🛒 What is passive consumerism?

When you think of the different roles that we play in our lives, what comes to mind?

Sibling, parent, community member, friend, athlete, thinker… consumer?

The last one might make you feel a little sick.

But the fact is: we live in a consumerist society, where massive businesses spend millions of dollars every day to convince you to buy things.

Our economy depends on it, and people increasingly define themselves by their consumption choices.

We’ve only been consumers for a recent chunk of human history.

For tens of thousands of years, the vast majority of humans were hunters, gatherers, and farmers who lived in small and mostly self-sufficient groups.

It’s only in the past few hundred years that we’ve begun buying and consuming products made halfway around the world.

Today’s newsletter is about passive consumerism.

The idea is simple: passive consumerism is when we are unconsciously pushed to buy things or to consider ourselves and others through the lens of consumerism or consumption choices.

Much of mainstream culture is based on passive consumerism.

We are forced to watch content that promotes a consumerist ethos alongside advertisements that are designed not to look like advertisements.

The idea of passive consumerism implies that there is active consumerism.

If they’re just different forms of consumerism, are they both bad? Not necessarily.

Just think about when you’re going shopping.

You’re planning to buy things, and you (usually) make active decisions about which products you will and won’t purchase.

The problem with passive consumerism is that it pervades every aspect of daily life.

Passive consumerism is related to attention theft, where we are forced to view advertisements that we did not consent to.

And in the digital world we live in, that can happen hundreds of times per day.

The problem is that passive consumerism pressures people to define themselves by their consumption choices.

Remember: advertising is essentially about creating desires that did not previously exist.

Increasingly, we view the world through the consumerist lens imposed by popular culture & advertising.

This trend isn’t exactly new, but it’s getting a lot worse.

We don’t relate to each other based on shared values or interests.

We connect through shared memes that are typically based around consumption choices and the social status they signify about us.

For example, here’s a meme from the excellent UK-based Socks house meeting Instagram meme page:

Robert McNamee captured it well when he wrote in his 2019 book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe:

We are left with the question: can we escape from consumerism? 

Some people respond to ubiquitous consumerism by going off-the-grid, living outside of society and minimizing their contact with The Economy as much as they can.

Others advocate for ideas like mindful consumerism or conscious consumerism, which asks us to be more thoughtful about what we purchase and why we purchase it.

Other people argue that we live in a world of consumer capitalism that we can’t escape.

The R/Anticonsumption subreddit is filled with interesting people talking about how to live outside of that system.

For me, it’s hard to balance these perspectives.

Sometimes I want to disappear from mass society and live in the woods.

Other times, I recognize that we need some level of consumerism to live a normal life today.

We can participate in the system without giving in to it completely — and we can try to use it to improve the lives of other people.

That’s what I’m trying to do with the Daily Concept.

On that note, check out this YouTube video I published last week.

P.S. I want to be forthright about the fact that I am including advertisements in my Monday newsletters.

I love writing the Daily Concept, and I hope that one day I can make a living from it.

So, I’m including ads from high-quality brands and companies.

On that note, here’s a word from one of our sponsors: The Flyover newsletter. Click one of the links below to check it out.

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