My Keep Calm: Consumerism

So I don’t know if this is the start of a series, or whatever, but on the heels of my last post, I want to catalog a few things I’m trying in my own life. They’re experiments. They’re not large. None of these are going to suddenly cure anything. If only I had that power. I share this because maybe it will give you some ideas as well.

This will be a living post—as I go through this specific pursuit, I’ll add more detail and any learnings I have.

The focus.

This week I’m focusing on tidying up my consumerism. I live in one of the bluest neighborhoods in one of the bluest states in America. I understand that my vote doesn’t go far outside of local issues. In fact, I’d say my dollar goes farther than my vote in this capitalistic hellscape. And unlike my vote, my dollar is fractional.

Billionaires are more powerful than ever in this country, and their capital influence helped this happen. Musk alone spent $120m to get Trump elected. If the billionaire class didn’t literally fund this rise to power, they stayed silent and forced others to stay silent, too.

They are powerful and I find myself struggling to admit how powerless we are in comparison. You can’t fight that money with money. However, perhaps we can dilute their power. A lot of my efforts will probably be around collectively diluting power, rather than gaining it. I don’t want to make this a ‘stop using plastic’ sort of thing while Exxon burns the ocean. I want to go into this realistically.

I can’t vote away billionaires who have no connection to common people and are obsessed with going to space instead of paying workers. But I can alter how much of my day-to-day cash goes to their war chest. I can reduce how much money I’m giving to dangerous people, and punish companies focused on algorithmic blood sucking and extractive practices. Even if they’re not billionaires yet.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m sorely in the mood to punish. Huo gai. And unlike last time, ya girl’s got the brainspace to do it with some actual planning.

Here’s what I’m doing re: consumerism.

Audit.

I’m looking over all the services I use day-to-day and targeting any company that’s already proven to personally fund evil individual action. It also includes companies that engage in overly extractive practices, particularly towards artists—paying artists as little as possible, playing games with costs to make life as miserable as possible to artists while locking them in. You know. Beating down on culture makers and then profiting from their work. Slotting in folks as they expire, sometimes literally, to keep the engine running. That’s my personal focus. My list will probably look different from yours.

I am then calculating how much money or worth I give to these companies. For some, it’s a literal subscription cost. For others, it’s how much advertisers pay the platform to serve me an ad. In these cases, this will be a bit loosey goosey. I’m doing my best to estimate ad views, and the cost of my impressions.

Find realistic replacements.

Can I amp down how much I make for these companies? I’m aiming to reduce my contribution and de-corpo down from this slice of the economy by at least $1500 next year.

It’s maybe not much in the face of $120m. But if 1/3 of Harris voters alone reduced their yearly spend by $1000 in 2025, that would mean nearly $24b ($24,000,000,000) removed from these extractive industries. That’s NASA’s entire budget in 2022. That’s 10% of Bezos’ total net worth. I mean…wait what…just need to pause and think about that equivalency for a second lmao…

It’s not going to be enough to ruin anybody, but it’s a dent for sure. A dent we can make with a couple of chores and spreadsheet math.

Again: remember again that your dollar is fractional, unlike your vote. If you can realistically reduce $1 to $.20, that’s 80 cents gone. And I mean do truly mean, realistically. You live in this society, so some of your money unfortunately goes to sustaining the system. I had some quibbles with Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, but I loved Odell’s perspective on ‘resisting in place’, and becoming a difficult shape. There is no escaping the system we live in. As she details with her accounts of communes, people have tried. No one can truly escape. Reduction is meaningful. And trying to do your part will always make you feel calmer.

Fill my Things dopamine bank another way.

One thing I’m evaluating is if I can get my little treats in a way that’s more community minded. I plan to take a hard look at bartering with other people. Either way, with things becoming more expensive, luxury items like candles, flowers, and sweaters will be way less justifiable. I am pretty handy with a pair of knitting needles, among other things. I’m hoping I can start to trade my friends for fun items and get that special rush of ripping open a package that way. And it will feel more like meaningful care, rather than empty consumerism.

Bonus things

If you are fortunate enough to have investments, you can adjust those, too. Move your money to grind out that high interest rate while we have it, or back literally greener pastures. Smarter people than me have thought more about this at length (honestly true for this entire post lol) so do some thinking there.

Now’s as good a time as any to give money to relief (Palestine’s Children Relief Fund, etc) and legal 501c3’s (Earth Justice, etc) who will be doing their best to slow the gears.

With the holidays coming up, kindly request family members not use Prime or other big box stores, and to focus on local shops, indie sellers, and places like bookshop.org instead. Especially if you have kids and doting grandparents who resort to the false convenience of Amazon to buy loud plastic clackies.

Besides How to Do Nothing, I also loved Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. It details a history on how we arrived at algo driven products, and the chilling effects on culture. A beige-ification if you will. I also appreciated the ideas for living a less algorithmically influenced life.