Everything Is Fine, Keep Shopping!

Image from Treading Lightly

For many of us, needs and wants are indistinguishable. It is not as hard as we would imagine. A simple factor is the chance to separate between the consumers and the citizens but there's no time because we are going shopping. Ever since advertising started dictating our needs while redefining propaganda and persuasion, it has been clear that we are what we buy. We need what we want and we want what we need.

In some places a.k.a. underdeveloped shitholes, where modern-day industrialisation is still a next-century stuff, where the purchasing power is still high, we can imagine the elusive suicide of the masses.

This is just as well how the system wants us to be: Buy, consume and die. The United Nations Development Programme calculates 20% of the world’s people living in rich countries account for 86% of total global consumer spending.

If you want, buy me love. Buy me a country which we don't have to curse day in and day out. I need a country. Buy me beauty. I need a few doses of aesthetics and change how I define beauty.  As in the catchy headlines of the ads, I will be burning with love. Burn with love. I can be together with a country. Be one with the country. I can be beautiful; and I cannot help it―what else we can do because we are born to buy, consume and die.

We can earn points and rewards for buying more. All the love-studded, country-filled and beauty-laden shops are offering discounts, regardless of the season. Sale is on. They are doing a charity with their businesses. Profit is just secondary. The more we spend, the more we get. Nothing is more wonderful than these newly-bought beer bottles!

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...”
― Chuck Palahniuk