I spent my holiday break plotting.
I revamped my portfolio. I played cards with my 94-year-old grandmother and let her win because I’m a sucker (even though, at one point, she created her own new card game as she went along, which I still somehow managed to lose). I started my 2025 vision board.
Most importantly, I watched that new Netflix documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy.
I’m someone who already dislikes spending money on unnecessary materialistic items, so to say that the documentary hit home would be an understatement. It highlighted how society’s constant need to ease our minds with materialistic items, either to follow trends or “just because,” has become a disease.
However, I am also someone who is prone to stress-shopping to procrastinate.
When I was still living in downtown Toronto, I once went on a rampage in the Toronto Eaton Centre to procrastinate working on final essays. I bought a (then) $42 Charlotte Tilbury lipstick, around $62 worth of products from The Body Shop, a stupidly expensive bottle of infused something-or-other from Williams-Sonoma, and two new pairs of pants from Abercrombie, all within an hour and a half.
Nothing, short of a natural disaster, could’ve stopped my rampage. It was me and my latte from Daily Ritual against the world.
I walked out of that mall and onto Yonge Street, feeling like Rachel Green from the NBC sitcom Friends in that scene where she barges through her front door with armfuls of shopping bags.
I returned all of it the next day.
I shamefully scooted back to the Eaton Centre, tail between my legs, ready to admit to the salespeople that I had suffered momentary over-consumerism due to impending 2,600-word essays.
They understood, marvelously, and the sales girl at The Body Shop was even nice enough to listen to my sob story and refund me the fifty cents I’d paid for a paper bag.
It’s safe to say that this was not my proudest moment.
Circling back, that Netflix documentary couldn’t have arrived at a more appropriate time. It was released just before Black Friday, that doomed day when everyone and their gerbil buys a whole lot of junk that they don’t need, just to fill some personal shopping quota.
The documentary highlights how much of the things we consume end up in landfills and waste sites around the world that overflow with used clothes, technology, and household items. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the segments they had on the result of overproduction and over-consumerism were pretty eye-opening: thousands of discarded items, still perfectly good to use.
The key takeaway? With insight from former employees to back up its claims, the documentary shows that the big kahunas — Apple, Amazon, and Adidas — keep consumers “in a vicious shopping cycle” through crafty advertisements with the constant goal of making us buy products that are now designed to fall apart quickly.
Overconsumption has quickly become a defining characteristic of modern day-to-day life. We always want more.
A lot of this also has to do with trends, mainly seen on TikTok or Instagram. But, just as soon as one trend comes around, another has taken its place — and we’re left with the useless garbage we bought to follow the first trend.
Our habits aren’t just formulated by personal choice but by the larger systems that constantly push us to want more, buy more, and disregard the long-term consequences. It lessens our personal values and configures society’s “collective desire for endless consumption.”