Tag Archives: consumerism

October 20, 2017

The World Won’t Improve Until You Stop Being A Vidiot

The quality of the world is determined by the quality of people in it. A perfect world would be full of educated, self-actualized people. In a society like that, we wouldn’t even need the perfect government because people would behave rationally and empathetically without having to be micromanaged. In a world full of idiots, it wouldn’t matter if we had a perfect government because people would still behave irrationally, selfishly and mercilessly, and we would destroy the systems we put in place to make life better.

The world we live in is far from perfect because we are far from perfect. Even if it’s impossible to define or create the perfect person or perfect government, we can still do a lot better than we’re doing. Even if we can’t save everyone else in the world, it behooves us to become better individuals ourselves. Truly, the only way society will improve is by each individual improving themselves, because each individual’s life is their own responsibility, and nobody can live it for them.

In order to fulfill your obligation to improve yourself, you need to proactively educate yourself, analyze yourself and the world around you, and stop spending 34 hours per week watching television.

Watching TV isn’t a sinister act in and of itself. The problem is that the content we’re currently broadcasting is designed to appeal to the lowest mental common denominator. It’s vapid, unedifying brain candy.

Sitcoms, reality TV, and cartoons revolve around petty characters who spend their lives stressing over petty conflicts. They rarely, if ever, teach us valuable life lessons or set positive examples to live by. Even the “mature” characters such as the adults on children’s shows act like unrealistic, goofy, neutered youth pastors.

Emulating these characters will cripple your ability to cope with the realities of life more than they will prepare you. Since these characters are presented as role models and children have a hard time separating fantasy from reality they skew children’s perception of reality for the worse. And those are the “good” characters. Television is full of glamorized characters who are flat-out bad role models.

Only a handful of shows such as Star Trek the Next Generation feature protagonists who are intelligent, proactive thinkers who value knowledge and reason, but more often than not, if a television show features a protagonist with an above-average intelligence he/she will be monstrously flawed in some other way. The rest of the protagonists on television simply celebrate their stupidity. In big ways and little ways watching television skews your perception of reality by presenting you with a warped reality, and the less you get off your couch and experience the real world the more susceptible you’ll be to accepting, mimicking and defending that dumbed down perception of reality.

Millions, if not billions, of people are able to watch television without mimicking the worse behavior they see, but they still worship the actors who play those characters since they’re presented as larger than life. Since these actors appear as authority figures on television we tend to hold them as authority figures in real life even if we know they’re not. Worshipping celebrities is a complete waste of time and distracts you from real intellectual authorities who actually have useful knowledge to impart and can back up their statements with research.

Celebrity-studded sitcoms, reality game shows, and children’s cartoons aren’t the only intellectually toxic programming on television. There are over 100 channels devoted entirely to sports. I understand that professional sports are near and dear to a lot of people’s hearts, but we all need to understand that the only reason that is, is because of the billions of dollars the sports industry has dumped into manipulating people into thinking that sports matter. If all the professional sports in the world disappeared tomorrow the consequence would be that we would not be wasting our time glued to the television watching people move a ball from point A to point B. Then we would have to find edifying and productive things to do with the short, irreplaceable time we have on this planet.

You might reply to my these criticisms of professional sports by saying, “Sports teaches you about teamwork and exercise.” To that I would reply, little league and intramural sports teach you about teamwork and involve exercise. Watching professional sports builds rivalries as senseless as street gangs who hate each other because one gang wears red and the other gang wears blue. And sitting in front of your television watching sports while your body atrophies, is the opposite of exercising.

Even the news has become more entertaining than informative. Some news actually makes us dumber.

Probably the best reason not to watch television is the commercials. The word “commercial” is misleading. It would be more accurate to call commercials what they really are, propaganda. Commercials are designed to manipulate the viewers into buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have. They redesign your values so that you believe there’s something wrong with your life that can only be corrected by buying consumer goods. They turn you into a consumer whore who is more interested in the accumulation of objects than solving the world’s problems, and when you adopt that lifestyle you become part of the problem.

You may respond to all of this by saying, “Yeah, the world has its problems. It’s a tough place, but that’s why it’s so important to have a little distraction every once and a while.” There’s truth to that statement, but watching 34 hours of television per week isn’t a little distraction. It’s a full-time job. Think of how much work you get done each week at your real full-time job. You could accomplish that much work making you a better person and solving the real world problems that make life hard by cutting television out of your life. But when you spend a major portion of your free time aging in front of the television, ignoring all the problems crushing civilization, when you could be fixing them, then your complacency makes you as responsible for those problems as if you were an active participant in creating them.

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Leave a comment | tags: consumerism, cultural evolution, pop culture, role models, television sitcoms | posted in Be Better People, Movies and Television

October 19, 2017

You Might Be Depressed Because The System Is Crazy, Not Because You Are

By wise sloth

Suffering from high anxiety or depression is a sign of bad mental health. If you see a psychiatrist, they’re likely to diagnose something wrong with you and prescribe you pills to fix the problem, but most of society’s anxiety and depression stems from the fact that the political and economic systems we live in are insane. So if you’re a logical, reasonable person, then the absurdities and abuses you’re subjected to will drive you to anxiety and depression. Think about these points:

Work places have totalitarian control over your life while you’re at work, and America has one of the largest prison populations in the world, but we’re told we live in the land of the free.

All day long the television and radio churn out commercials encouraging us to buy wasteful junk, and then we’re told if we buy that junk, we’re irresponsible and destroying the environment.

It’s fashionable to get drunk. It’s unconscionable to get high.

If you feed your family poison over the course of several years until they die, you can get the death penalty. If you run a tobacco company that poisons millions of people over several years until they die, you get a golden parachute.

The stock market is designed to fund companies at the expense of the investors, but when investors lose their money (in the system that was designed to take their money) the investors are told they were foolish with their money.

Houses cost twice what they’re worth and are so confusing to buy you have to hire someone to help you navigate the paperwork, and we blame the people who got tricked into buying houses that cost twice as much as advertised for the mortgage crisis.

A higher education is necessary to earn a living wage, but if you can’t afford a college education you’re told the reason you’re not earning a living wage because is because you’re lazy and worthless.

People are killing each other over which mythology is the most loving.

We’re taught that slavery is unconscionable, but almost all of our clothes and household goods are made by slaves in sweatshops.

Poor people work the longest hours at the hardest jobs, but we’re told they’re poor because they’re lazy.

America spends trillions on the industrial war complex to protect freedom, but America is the largest exporter of war.

Janitors have to take drug tests, but political leaders don’t. In fact, they have diplomatic immunity.

Police cars are designed to look intimidating, but they have the words, “To protect and serve” printed on the sides.

Shows like South Park and The Sopranos come with warning labels that say, “For mature audiences only.”

A man can take off his shirt in public, but women are told their chests are immoral.

Bribery is called lobbying, and propaganda is called advertisement.

When goods in a store are only sold at a 1000 percent markup instead of a 1200 percent markup, we’re told they’re on “sale.”

Banks call their investors “valued customers” but they charge you with fees for everything possible, even for not having enough money.

We’re told there’s no cruel and unusual punishment for breaking laws in the West, but going to jail is almost a guaranteed sentence to get beaten and raped.

The tax laws are so complicated you have to pay someone else to do them for you, and if you can’t pay your taxes or you fill them out wrong, you’re a criminal.

Workplaces use performance quotas to push workers to the limits of human endurance, and if that stresses you out you’re told it’s because you don’t have a positive enough attitude.

Self-help books and religious books offer ineffective, fantasy-based solutions to real-world problems, and when they don’t work, you’re told it’s because you didn’t believe in them enough or try hard enough.

Fox News is considered “news.”

We’re charged the highest possible cost for goods and services while being paid the lowest possible wages for our work, and we’re told that wealth trickles down and that supply and demand justifies our exploitation as necessary.

The celebrities we’re encouraged to emulate churn out mindless, idiotic, formulaic art. People who actually take stances on important issues are told they take life too seriously and should lighten up. And we wonder why the world isn’t improving.

We’re raised from childhood to believe romance and wealth are the most important goals in life, and when we spend our whole lives chasing them only to find out they don’t work in life like they do in the movies, we’re told we were childish for believing what we were taught on television.

Western society is a labyrinth of smoke, mirrors, contradictions, misdirection and dead ends. The lies and falsehoods are so ingrained in our society you can’t escape them. If you even begin to wake up to the reality of how un-user-friendly society is, it will cause you deep anxiety and depression, and when that happens you’ll be told by the television, your boss, your co-workers, your political leaders, your mental health professions, your religious leaders and maybe even your friends and family that there’s something wrong with you. And just like the military, you’ll be pressured to conform to their twisted mindset or be rejected and even punished by the brainwashed individuals who have given up the quest for sanity and given in to the status quo.

Anxiety and depression can be signs of mental health when the rest of the world around you is insane. If you don’t experience anxiety and depression, then you should be very, very worried, because that means you probably aren’t paying attention or asking the right questions, and that’s not mentally healthy.

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Leave a comment | tags: consumerism, how to be happy, inspiration, modern life, motivation, pop culture, predatory capitalism, self-help, self-improvement, systemic economic oppression | posted in General Pop Culture

September 28, 2017

The World Won’t Improve Until You Stop Being A Consumer Whore

By wise sloth

In order to understand why the world won’t get better until you stop being a consumer whore, you have to understand how the economy works: Businesses don’t make money unless they sell products. The more stuff we buy the more money businesses make. In theory, this should create jobs, and it does, but it creates as few jobs as possible, because the goal of business is to make as much money as possible for the owners and investors. They maximize their take-home pay by making as few workers as possible work as long as they can get away with, paying their workers as little as they can get away with, making as cheap of quality of products as they can get away with and selling them for as much as they can get away with.

Businesses can only sell as many products as customers are willing to buy, and people don’t have any motivation to buy things they don’t need. In order to remove this roadblock to profits, big businesses have dumped billions of dollars into studying human psychology in order to perfect the art of manipulating consumers. Today advertisements are ubiquitous and effective. We are inundated with them to the point that we accept an advertisement-saturated life as the norm. Inevitably we grow up buying crap we don’t need with money we can’t afford to spend. We’re all guilty, but for what it’s worth, we’re as much victims as we are offenders.

But make no mistake, we are offenders. Every time we buy something we don’t need, big business owners and investors take home profit that they can hoard, invest in more brainwashing advertisements, or influence politicians to pass laws that make it easier for them to screw more people harder, quicker. At the same time, every time we spend a dollar on something we don’t need we take a step away from financial independence and a step towards dependency on whoever is going to give us our next dollar. The less financially independent we are the more desperate we’ll be. The more financially desperate we are the less money and dignity we’ll demand from our employers.

Mass consumerism makes life in the present less enjoyable for everyone who gets squeezed by greedy businesses, and given enough time, it will make the planet unlivable. Our factories are tearing through the world’s resources as fast as possible in a mad dash to make cheap, barely-useful junk that will end up in a landfill within a year. The fewer resources the world has the more expensive they will become in the future, and thus the more expensive consumer goods will become, which will make economic disparity even worse. If the economy doesn’t change then eventually the majority of the population will live in polluted ghettos where there is no hope of upward mobility. In fact, this has already happened in the poorest areas of the world.

The survival and expansion of the economic system that creates inhumane slums depends on us buying mass-produced stuff we don’t need.

You might defend your purchasing habits by pointing out that if we don’t buy consumer goods, then companies won’t make money. Then they won’t have money to pay any workers or expand production to create any new jobs. This argument isn’t justification for continuing business as usual; it simply states why the current system is oppressive and unsustainable. The call to action it raises shouldn’t be to keep feeding the beast. The call to action should be to redesign our economic model so that workers and consumers aren’t caught in an inescapable downward spiral of economic oppression.

It would be a shame for people to lose their jobs and their meager livelihoods by starving the system to the breaking point, but people are living in hunger and fear now, and that’s only going to get worse the longer we continue doing what we’ve been doing. Starving the economy to the breaking point would at least allow us to start over and change directions. There is another alternative though, start building sustainable communities now and slowly transition workers from the oppressive system to a more humanitarian one. Unfortunately, it will cost a lot of money to build sustainable communities since those materials will have to be bought from companies that charge as much as possible. However, if the poor stopped being consumer whores, saved their money and worked together instead of fighting each other for the scraps that fall from their masters’ table we could build a better world.

One way or the other though, the world won’t change until you stop being a consumer whore.

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Leave a comment | tags: consumerism, economic inequality, how to save the world, predatory capitalism, sustainable building, sustainable living, systemic economic oppression | posted in Buy a Better World

September 28, 2017

Stop Guilt-Tripping Poor People Into Saving The Environment

By wise sloth

97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming and threatening the extinction of life on the planet as we know it. Even if that’s not true, as some believe, there’s no doubt pollution and urban sprawl are killing off thousands of species. On a long enough timescale, this will tip the eco-system into catastrophic failure. So there’s definitely a call to action here. It’s vital that humans change their behavior, and millions of dollars have been spent on propaganda and movies trying to convince us to do so.

This is a message we all need to hear because we’re all complicit in the destruction of the environment. Wildlife habitats were bulldozed over to make room for the cities we live in. Pollution is created from manufacturing the products we fill our houses with, and the leftover trash goes right back into the land we’re not occupying.

Even if we all reduce our consumption and only buy eco-friendly products, that will only slow the damage we’re doing to the planet. It’s still an inevitability if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, but the problem isn’t that the average person needs to be more responsible. Guilt-tripping the average person is blaming the victim.

It’s pretty much illegal to live anywhere except in a modern house. The only place you can find enough food to survive is at a grocery store where every product is mass produced, pumped full of poisonous chemicals and packaged in disposable containers. In order to make a living, you almost have to own a car that you have to keep dumping toxic chemicals into. In order to pay for all of this, you’ll have to work for a business that makes and/or uses mass-produced consumer products.

While it’s great that we’re not all living in caves and hunting wild animals, modern life is more of a grueling, soul-crushing rat race than a futuristic utopia. The only way to escape the daily grind is to make enough money to buy land and build off the grid. Even then, you’ll still be hounded by taxes. So you need a permanent source of income to keep feeding the beast, or the police will take everything you own and throw you in jail.

If you’re one of the 3 billion people who live on less than $3 per day there’s no chance of you being able to afford to move off the grid. Even if you live in a first world country, you’ll have to make at least $28k annually just to cover the cost of living, and you’ll still be eating eat cheap processed food, living in the ghetto, driving an old, unreliable car, and never seeing a doctor or dentist.

It’s no accident it’s so expensive to live or that so many people have so few options. All of these worker/consumer/taxpayers aren’t lazy. Almost all of them work full time. They’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of working just to make enough money to be broke after they’ve paid their bills because that’s how the system is designed. Everyone except the ultra-wealthy are trapped in an endless cycle of debt. We would love to escape the rat race, but all the exits have been systematically blocked. So we have no choice but to keep working, shopping and helping destroy the planet.

Money is power, and the owners of the businesses that are strip-mining the planet’s resources have taken all the money. They’re the only people who have the ability to break the cycle by investing their fortunes into building self-sufficient cities and an economy that doesn’t require the mass production/consumption of junk. They’re not taking any steps in that direction because that would mean scrapping the system that made them wealthy in the first place. It should come as no surprise that they’re using their fortunes to make the economy even more unsustainable for the poor. The harder it is for the poor to live self-sufficiently, the more secure the revenue streams of big business are.

If you’re going to make propaganda urging people to save the environment, then you need to target the people who are most responsible for the destruction of the environment: wealthy business owners and investors. Any effort spent guilt-tripping the poor only accomplishes two things: making poor people feel bad about themselves and distracting them from the source of all the world’s problems: our unsustainable economic model.

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