not immune to propaganda, even if you’re aware of it, even if you know what it is, how it works, what it’s intended to do, even if you don’t have the means or the opportunity to engage in the behaviour it’s intended to promote, you are effected by it when you are exposed to it.
The macro effect of constant exposure to this propaganda is psychological adaption, a mindset and habit shift. This is, after all, what propaganda is meant to do, encourage some behaviour or opinion, further an agenda.
Advertising is hardly new, it’s millennia old, the blending of advertising directly into other forms of media, in the form of product placements, “sponsored” content, paid reviews etc. isn’t novel either.
What is new is the internet, internet shopping, and the state of omni-connection to media, entertainment and commerce almost all of us in the industrial world now exist in, whether we like it or not. This has had the effect of dramatically increasing the amount of time all of us spend being advertised to on a daily basis, multiplying and differentiating the delivery vectors that we can be exposed to advertising through, and reducing the gap between exposure to advertising for a product and being able to buy that product to essentially nothing.
You know how when you go to a supermarket there is almost always chocolate and sweets right by the checkouts, to encourage impulse purchasing?
We are now all always at the checkout, for every stupid purchase imaginable.
Little Orphan Annie was telling kids to drink their Ovaltine a hundred years ago, but they still had to go to the shop and hand over actual physical money to get it, now all thought and effort has been taken out of the equation, just click on the pretty colours, get a little dopamine, funny numbers on the screen say it costs money, but its just glowing pixels, not a thing you have to take out of your pocket and hand to another human being, or even push into a machine, and oh look! They’ll helpfully list some more things you can buy, and email you when they know your statistically most vulnerable to reupping, send you vouchers and codes for things you never would have bought otherwise, how nice of them, saving you money like that, what a great deal.
The end result is that shopping has for many surpassed hobby, surpassed religion, compulsive consumption has become an automatic function, an unthinking habit, barely more deliberate than breathing.
How many people have you observed, bored, mindlessly browsing Amazon or eBay or Facebook marketplace? How many people in your life slowly accumulate junk, seemingly on autopilot, in 4-5 minute bursts of purchasing in between their work or leisure activities?
Does it make them happy?
No, you know it doesn’t, because you’ve done it too, we’ve all done it, it’s near impossible not to at some point.
Swearing off buying new and only buying used on its own does nothing to combat this pattern of behaviour. The companies don’t like it, it’s worse for them, it’s perhaps marginally better for the planet, but it’s no better for you. It doesn’t really matter where you’re doing it, the platform, or what you’re buying, new or used, megacorp or mom and pop, you’re still on the hedonic treadmill, the little burst of dopamine is still on its way when you click buy now on some piece of tat and it still leaves again just as quickly.
And the more you buy the more that little pattern of behaviour entrenches itself, the more you get used to that little hit of sweet dopamine the more you resent its absence, the sooner you reach out for it again.
This feedback loop has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re buying or from who, it doesn’t matter how good a deal you did or didn’t get on whatever you bought, it doesn’t matter if you’re aware of what’s going on or not. It’s just a quirk of biology, your hunter gatherer berry brain, ill equipped to deal with modernity, being exploited endlessly by organisations with immense resources dedicated to ensuring you keep coming back.
Consider the effects being submerged in such an environment must have on you, being taken advantage of in this way, constantly, without your permission, quite often without your knowledge. Living in this deluge of information warfare conjured up by the largest companies on earth aimed at you for the explicit purpose of subverting your desire, blunting your ability to reason.
If you cannot see it in yourself look again at those around you, the people everywhere going into debt to finance nonsense purchases, buy now pay later plans for junk food and plastic clothes, the constant orgiastic consumption fads that seem to come from nowhere and disappear back into it, the children being bullied for not having designer clothing or computer game skins, the clutter and rubbish polluting everywhere and everything.
Its like living in smog, choking on a cloud of waste and detritus every moment of your life, forced on you, forced into you, destroying you by its very presence. If you’ve grown up in smog stepping out into fresh air must be transformational, the first lungful a religious experience. But its got to be discomforting too, and maybe once you’ve had a chance to think about it the contrast becomes infuriating.
The way things could be and the way they are made to be.
The system is bad, but the people stuck in it aren’t
Most of them aren’t anyway, most people are stuck in this feedback loop, and it isn’t because they’re stupid, or bad people, or don’t want to make better choices. They’re in it because it is nearly impossible not to enter it, and once you’re in it it’s quite difficult to get out, especially if you aren’t aware that there’s anything sinister going on.
And sinister really is the word, because the transnational organisations that facilitate and profit from this system, the Fords and Googles and Amazons, the Sheins and Tencents of the world, all of these monstrosities know, in excruciating detail, just how incredibly damaging the system they have honed to perfection is for the people trapped in it and for the planet we all live on. They don’t care, and they never will, the exceedingly rich are no longer even remotely human.
So what’s the alternative?
Which is nice and all, but you, I and everyone else with a bank account and an internet connection are long past being able to do that. So I think the next best thing is to stop, as quickly as possible.
I am not saying not to buy things ever, just do not buy anything you do not need, unless you are absolutely sure you really do want it.
Not kind of want it, not “it’s cheap so I’ll get it, why not?” not “eh, I can sell it again when I’m done with it”, not “it’s 2am and I don’t want to go to work tomorrow, let me buy that toy I was looking at”, only things that you genuinely, unambiguously want, have no doubts about buying, can afford to buy, and that aren’t going to end up discarded 2 days after you get it.
Stop letting yourself be passively propagandised, don’t let these companies keep sticking their fingers in your mouth.
Withdraw as much as possible from the deluge, limit your exposure to advertising, especially targeted advertising. Establish routines and habits around when you do interact with marketplaces and advertising adjacent content like reviews or comparisons, to minimise any unnecessary time spent browsing and limit your vulnerability to them.
What this process would look like, and how comprehensive a withdrawal from the system is manageable, is going to depend entirely on the individual and their life circumstances. A complete break is going to be extremely hard for most people, I haven’t entirely managed it, but I’ve got most of the way there, and the benefits are real.
For the steps I took, and the process I follow when deciding whether to buy something now see my buying process.(under construction)
Does any of this actually matter?
Can individual action ever matter in the face of Leviathan?
I think it can, and I think it does.
Ultimately nothing I have done, nor anything you might do after reading anything I’ve written will have a substantial practical effect on the world we live in, but our actions have a massive effect on ourselves, those around us and on our own little parts of the world, to me that makes any positive action worthwhile.
Doing the right thing often feels pointless, especially when it’s hard or uncomfortable and doing wrong so easy and acceptable, but stick with it, refuse to bend, it will be worth it.
And standing up for yourself feels good, being able to honestly say that you are acting intentionally to improve yourself and your relationship with the world is a feeling worth pursuing, it’s empowering and it’s rare; you can’t buy it, it has to be earned.
You might completely disagree with me, or think this process pointless, that’s your decision to make.
But even if you think all of this is stupid, I’ll ask you this:
Sit down and have a think about your relationship with consumption, with advertising, with the things you watch and read and listen to and the things you spend your money on.
Do they benefit you more than those you’re buying from?
If not, why not?