consumers
You are viewing stuff tagged with consumers.
You are viewing stuff tagged with consumers.
I am realizing that I don’t like stuff. Not in a little way, but in a really big way. Having ATVs or a boat sounds like the most awful thing: gas, insurance paperwork, maintenance records, towing trailers… just… yuck. I love to donate things, throw things away, recycle, get rid of worn clothes, throw out stuff I no longer use, and get rid of broken stuff. See, my brain has a tendency to track everything single thing we own and when we get rid of something, it makes that mental list shorter. That’s partly why I want a document scanner. I have giant boxes of school paperwork (literally like over 40 pounds of school papers) that is valuable but unsearchable. Pounds of organized (paid) bills. If I scan all this, it takes up zero space, I recycle of bunch of papers, and all that information is searchable thanks to the magic of optical character recognition.
The Joy of Scarcity at “zenhabits”:
There can be joy in getting rid of things, in living with less, in freeing yourself of debt and possessions. It’s all in your mindset.
Yesterday, someone parked a year’s worth of dental school (in the form of a BMW X6 outside our home. As I admired the dramatic curves of the car, it felt freeing not to want one. Now, before you start thinking I’m trying to be all high and mighty anti-buying-stuff, hear me out! This isn’t some moral triumph of mine over material goods. In fact, I understand I’ll certainly need a car when I begin working in a few years. Indeed, my thoughts about this are more practical.
Mykala and I went on a weekend quest for lawn chairs. But, after watching The Story of Stuff on Friday, (which seeks to illustrate the wasteful, unsustainable, dead-end process generating the crap we buy) — we were less than enthusiastic about purchasing crap. You start to think about the stuff-making process. Oil that can’t be replaced is drilled for plastic. Raw plastic is shipped around the globe in container ships, which spill millions of pounds into the sea. Floating on the water, plastics follow currents and congregate in focal points the size of states. The oceans are trashed, the resources exhausted. Even worse, people are trashed. The latter is a contentious, ongoing issue. In this article about Chinese workers assembling Microsoft products, Chinese factories sound unbearable:
5 steps to taming materialism, from an accidental expert:
In hindsight, I realize it felt safe to live somewhere I could afford if my company went bankrupt. Which it did.
A recent article by Marc Hedlund (who writes the Wheaties for Your Wallet blog) covers a paper entitled Consumer Myopia and Information Suppression in Crowded Markets. If you scanned too quickly over that title, think about it once more: it means that when consumers don’t take the time to analyze the full extent of their purchases/services in a given market, then they will get overcharged by companies taking advantage of mis/dis/missing-information.