buying and hoarding items that we don’t need and generally will never use more than once or

may never use at all. Consumers in today’s society have no idea how to buy new items and lack
the ability to get rid of these items in a useful manor and it has become a growing problem in
society. It is a cycle that happens for the average consumer because many are not in any way
conservative with the items they do have or with the money they spend on items they don ’t need
as opposed to using them on something they need critically. Most consumers are not smart
consumers and it leads to most of our bad consumption on the daily basis. Based on my
experiences as a consumer and being part of a generation that is everything but conservative, I
have been able to step out of my shoes as a consumer and observe how others are exactly like me.

Being the epitome of a complicated consumer in contemporary society I am in a viscous cycle of

repetitive buying and keeping items or getting rid of items in a useless way that is in no way
important to me or to keep because just knowing myself that I have the top brand or the newest
“thing” makes me happy and feel like I belong. Throughout my life I never had the chance to
buy any of the newest things or get what was popular so I only had items vital to living. However
as I got older I realized I could earn money for myself and gradually be able to buy things that
other people had and help myself feel like I belong to society. I thought that I had the background
and experience to be able to be a smart consumer and get things that I really needed and if I later
realized I didn’t need them I would be able to efficiently get rid of them. However, as time went
by and I got more responsibility and earned more money I began to fall into the cycle of buying
things that were so unnecessary and then once I was done using them, which didn’t take long, I
would put them in a drawer and they would sit. When I was in middle school, the Converse
Chucks had just come out and everybody got a pair so I decided I need a pair, so I went out and
bought a pair I thought I would absolutely love and once I got home I put them on and realized
that I completely hated this pair of shoes. There are so many things I could have done to put the
shoes to better use, such as taking them back and exchanging them for a different pair, giving
them to someone who needed shoes, or even something creative. However I put them in my
garage and they sat there until I left for college when I found them and saw that pair of shoes for
the first time since I bought them. In society today it is almost as if most of what we consumer is
based off of what majority of people like, like we don’t actually have an opinion on the item. We
just really fall in love with them because we know the attention we will get once our friends will
see them or we will feel closer to being an acceptable part of society’s norms. At least that’s
how it is for my generation, there have been countless times that people have an article of clothing
and they don’t even know if they like it or not, but because they saw somebody on MTV with it
on, it makes them go crazy for it. Many people are conditioned to do this because we learn it at
such a young age and after that it all goes to hell and becomes one viscous cycle.

One of the articles we read in class, “The Stranger Exchange” by Rachel Botsman really made
me think about contemporary consumers in society today and forced a lot of self reflection upon
myself. After reading that article and thinking about doing something so simple as setting up an
old newspaper container and having people put items in it and then taking one for themselves is
such a genius idea, but takes such little thought or effort. It is such a basic idea but people would
never take the time to even give one thought towards it because we, as consumers, are so caught
up in our cycle that we don’t realize the creative things we could create and the helpful things we
could do with items we no longer use, which tends do a lot more items than we realize. The idea
of the stranger exchange, if it could be amplified and used across the country, or even the world, it
could help with the useless consuming people do. It might not be able to get rid of consuming for
no reason or consuming just to feel a part of something, but it could be such a positive form of
recycled consumption. Even building off of this idea because putting a box in the middle of an
area and expecting people to exchange things and put their own items into it is a bit of a stretch,
but creating ways to help people with buying more sufficiently and being able to get their unused
items to people who could use them. As long as there is some form is some form of success we
can always build off of those ideas and make them better to get more and better results. Getting rid
of items that you don’t use by giving them to people who would not only use these items, but
appreciate them in a way that some people can’t. There was a blog I posted earlier and it was an
image of an Android phone advertisement and it implied that it didn’t take a genius to both
operate the phone and to choose it over an Iphone. This is more of a minuscule example but it is a
prime example of why people consume with no motive other than to fit in or have the newest
things. It makes you feel like you are smarter and more important than those that don’t own an
Android, or own the Iphone and attempts to give a sense of power over those people. This is
dangerous because just feeling like you have that power is something that people fiend and crave
for their lives, it’s the search for ultimate power and feeling like you are more than the other
people or the general consumer. However if you think about this it’s extremely dumb and
useless, this is because just cause you have a different phone or a better phone doesn’t give you
any power over anybody. It’s a psychological mind state that people keep themselves in to make
day to day life better and makes them feel important. This is going to be and has been destructive
to consumers around the world because it gives consumers a false identity and false sense of
power over any one person.

As a consumer, I am self destructive and destructive to other consumers because it is a self

conscious need for power and not wanting to get rid of items that I spent money on even though I
have no use for them. I spend money that I barely have on things I don’t really need and it
causes a habit for myself to see something, such as shoes, I really want but probably will never
wear and it wastes my money when it could be used for bills or food. I believe that a quick way to
help people and myself with that could be the stranger exchange because it is a simple way to get
rid of an item that you don’t need and possible even pick up an item that you could use. Another
way to help people stop consuming so mindlessly is by showing society the happiness they could
bring by helping less fortunate people by giving them items that they no longer need or use. This
would be hard however because it’s hard to get people to stop and actually think about their
consumption in all senses, but I believe it is possible. I have faith in people and I believe that there
is still hope to show people that they can help others by consuming with more thought.